Today at work, our marketing team rolled out the web site for our new product, Email Center Pro. The service is still in private beta mode, but the thought is the new site will start to pick up organic search traffic, and by the time we launch publicly in the next few weeks, the site will start off with decent search results.

To those small business owners out there, keep your eyes peeled as we go public with the new service. Palo Alto Software’s latest offering will help you manage your customer service, informational, and other generic public-facing email. It’s group email management done the right way- check it out.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, me and my brother started a best-of-13 series of cribbage, but sadly I had to head home with with a 6-4 series lead. When he came by my place the following week to finish the match, we had to keep score using paper and pen. Since cribbage is essentially just a card game, I decided to create this iPhone cribbage scoreboard so cribbage lovers can pack a deck of cards and their iPhone and be all set to play a game.

The online cribbage board is located here: iPhone Cribbage Scoreboard. Read on for some instructions.

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up until this point i’ve resisted the temptation of blogging about the iphone, simply because it’s been done to death lately everywhere else. yes, it is amazing and ridiculous and lacking in features here and there; this has already been blogged, twitttered and webcasted around the globe by now. but tonight i’m writing this blog (yes i am typing this on my phone no less) because i spent a decent amount of time setting up a system that ensures i’ll never need my laptop again. i’ve been amazed with the capabilities of the phone from a web browsing and email experience, not to mention entertainment, but until today my phone’s been lacking that killer app that rounds out my productivity needs: an SSH shell.
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one of the best things about being a web developer right now is the huge amount of resources available to help developers like me accomplish what it is we want to do. the amazon web services offerings are especially noteworthy. for the first time, infrastructural elements such as storage and processing power are now available as a service, and acquired on demand. this means that developers can leverage an essentially infinite pool of resources for absolutely zero fixed cost, but only pay for what is actually used. for many, bootstrapping an application is now a complete reality. at work recently, i’ve been building an application with a storage model based on amazon’s s3 (simple storage service). it’s been a wonderful experience so far, and everything’s been working great up until a few days ago. i just realized that this post is about to abruptly shift from a nice general overview to a incredibly specific level of detail, so to spare those less technical *cough (nerdy)* readers, the slightly amusing story and s3 troubleshooting tip is after the break.
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at some point last night a great milestone in my life was achieved.  that’s right… my first (and only) youtube video hit the century mark in views.  that’s a one with two zeros, folks.  so that got me thinking- i must be getting up there with the most viewed videos of all time.  after a quick trip to youtube’s most viewed page, i sadly realized i’m 38,349,764 views short of the title.  so close.  what was the video that has caught the eye of so many viewers worldwide in just under 9 months?  this dancing jackass.  is there better proof that a popular youtube video has less to do with content and more to do with distribution?  so what do you say readers, lets get the word out there and push my video over the grand mark!

so i was just reading about this new search engine called ChaCha, where you can search with a “guide,” that apparently hand-selects search results for you. while it’s an interesting concept, i can’t imagine it will be too commercially viable. just to test it out, i did a search for carolina tar heels and here’s the chat that ensued.

JoeS: Welcome to ChaCha!
You: so what are some good tar heels sites
JoeS: let me look. hang on a minute!

blank screen …

You: for example how come i am not seeing anything
JoeS: i haven’t given you any results yet.
You: oh

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as we approach the end of the fiscal year, it’s time for the upgrades at work… fresh cut new box of 100% recycled pencils, new workstations, and dual monitors all around – a great productivity booster. but for those who aren’t lucky enough to have hardware support for multiple monitors, or more likely those readers who wish to share a mouse and keyboard between multiple computers running different operating systems, there is a pretty slick option available – it’s software, and it’s open source (free).

synergy is a utility for windows, mac os x, and *nix environments that allows you to harness an array of monitors to provide seamless transitions between desktops of different machines. as an example, i set up an imac to the right of my monitor, installed the application on both computers, and told the server (running on the computer attached to the keyboard and mouse) the network name or ip of the other machines. i set up the virtual arrangement of my screens and that’s it. it even copies over your clipboard text when you move between the computers.

i’m totally stoked on this because as an avid mac and linux user, i am able to leverage the strengths of the various operating systems concurrently within the same work session, without losing a beat. i use terminal to ssh into my headless linux box, and adium (good stuff) instead of yahoo im on my pc, and with the recent development of my ipod not working, i can tap into the music library i have on itunes. anyone else in a similar situation should really look into it.