What Recruiters Look At During The 6 Seconds They Spend On Your Resume

via How Recruiters See Your Resume – Business Insider.

The booking form has an  “I accept your terms and conditions” checkbox. If you submit the form before ticking the box the site clears your credit card details and then asks to type them in again. Surely the designer could have used bit of JavaScript to disable the submission button until the mandatory fields were complete?

It gets worse. The site has no way to complain about broken functionality so I shall vent my anger in public. If you going to not bother doing any user testing or instrumenting your site at least allow users to tell you when it is not working.

I will try Premier Inn next time, they might be better.

Postscript – 23rd May 2012

Although it is not possible to contact Travelodge about the website design when I had a problem with a booking I was able to defeat the online “the answer to your question is this” system and get a message to a real person who fixed the booking in a few hours.

Others I respect have chosen to use the Sencha tools for the same job. I thought it would be useful to find a comparison and found a good one on stack exchange.

• Smartclient vs Ext JS

Load Firefox Tabs Faster with Tab Preferences

via Load Firefox Tabs Faster with Tab Preferences | The Den | Tips on Using Firefox | mozilla.org/firefox.

Announcing Amazon CloudSearchWe are pleased to announce the launch of Amazon CloudSearch, a fully-managed search service in the cloud that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale search applications. Amazon CloudSearch enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a search service. Customers don’t have to worry about hardware provisioning, setup and configuration, data partitioning, or software patches. Amazon CloudSearch automatically scales as the volume of data and traffic fluctuates. Built for high throughput and low latency, Amazon CloudSearch supports a rich set of features including free text search, faceted search, customizable relevance ranking, configurable search fields, text processing options, and near real-time indexing. To learn more, visit the Amazon CloudSearch page.

via April 2012 – AWS Summit 2012 approaches, Amazon CloudSearch is introduced, and there are new features for AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon RDS, CloudFront and ElastiCache.

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We are excited to announce that AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports a PHP runtime and Git deployment. Elastic Beanstalk already makes it easier to quickly deploy and manage Java applications on the AWS cloud. Now, Elastic Beanstalk offers the same functionality for your PHP applications. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access those underlying resources at any time.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon Simple Notification Service, to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure to run your PHP applications. You can easily launch a PHP environment using the AWS Management Console or the Elastic Beanstalk command line interface.

You can now set up your Git repositories to directly deploy changes to your AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments. Git speeds up deployments by only pushing your modified files to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In seconds, PHP applications get updated on a set of Amazon EC2 instances.

To learn more about how to launch your PHP environment and use Git to deploy, go to “Deploying PHP Applications Using Git” in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide.

Are you interested in implementing disaster recovery in the cloud for your websites or applications, including enterprise applications from Oracle, SAP and Microsoft?

Attend this webinar on 28 March 2012, 14:00 GMT / 15:00 CET and learn more about how organizations are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement their disaster recovery strategies with the cloud in order to meet RTO, RPO, and cost reduction objectives without compromising security, scalability, and control. We will discuss four common DR architectures that leverage the cloud and the AWS services you would use.

Space is limited. Reserve your webinar seat now using the link below. Upon registration, you will receive an email with instructions on how to join the webinar.

>> Register now for the Using AWS for Disaster Recovery webinar, 28 March 2012

System Requirements:

• PC-based attendees: Windows 7, Vista, XP or Windows 2003 Server
• Macintosh-based attendees: Mac OS X 10.5 or newer

We hope you can join us.

Best regards,

The Amazon Web Services Team

As a project manager document control is a big part of what I do. Final versions of documents are always PDFs.

One common problem is combining information from different Microsoft Office applications. Although pasting from Excel to Word has got easier over the years it can still go horribly wrong. Often the simplest solution is to use Snagit to screen-capture part of the Excel document and paste it into Word. Later the Word document is saved as PDF.

This solution also works for Microsoft Project but there is a problem; the printed reports from Microsoft project are far better than the on-screen reports. Until now I have printed these to PDF and then had to combine PDF documents to produce my final document.

I have now discovered Snagit printer. This captures the output of the print job as a high-resolution image in Snagit Editor. This image can be tweaked and pasted into Microsoft Word. This is a far better workflow.

1. Create reports and graphics in various tools
2. Use Snagit screen capture and Snagit printer to capture images
3. paste images into the Microsoft Word document which has the explanatory text
4. Save the Microsoft Word document as PDF
5. Combine related PDF documents in a PDF portfolio

The last step is to use a PDF portfolio to combine related documents. This is great when you need to version a set of documents. For example, a Business Case and Project Plan. The documents remain separate within the portfolio wrapper.

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

More than just a few tweaks…

via Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer • The Register.

Windows Server has always been the choice of businesses for system administration and file storage. The only significant competitive advantage that Linux/Unix had was its better scripting interface. It lost this with the introduction of Powershell.

The author says that Windows 8 Server exposes everything though Powershell and also makes previously high-end features like High Availability (HA) very easy.

This is all sensible and very necessary if Windows is to compete against Amazon EC2 and other cloud vendors which offer inexpensive but still rather difficult to configure Linux-based solutions.