Author Archives: djuang1

About djuang1

I am a technology junkie, proud father, loving husband, social media use, amateur photographer, and triathlete. Originally from Chicago, I currently reside in Houston, TX. I work as a Product Manager for the Knowledge Management solution for Consona CRM, a leading CRM and ERP software vendor, and my work allows me to dabble with the latest web technologies.

My Products I Can’t Live Without

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In response to Michael Arrington’s list on TechCrunch, here’s my list of products that I can’t live without. This list is in no particular order:

  • Google Reader – I’ve been a fan since the start and their on-going improvements never dissappoint me. Along with Google Chrome, Google Reader can’t be beat.
  • Twitter - At first I was a little apprehensive about this tool but I’ve recently become hooked. TwitterBerry adds to the addiction by making it possible to follow my fellow Twitters and tweet when I’m on the road.
  • Facebook – At one point I was on at least a dozen social networking sites (Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, etc…) but in the end Facebook won. Primarily because it’s what all my friends use and has the mose user friendly interface (to some).
  • FriendFeed - I don’t think this tool has caught on yet in the mainstream yet partly because it tends to be information overload. But once you figure out how to manage the people that you follow and setup your lists correctly, it’s great.
  • Hulu.com – Four shows make this a product that I can’t live without: The Simpsons, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Family Guy
  • Mint.com – Mint is what I consider my FriendFeed to my finances. Since they added the ability to track investments this year, Mint has replaced Quicken as my tool of choice to analyze my financial data.
  • TripIt.com – I’ve used this site since it’s inception and it’s never failed me once. It makes organizing all my trips a piece of cake.
  • WordPress.com – The latest release of 2.8 makes WordPress the blogging tool of choice.
  • Blackberry Pearl – Though I’d love to upgrade to the latest Storm or Bold, the form factor of the 8100 can’t be beat. It’s nice not to have that cell-phone bulge in your coat or pants pocket.
  • Google Chrome / FireFox – It’s a toss up between these two right now because I’ve grown so accustomed to the FireFox extensions that make my web-browsing experience so easy and comfortable. But Chrome is fast, and with so many AJAX intensive sites out there today, once they add plugins to the mix, I’ll probably make the switch.
  • Gmail – I agree that Yahoo! Mail has the best UI experience but Gmail provides so much more functionality (Search, POP/IMAP, Chat, Tasks, etc…) making it the product of choice.
  • LinkedIn - The career networking site of choice, there’s really no other site out there that can match the number of users that are on LinkedIn.

Facebook Platform API

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So I finally got around to playing with the Facebook Platform API yesterday and my initial take is that there’s a lot of potential to leverage the API and extract and transform the data the resides on Facebook. Of all the API functions, I think ‘fql.query’ alongside understanding the Facebook Query Language gives you the most power to pull and analyze the social and marketing data that resides on their servers around millions of users.

Simply having the ‘uid’ of a user, along with the ‘Users.getInfo‘ function, gives you a ton of information about that user and the only limitation is the user themselves. Unless a Facebook user realizes the security concerns of the data that they’re sharing, their information is free for anyone to see and extract.

PHP is the language of choice for most Facebook developers I think (myself included) but I decided to take the ASP.NET / C# route to see how I could integrate it with Consona CRM. The Facebook Developer Toolkit, which just released a new version (lucky for me) is fairly comprehensive but because it’s so new, the documentation needs some polishing up and there’s not many code samples out there yet around it. I created a quick and dirty solution that takes the customer information and passes it to Facebook to either pull up the customer Facebook profile information or run a search and see if that customer is a Facebook user. One issue that I’ve run into so far is the around the session data. If a parent frame has a different domain than the child page in IE, the session data (stored in the Session object) is not preserved as a security precaution. So unless I preserve the initial session that is created, the user currently needs to login each time a new customer record is pulled up.

Ribbit API

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I’ve been fiddling around with Ribbit the past couple days and trying to figure out how to integrate it with the Consona CRM platform. Ribbit has an incredibly full featured API and is developed primarily with Adobe Flex so I’ve had to do a crash course on the side but it hasn’t been all that bad. The Adobe Flex Builder leverages Eclipse so if you’ve used Eclipse IDE for development in the past (Java, Aptana, etc…) it’s really a piece of cake. The SDK that Ribbit provides also has some great examples.

