Signs of our weakening economy are everywhere. There are so many of us who now find ourselves back in job seeker mode as a result of corporate belt tightening. It’s simply a fact of life!

With the job market so full of competition for those elusive opportunities out there, how are you staying ahead of the pack? In a recent study performed by Robert Half, executives were asked, “Which of the following technology tools do you believe will be most useful in your firm’s recruiting efforts in the next three years?” Their responses:*

- Professional networking sites 62%
- Social networking sites 35%
- Video resumes 20%
- Second Life 7%
- None of these 15%
- Other/don’t know 10%

*Multiple responses were allowed.

What is really interesting about the Robert Half study is the percentage of respondents who are using video resumes. This is certainly something that is quite new in the job seeker world. This is a new service that only a few of the major job boards are offering to job seekers.

Having your own website as a an online resume, with video capability, is definitely a way to get an edge on the competition in the job market. This speaks volumes to potential employers about you as a professional and your willingness to go the extra mile even before get that crucial first encounter. Your personal brand is already established and ready for the world to see.

Of course, Neulio is a great solution for video content, which is easily accessible from any Internet ready computer. Check us out and how we can help you in creating your own personal brand for nailing the right opportunity!  www.neulio.com

If you haven’t used Neulio in a while, this is a great time to take another look at what we’ve been up to. We’ve made a number of significant enhancements lately.

What makes Neulio different is that it is the only site that allows you to create multi-lesson courses and use both video and audio files for your lessons. We’re also the only site that includes an integrated quiz builder.

Over the last few months, though, we’ve been working hard to make our platform even better. Thanks to feedback from many of our users, here are a few of the enhancements that make Neulio a better choice than ever before for your instructional content:

* Better Video — We’ve upgraded our video encoding so that your video lessons will look clearer and sharper than ever before. (If you’ve already published a course on Neulio and haven’t reviewed it lately, you’ll see a noticeable difference in the video quality. We re-encoded your material to take advantage of our enhanced video processing.)

* PowerPoint Support — By popular demand, Neulio now allows you to use PowerPoint presentations directly, rather than having to convert them into a video format. Anyone viewing your material can click through your PowerPoint slides right from the Neulio lesson player. Putting your instructional content on Neulio has never been easier!

* Enhanced Web 2.0 Tools — Sharing, commenting, tagging, and rating functionality is all built-in now, All of these tools make it easy for users to find your course and tell the world about it.

Over the next couple of months, we’ll have more news to share about what we’re up to. Keep an eye out on the blog for more info on what we have in the hopper!

There is an issue, if you haven’t already discovered it, in the MacPort installation for Duplicity 0.4.4, which is the current port version as of today, December 3, 2007.

I know, I know .. the current official release is 0.4.6, released November 28, 2007, according to the official site, but I’m only the messenger. Please direct your complaints to the maintainers (port info duplicity | grep Maintainers).

Anyway, very likely if you ended up here, you’re running into the following error no matter what duplicity command you run:

ImportError: No module named _md5

Apparently, the maintainers forgot to note a further port dependency, so you’re not getting all the source you need to properly run the program. Thankfully, the fix is quite easy. All you need to do is install the py25-hashlib port, and all will be swell:

sudo port install py25-hashlib

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

The upside of Leopard is that it comes pre-packaged with Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, and Capistrano. However, most Rails developers utilize MySQL for local development (if not also production) and a lot of us are in the habit of utilizing MacPorts to get it.

With the OS installation of Ruby and the MacPort installation of MySQL, it can be a bit of a challenge to get the correct Ruby bindings for MySQL without stomping on top of the existing Ruby installation. So, in short, here’s the answer:

sudo port install mysql5 +server
sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install mysql \ –with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql \ –with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql

That should be two lines up there, both starting with sudo.

Now that we’ve got the solution out of the way, I’ll go ahead and throw up the explanation for the *cough*upper*cough* 1% of you that might care. The MacPorts installation builds your MySQL setup in the /opt directory on our root disk, by default. Further, the current mysql port does not install all of the lib and include files inside of one, nice subdirectory, but rather in subdirectories of /opt/local/lib and /opt/local/include, respectively. All you’ve got to do is let your GEM installation know where to look, while forcing an i386-compatible architecture for the build.

Lovely, huh? Go forth and conquer.

If you’ve got a strong Windows background and / or a lot of history with Mozilla’s FireFox browser, then at least one large annoyance you’ve likely got with Safari is the difficulty of Google Searching.  Apple was, as always, thoughtful enough to include the search box in the top corner of the application by default, but the keyboard shortcut they’ve given you is a bit rough (cmd-option-F).  I think the easiest way to think about that particular shortcut is to name it “the claw,”  as your hand uncomfortably morphs to attempt it.  And, if you’re on a laptop, forget about it.So, here’s a quick and easy solution to bring back the more familiar cmd-K Google Search option of FireFox into Apple’s Safari:

1. Open  System Preferences,
2. Open Keyboard & Mouse,
3. Go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab,
4. Hit the plus (+) button under the list of available shortcuts,
5. Select Safari as the Application, “Google Search…” as the Menu Title (without quotes), and hold down Command while hitting K in the Keyboard Shortcut box.

Voilà! Cmd-K searching-bliss in Apple Safari.  Enjoy.