David Thomas

If you development life cycle is anything like mine, it can be weeks/months before you get back to testing the original system.  I jumped in to test some sound files and discovered it wasn’t working – and the error code given was useless.

I knew the evaluation license may be expiring soon, so I thought I would check that first. A google revealed nothing, so I thought I would put the steps up here.

Step 1.
Login to our box and set things up so you can do your testing.
Some recogniser path variables required to run the sample file: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve launched a quick teaser for the new voice recognition platform I’m currently building. We are still in development, but I thought I’d get something up and running now to get in cue for some seo!

I did some other sites for some friends of mine, who I would of course recommend.  They might still be finishing the content.. but anyway: sunshine coast electrician and sunshine coast home renovation.

On Friday I called up one of my business partners and had a good old whinge to him.  You see, my problem was with the telecommunications industry.  As with most business which has the whole passive large volume business model, it attracts people who aren’t in it for the long term.  The ideal business model means growning a business to a certain size, then offloading to one of the largers players for a big price tag.

To be honest, I was one of those people when I first entered the market.  I had the dream of growing massive and then selling.  I would accept any client applications for credit  at very cheap rates despite warning bells ringing.  A few months later, those same clients would be 3 months outsanding on their invoices, but because I was desperate to gain customers and income I would take the risk.

I learned quickly from those early lessons and have since built my business around long term relationships with clients.  There are a lot of clients out there who value simplicity, ease of owning the service and honest rates – which has given me a solid foundation.

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Let me start of by saying obviously there isn’t much wrong with facebook. Its giving google a run for its money in terms of the most traffic weekly, so obviously they have got it right.

I ended up deactivating my account a couple of months ago as I was a little distracted and I needed to focus on work at the time. Things have quieted since then and I was thinking of getting back on to facebook while exercising a little balance.

This leads me to the main problem with facebook, there is only one category of friend.  Facebook is supposed to be for our social lives, the problem is I had plenty of business contacts on their and I have worked hard to separate these worlds in the ‘real’ world – I would like to do the same on Facebook.

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I was just reading Matt Cutts blog and he reminded me about google’s site speed factors – which now (possibly) affecting page rank in search engines. This led me to jump into webmaster tools for my primary site: http://www.simple1300numbers.com.au and check its load time. Its 3.3 seconds – which according to google is in the top 50% of webpages. It also lists some suggestions on what I can do to improve it, mainly some compression to reduce transfer time.

Just a quick disclaimer – backup your site before doing this. I accidently deleted my css and javascript files a few times so just be safe. Also, make sure you correct your paths as needed.

I decided to do what I could to help the load time, so according to my own results in the Net report in firebug, it takes 4.1 seconds to load the front page.

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