Despite giving up I still very much wanted a job but it didn’t seem like I was going to get one. Many of the jobs which aligned with my university studies wanted graduates/juniors with “commercial experience”, for most students this requirement creates an infinite loop whereby commercial experience is needed to get the job yet without a job how can commercial experience be gained?

Thankfully I haven’t given up entirely on Facebook and usually go on every few days to check my notifications. Little did I know that I would be fortunate enough to stumble upon the perfect job offering to begin my career. A junior web developer position in a small eLearning firm: TheCyberInstitute (TCI).

To my amaze the whole process went very quickly, the job was posted on the 15th of December, I applied on the 16th, interview on the 19th and first day of work on the 21st.

I showed up ~1.5 hours prior to the scheduled interview time since I figured I would be wandering around hopeless trying to interpret my printed out map but this wasn’t so. After a short wait which seemed endless I was invited into the interview room where my nerves skyrocketed, I knew it and the person interviewing me also knew it. Thankfully this didn’t destroy my chances.

After eagerly anticipating a rejection call or email I was pleasantly surprised to be asked to begin on the 21st of December. Not prepared for the worst I came in expecting to be required to recite the entire list of PHP functions or write some horribly complex SQL queries.

Luck was on my side for once though as I was greeted by Georgia, one of TCI’s clients (I actually thought she was the receptionist D:). After that I met the other new IT developer as well as Tony and Will, the other IT developers. To my amaze the entire day was a breeze and was almost entirely devoted to product testing.

I was even happier when I heard about the awesome pay of $25.82/hour. To put this into some perspective my father has been a light vehicle mechanic for 30 years was on $24.50/hour at his last place of employment.

The only letdown to what was otherwise the best day of 2011 was discovering that HECS (a university tuition payment scheme) would not cover the $2,000 of costs for my current semester. Currently I am unenrolled from university with nothing to show for my past 3 years of study except for a ~$20,000 fee, not at all a pleasant though. Now waiting on a response to my R/I form and hoping to get re-enrolled in the new year.

Firstly I should probably mention that I am a university student studying Business and IT at QUT. I’m in my 3rd year of full time study and still have another 1 1/2 to 2 years left if I continue at the pace I am going.

When I finished my final year of secondary school I was hoping to obtain a place in their cadetship program but that fell through (twice) and since then I’ve just been bludging off my parents and focusing on my unversity studies and my primary hobby (programming).

Until this week my resume hasn’t even been attractive enough to reach the interview stage of the job recruitment process but… finally a few hours ago I got an email from David Steel the owner and creative director of Vivo Group to setup an interview for this Friday.

After doing a bit of Googling around about Vivo Group I discovered they were the guys behind that Slap Corey flash game that I remember playing in high school and also 2 similar flash games; Slap a Pollie and Slap Sheen… I smell a bit of a trend going on here. O_o

Very eager to have this interview, I’m not too confident about my chances of getting a job but at least I finally got an interview.

*crosses fingers*

Update (26 July 2011): failed.

That being said Zoka.cc weren’t as bad as others, I only suffered one major downtime on their free hosting. By comparison 000webhost randomly deleted my account after a few months of using them without giving any explanation as to why and HostHelpers underwent a change in ownership at which point everything went to shit with more frequent and longer downtimes until one time it failed to come back up.

The reason for the change from Zoka.cc is purely due to my university having something wrong with their network setup rendering my site inaccessible whilst at university.

Anyways now the awesome people at GSHI are hosting my blog, cheat database, code converter script and whatnot. All considered I think this should offer better stability for the site since they have been around for quite a while (more than 10 years) and have also been hosting KodeWerx for some time now. Thanks GSHI staff!

… now back to silence on the blog for another few months.

I have also uploaded a small fix for TempAR to allow game guides to work on 6.3X. The update also possibly makes it compatible with PSX-PSN games on 6.3X (untested as I have no PSX-PSN games). Remember that it is recommended to use tempar_lite.prx in games on 6.3X to help prevent crashing. Download from here.

