How I Learned to Shoot the Engineers and Ship the Product (by guest blogger Andy Lawrence)
This post is by a guest blogger.
Andy Lawrence aka andyxl is the Head of the School of Physics and a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, located at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh (ROE) on Blackford Hill. He work on quasars, observational cosmology, big, big sky surveys, and the Virtual Observatory.
I am a scientist. I come across a lot of engineers. They are alien life forms, but I have had a symbiotic relationship with them. I found myself getting confused trying to understand the differences between us, until I realised that behaviour depends on environment. You can see how we are different in three ways:
- general differences in behaviour,
- working on hardware projects,
- and working on software projects
The latter is where it gets weird.
Are you making the most out of Google Search? (by guest blogger Ashish Mohta)
This post is by a guest blogger.
Ashish writes about security and technology at Technospot.net
Quick Tips on how to Search Using Google
One of the major complaints people have is “I can’t find this on google.” Which is surprising, because it’s the best search engine. It all comes down to knowing how to search. Here are some quick tips to help you become better at searching.
Lions, Tigers and Managers Oh My - The IT Animal Kingdom (by guest blogger logtar)
This post is by a guest blogger.
John Guzman aka logtar is a computer programmer that rants about daily life, movies and culture. He was born in Colombia and also does translation and interpretation.
Now that I have liberated myself from the last zoo I worked at, I feel that it is my duty to document the IT (Information Technology) ecosystem for those that happen to enter it. I’m intending this as a good PSA (Public Service Announcement) for all the non-IT people out there. It is no accident that I have made all of the managers predators. You may find yourself fitting one of the animal profiles.
The Eager Beaver
I think there is a little Eager Beaver in all of us when we start in a new department. This character is the one that is always coming up with new innovative ideas that, while brilliant, will never be implemented. There are many varieties of this beaver, from the one that eventually gets beat down and controlled to the one that actually tells his boss he is just stupid. And, yes, to his face… and, yes, I have seen this one in the wild. Eager Beavers know what they are doing when it comes to technology; however they spent too much time on new ideas and not enough on actual production.
An Introduction to Reputation Management (by guest blogger Tim Nash)
This is a post by a guest blogger.
Tim Nash is a reputation management consultant, co-founder and primary consultant for Venture Skills a “New media” IT company which specialises in search engine optimisation, reputation management, and technical side of online marketing. When not working at Venture Skills, posting site reviews on forums he can be found teaching at a local university where he lecturers in Search Engine Optimisation and Information Retrieval.
My name is Tim and I’m a reputation management consultant. I’m helping engtech out by doing a guest post for his blog.
But what is reputation management?
Let us start with a formal quote:
Reputation management is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop. All entities involved are generally people, but that need not always be the case. Other examples of entities include animals, businesses, or even locations or materials. The tracking and reporting may range from word-of-mouth to statistical analysis of thousands data points. — Source: Wikipedia
This is a very dusty but surprisingly accurate description of reputation management, be it in commercial business analysis or on a personal level. There a three basic areas to reputation management:
- Finding out what people are saying about you
- Creating a persona or brand image
- If needed defending this image
How to design a variable sidebar WordPress theme with widgets (by guest blogger Daria Black)
This post is by a guest blogger.
Daria Black is a freelance writer and web designer. Visit her website Webernet Architect located at for information and tutorials on web design, blogging, social networking and a general guide to having fun on the internet. To learn more about Daria visit her personal weblog at Lexicon Indigo.
When I first heard of WordPress widgets, I was appropriately disgruntled. ‘Widgets? We don’t need no stinking Widgets,’ I grumbled. I was resistant towards the notion of widgetizing my themes because it meant having to change my style of design from using divs to separate the content in my sidebar to placing everything in an unordered list.
But when I saw how they make the end user’s life a little bit easier and how they can make an already powerful content management system even better, I can’t praise the creators of the Widgets plugin enough. So to show you just how creative one can be with the plugin, I’m going to share with you a way to create a template where you can have different widgets on each of your template’s page views; the index, single post and Pages.
This tutorial assumes you have a basic understanding of WordPress themes and prefers that you know a little bit about PHP as well. However, knowing how to follow directions and cut and paste is just as good.
For Those Who Are New to the WordPress.com Support Forums (by guest blogger Sulz)
This is a post by a guest blogger
Sulz is 21 year old Chinese Malaysian college student. She blogs at her whim and fancy, which is almost every day, but mostly about her life and what issues that provoke her thoughts. Blogging is her only cathartic outlet for expression. Devours books like food and devours food like a non-eating-disorder person. You can read more of her writing at Bloggerdygook.
As a volunteer providing free support for WordPress.com in the Support Forums, every now and then it’s hard not to get frustrated with the new users who ask questions without taking the time to read or search the FAQ and past forum threads. On the other hand, you can understand somewhat the feeling of being overwhelmed by the mountain of information in past threads or the FAQ that it totally turns one off from searching for an answer.
Posting elementary support questions in the forums is an easy way to get an answer. But is it the best way?
Life in the Trenches - Getting Out Alive (by guest blogger AJ Valliant)
This post is by a guest blogger.
This is my first guest column by friend and fellow blogger AJ Valliant. AJ is a regular writer at Beats Entropy. I wasn’t expecting something of this quality, and I’m sure you will enjoy it.
In an inexplicably poor lapse of judgment (ET — one of many), [Digg]engtech has recruited me to write a column relating my experience as a former arts student trying to make a living in the cold, heartless and geeky IT world. I can only assume this is a misplaced gesture of friendship, or some repressed blogocidal urge; either way I agreed and will attempt to drop some knowledge. I do internal technical support and problem co-ordination for one of the largest corporations in the world with no background other than a B.A. in psychology.
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