Functionally, Ribbit easily replaces the Consona CRM CTI toolbar. What I need to figure out is how to integrate a user logging into to Ribbit as a user of the Consona system and then be able to track incoming and outcoming phone calls to the customer records in CEDB. Unfortunately I’ve been sidetracked with some other issues the past couple days so I haven’t been able to give my full attention to this side project but I’ll post updates in the future.

What has suprised me is the lack of attention that Ribbit has received in the marketplace. It was acquired by BT a little while ago and they’ve been quietly been release newer versions but the potential of this API is great.

Viigo

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ViigoIf there’s one application on the Blackberry that I would recommend to anyone, it would have to be Viigo. Viigo is an RSS reader for your Blackberry with some extra bells and whistles. Not only can you subscribe to your own RSS feeds, Viigo provides a library of popular RSS feeds for you to discover. On top of that they have an incredibly intuitive interface that pushes additional information like sports scores, weather, entertainment news, and stocks. Right now they have extra links to Election 2008 information and during the Olympics, you could keep up to date on your favorite sports as well as the medal count. They’re looking to adding audio and podcasts in their next version which should be cool. Check it out if you have a Blackberry.

Busy

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Ok…I know it’s been awhile since I last posted something.  Two months to be exact. It amazes me how some people can blog everyday and I guess I do when I use Twitter but I’d rather post larger streams of thought than 140 characters.

A lot has happenend in the past two months. I’ve actually made the move down to Houston, Texas finally. It was a hectic move and so far we’re 1-2 on items that have made it down here from Chicago. The car showed up last Thursday and it showed up in one piece. Now we’re waiting for a couple hundred boxes of junk to show up at our doorstep. Supposedly they’ll be here on Tuesday but I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.

Moving is definitely up there as one of life’s most stressful changes. I think the other ones were marriage, birth, divorce, and death of course. I’ve moved across country one time but that was straight out of college when I didn’t have anything nor did I have a family, two kids, a car, and a mortgage.  I think I’m willing to make one more move in my life and after that I’d like to settle down in one spot and hunker down for the remainder of so called life.

Hyperconnectivity

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Hyperconnected is definitely an understatement. I definitely fall into the category of people that are constantly on-line either on my laptop, my Blackberry, my XBOX 360. I often wonder how much of the information that I read is being absorbed. Through these devices I’m bombarded with e-mails, Twitters, chat requests, videos, music, etc… I agree with their statement that “…their lifestyle simply seems normal,” and to my friends on the outside I often wonder if it seems strange.

Ruby On Rails

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Ruby On Rails

Ruby On Rails

Design patterns and web application frameworks are topics that I wish I paid more attention to during my Computer Science courses in college. What didn’t seem important at the time has a lot of relevancy in the projects that I work on these days.

So recently I’ve started to go back and re-learn and play around with some of the basic design patterns as well as delve into some of the latest web application frameworks that are out there. “Ruby On Rails” is one that I’ve recently been playing around with that has some pretty cool features and a pretty active developer base from what I can see. Though there has been some news lately about scalability issues with Rails but from what I can see so far it does offer some impressive features to help speed up and make web development more efficient.

Keeping Me Busy

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Keeping a blog is almost like a second job. It’s been awhile since I posted anything because life has been rather busy itself. I’m a new father as you can see by my Twitter two weeks ago :) Julian was born April 20, 2008 at 4:02pm. He’s slowly figuring out his daily schedule of eating, sleeping, and pooping and bringing us along for the ride.

.NET , PHP, or Java

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As a sales engineer, I’m in a strange position where I need stay ahead of the latest technologies in order to know how to communicate how my product can fit into their technology stack. The majority of the code base at work relies on .NET and ASP but I often hear about a prospects or client using  PHP, Java, and other open source technologies in their environment. Constantly switching back and forth does present a challenge but in the end it’s what I have to do.

Fring

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I’m in the camp of people that decided not to buy the iPhone and wait until they released the 3G version. Looking in from the outside at all the iPhone users though, I have to say that I’m amazed at the number of users that still love it even though it runs on a slow network and is locked into AT&T. This I think is largely attributed to hacking community that has sprung up around this one single device (in addition of course to it’s ease-of-use and aesthetics). One great example that was just released today is ‘Fring’ which is an app that allows you to chat on multiple platforms as well as make SIP calls. Of course you need to jailbreak the phone but what this apps offers will help drive the push toward helping open up the iPhone SDK hopefully.