Some notes that I passed on to the last person I sent it to:

• This was my first attempt at a C language application and had just hacked my PSP. You should expect bad coding practices and whatnot. I also used some crappy VB.NET app which compiles and packs everything instead of a makefile so you may have to do some fiddling there to actually compile it if needed.
• There may be some half done code in there. I keep planning on changing stuff but end up giving up because it is in need of a complete rewrite which I can’t be bothered doing.

If anyone decides to release an unofficial version of PSP Tool I would hope that they decide to keep with the spirit and release all source code and keep the list of credits in tact. A large amount of thanks goes to the usernames that appear in the credits and much of the information was plucked from a variety of sources. These include but are not limited to lan.st, the ps2dev forums and SilverSpring’s blog.

Note: I will not be providing any support for this source code and at this point in time have abandoned any future developments of it. Please do not make a comment here requesting help using the source code as it will most likely be ignored.

I’m at a bit of a loss why the host felt the need to redirect the traffic from my site to one of those crappy ad sites but whatever.

Anyways if you want the most recent cheat database you can get it from here. You can also get the latest version of my cheat device (TempAR) from Codemasters Project. It was recently updated to work on the newly released 6.3X PRO by Coldbird/VFlame.

If you are using one of the 6.3X HENs be sure to read the instructions carefully because they are a bit different then the normal installation instructions. Also there have been some reports of it not working which I haven’t been able to reproduce . I want to get some kind of idea of how many people are having this problem, so if you are using 6.3X PRO please cast your vote as to whether or not TempAR works for you.

Update: the usual site seems to be working at the moment. I might leave my blog at raing3.co.cc for a while in case the problem happens again. You can visit http://www.cheatstemp.cz.cc/. For the converter, generators etc.

Update 2: I can confirm that TempAR is working for me with my PSP-1000 and PSP-2000 handhelds on 6.35 PRO.

Pastebin

A Pastebin is basically a site for people to share snippets of code quickly over the internet. These tools are commonly used for collaborating with people over MSN or IRC. The original Pastebin software at Pastebin.com has recently undergone a complete overhaul offering new features and a modern interface. Despite this overhaul the site has kept its basic principle of simplicity, there are no user accounts, no post deletion (there is however post expiration).

Something I have recently found interesting about the Pastebin website is the API. The beauty of many Web 2.0 platforms is the simplicity of integration and using the Pastebin API was a cinch. As part of a hobby project I made a basic tool which converts PSP (PlayStation Portable) cheat codes to different formats, upon pressing the convert button it uses AJAX to display the output and also creates a Pastebin post with the output content. Public APIs like these are a great example of reusing code which is a practice which is becoming more and more common with social software becoming more integrated.

Unfortunately the feature listed above has been removed since I started writing this due to privacy, copyright and other legal issues which was a major concern due to the inability to moderate Pastebin content.

Forums

Forums (also known as Bulletin Boards) are excellent systems for collaboration. They are similar to blogs in that 1 user creates a topic and other users then comment on it. The difference is that forums are sorted into categories and instead of only the blog owner being able to create new topics anyone can!

Forums vary forum site to site and generally have a primary focus area (eg. gaming). The primary use of a forum to most users is as a tool for seeking assistance on a matter.

One of the largest and most well-known forums is /b/. This forum was initially created for sharing anime and manga. However due to its anonymous nature it became the number 1 site for planning an internet prank. Of its many pranks some of the more recent ones are DDoS’ing anti-piracy sites, attempting to get Justin Bieber sent to Korea and many others. Many of the internet memes such as lolcats and rick rolling were also the creation of 4Chan users.

What else is there?

I’m sure there are many other platforms which encompass the Web/Enterprise 2.0 principles. There just isn’t enough room to mention them all! With new services coming and going every day the possibilities are endless and new uses for existing tools are being found all the time. As technology continues to grow and expand into new areas we are all finding ourselves more reliant on these systems which many of us now rely on every day.

