Mojo solo wins

David Matenaer, a friend of mine who owns Mojo Solo, who has worked a great deal for my employer developing multimedia solutions recently won 1st place in the Minneapolis 48hr Film Festival.
check out the winning entry here.

Kids Search engines

good review here

When to use Agile

http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/2007/06/agile_suitabili.html

Awesome discussion of different methods for choosing a project methodology.

Bigg Ass Fonts

Due to Jason's old age and post lazik eye sight I have decided to increase the font size.

503 under load

We are getting sporadic 503 errors under load in our test environment, I found a bunch of interesting links on the subject this morning:

Specific 503 articles:
http://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/archive/2005/09/23/HOWTO_Diagnose_one_cause_of_503_Service_Unavailable_on_IIS6.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=895976
http://blogs.iis.net/brian-murphy-booth/


Performance counters for 503: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/fxk122b4(vs.71).aspx

Good background on IIS6 and asp.net:
http://www.resultspk.net/iis/ddu0028.html#259
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2005/05/ServingTheWeb/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/07/WebAppFollies/default.aspx

Big Ass Coffee Table

I fell on the floor rolling around laughing when I saw this:



I love the way it ends, "take that Appple".

Differences between seach engines

I was forwarded a link to this paper which compares the results obtained from Google, Yahoo, Ask and Live and compares the overlap between them. It concludes by pointing out that no one search engine results all the best results, unfortunately the study really did not focus on what was best. It instead focused on the matches between results and weighted matched content as better than unmatched content, implying that the aggregate wisdom of multiple engines trumps the wisdom of one search engine. Needless to say I think a much more rigorous analysis of these four engines is necessary to draw the conclusions that they drew. But it was done by Dogpile whose biz prop is to aggregate multiple search engines so no wonder this was the finding...

Agile Software development in large organizations

http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/co/&toc=comp/mags/co/2004/12/rztoc.xml&DOI=10.1109/MC.2004.231

MSFT Agile product mgmt blog

Found this somewhat interesting blog about role of product mgmt in agile sw dev projects.

arbitrary guidelines are presented with pseudoscientific justifications of dubious certitude

Any document with a section title like this just needs to be read, seriously though, take a look....

Social aspects of product design

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/44/17096/00788770.pdf?arnumber=788770

NPD

good quote: Effective new product development teams do not spend their time on insignificant things. Finding, and knowing that you have found, the significant idea is sometimes the hard part.

Conflict in project teams

Found this great paper entitled Gaining the benefits, avoiding the costs which describes the good the bad and the ugly of conflict within teams and how to use it you maximize the team's performance. It's worth a quick scan.

Attention Trust

Barb sent me this link today to Attention Trust I really don't get how they think they can do what they want to do. I understand the desire to protect the value of ones attention data, but without anonimizing your web usage hosts will always be able to at least attempt to track your attention, the whole Web 2.0 "users add value" mantra and the machine learning behavior of Goggle et al depends upon knowledge of users attention. I think this is too little too late.
I applaud sites fro throwing away all the behavior tracking data to protect me, but in a way I would rather they use it to tune my experience and improve their product.
Too much privacy could cause too little innovation... maybe.
What ever.... I'm going rollerblading tonight, pray for me (or at least my bruised rear end) as I am learning this sport can be filled with many perils.

Bruce Schneier

If you have never read any of his work, nor seen him present I recomend you do so.
I subscribe to his blog and also to his email newsleter Crypto Gram". This week on particualr quote resonated with me:

I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very
definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when
something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer
news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying.

Seadragon

I saw this at the SAF last year, holy crap has it improved.

More here

Cross-domain communication in the browser

If you develop on the .NET framework and you don't read the Architecture Journal, you really should start. There is a great article this month that addresses how to communicate between domains in a browser using iFrame url messages.
I just checked and the public version is not yet available so you will need to wait, I suggest subscribing.....

Research while on the plane

When I travel I tend to take along a bunch of papers to read on the plane, the following are the links to the areas I read over the last two days.