A large number of big brand companies have also implemented social media usage guidelines and even training within their organization to better protect the reputation of the company. These guidelines came out of a necessity to not only protect other employees but also to ensure the company’s image is not ruined by misuse of these tools.

An example of a company who has not had the best run with social media is Nestle (example originally found by Andrew). The employee in charge of social media communication clearly neglected the guidelines and even common sense for that matter. Threatening to ban a user for simply using the company logo as an avatar is absurd in an online environment where freedom of speech is taken to a whole new level. This is an excellent example of how 1 person can greatly diminish the reputation of a company through just a few comments.

Also just a bit of information for anyone interested. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook has been in the spotlight quite a bit for some less than ethical and highly illegal acts. From what I have read on the internet it seems that Mark has been accused of stealing and re-using code and ideas from ConnectU (more info) and other university social systems. It was then later on revealed that Mark also hacked into the ConnectU as a result of these accusations (more info).

Mark has not been too successful in maintaining a quality image and has to some extent been harmed by the use of social tools. Due to his past Mark has earned himself a bad name by many of the people in the technology industry. His past also leaves open the question of whether he will do something similar again. With such a large user database at his finger tips there are many ways he could misuse this information.

One of the largest wikis is Wikipedia an online encyclopaedia created by contributors from around the world. Being such a large wiki both in users and in content it truly shows how useful a wiki can be. Whilst Wikipedia is a constant subject of vandalism these problems are often rectified rather quickly and in many cases the quality of the content is comparable to that of commercial encyclopaedias and in some cases even better with a larger variety of available information which is more up to date.

But enough with Wikipedia, this blog post is about how corporations are using Wikipedia.

So why and how are corporations using wikis? From the outside it would appear that most corporations are using wikis as a tool for maintaining documentation relating to their products however this is not the case with many corporations using them as tools for internal collaboration to assist employees in coordinating projects and for the safe storage of important information.

Pixar is an example of a company who has made use of a wiki internally. During the production of WALL-E to co-ordinate the use of animation tools within the organization. On the other hand Sun Microsystems make use of multiple wikis to manage product documentation for easy retrieval by their user base.

What are the advantages of using a wiki in the organization? The benefits are clear and numerous, wikis encourage participation by employees and allow them to collectively work on a project with ease and less duplication of work. Wikis are also useful in allowing executives to evaluate the status of a project as well as employee performance through the usage of the page diffs.

Through my personal experience of improving a wiki project I discovered just how useful they were. In my opinion 2 of the most useful features of the MediaWiki software are the page diff functions which allow users to compare different versions of an article and highlight differences between the two as well as the usage of templates which are highly useful for providing consistent HTML and CSS styling to various page elements such as tables and the info blocks like those which are displayed on the right hand side of most Wikipedia articles.

Useful Links:
Corporate Wikis at Work

An example of a company which is getting involved in blogging is the Red Cross. As a complement to their blog they also have a twitter account which boasts a massive 186,837 followers as of September 13, 2010. That is a phenomenal boost of 182,639 from just one year ago and exposes just how viral these social networking sites are. The Red Cross twitter account is used to make the operations of the company more transparent as well as for marketing in which they “tweet” short blurbs of information about disasters happening around the world to persuade viewers to donate to help the cause.

Despite the largely positive potential blogging and micro-blogging may carry with it there is even larger potential at jeopardizing ones-self or an entire company with just one slip up. This is not something that is new and can often be avoided by following company protocol before making any material public. An example of a recent slip up is Stephanie Rice’s homophobic tweet which despite being deleted only moment after being published has resulted in the loss of her contract with Jaguar and severely damaged her reputation which will undoubtedly affect any possible future sponsorship.

If the internet and the usage of social media has taught us anything it is that even the slightest slip-up in wording has the potential to ruin an individual or company and that it is of utmost importance that anyone acting on behalf of a company or who relies heavily on their personal branding should adhere to tight guidelines regarding the publishing of content on the internet.

Useful Links:
40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
Stephanie Rice in trouble over homophobic tweet