Query Expansion research:
re-examining the potential effectiveness of interactive query expansion
The Loquacious User: A document-independent source of terms for query expansion
Query Expansion in Personal Queries
Selecting Expansion Terms in Automatic Query Expansion
Query Expansion using an Intranet based semantic net
Automated query generation for embedded information retrieval

Search rank optimization:
On relevance weights with little relevance information

Index optimization:
Compressed Full-Text Indexes

NWA failed to screw up my Birthday :)

Despite their best efforts NWA and MSP failed to screw up my Birthday, my better half arranged for me to fly to Chicago, and she had booked dinner for us a Les Nomades. Listed by Zagat as Chicago's top French restaurant, it provides a wonderful variety of options for a four or five fixed course meal, we both chose the five course which ended up being seven courses due to the chef throwing in a couple of extras, he also made a delightful little birthday cake which I guess should count as the eighth course, needless to say they were all fantastic and now rates as the best meal I have eaten in the US ever and I have eaten a few ;).
Highlights included fennel soup with shell fish (amazing flavor, I want the recipe), snails (tender and tasty), quails (which I could have had seconds), crispy poached eggs and asparagus 9sounds weird but tasted wonderful), venison (great sauce) , flounder (wonderful crispy skin), apple tart (yummy pastry), green apple sorbet... I could go on.
It was a fixed price of $112 per head plus drinks, so this was a very special treat! The staff were great, not overbearing, not condescending, just the right level of attention.
If you are ever in need of a treat in Chicago try it out, I doubt you would be disappointed.

Vizualization

I found this awesome visual dictionary today, Vizuwords.

What an great way to teach language.

An an aside I found this through a great little blog that I subscribe to: Speaking Freely

The rebel may have a new cause

Given my passion for low cost infrastructure and my inability to find a low cost environment for development servers, I was forwarded this very interesting link: http://www.thureon.com/

Whilst not immediately obvious what it is, it is a data center in a box. Designed to be able to be hung on a wall and stood up from a floor stand, cost around 10Gs its not a bad option for us to consider, I would be interested to learn what the noise level is associated with it.

Thanks Hans....

Rest has won...

But which race was that?
Well Ann said it so it must be true!
not that I am cynical, but come on, that is not the real debate SOA is neither SOAP nor REST, both can be and should be used, get over it and start talking about something relevant, I had (until this morning) been really pleased that the flurry of fluff around SOA had died down.

Google ranking technolgoy

A recent flurry of articles have pointed out some of Google's special sauce.
Point of interest to me is 200 lever pulled on each page to rank, we are currently at arround 18, a long way to go! Lots more fun ahead.

iPhone ads.

Very cool but I still don't want one, lousy exchange integration.

Open position

If you are or you know someone who would like to work on our C# Agile development team in Egan MN, using the latest technology, in a high visibility, highly exciting project, then please check out the job at http://www.thomsoncareers.com/search_jobs/index.aspx and search for job posting "TEC00001065".
We look forward to hearing from you.

Displacing Google is it realy worth it?

According to Arrington other at Tech Crunch Microsoft is going to again try and dethrone Google, is it really worth trying? Google works because they have managed to redefine the web as one page (www.google.com) and 16 billion pages connected to it. They make huge wads of cash by showing their annoying little paid links - you cant beat them at that, they have the audience. So why not make them irrelevant by changing the game, ignore search more to a better way to navigate the WWW get crazy and move to a new metaphor. Please please don't invest billions in developing yet another way to display a list of results, we don't need it.... we need a better approach in general to information discovery.

Rant on long working days

Rant...... I am frequently irritated by comments about developers needing to put in long hours and the differences between employee and consultant work ethics. I guess that the reason I get irritated is two fold, the first stems from my experiences with my current team and our use of the Agile methodology. our implementation of agile causes us to maintain a relatively constant work load. Unlike waterfall projects where developers spend a great deal of time "daydreaming" up front with large scale design and requirements gather sessions and then discover later on they have not enough hours left in the day to complete their design, we instead work at a constant pace scheduling our time out to the nearest 1/4 of a day and ensuring we meet each 2 week iteration as best we can. The second reason I hate this "pressure" to work long hours is the impact it has on peoples family and personal lives. I have allowed mine to be impacted in the past and have no intention of letting it get so impacted again. I see it as part of my role as a manager to ensure that my people are able to maintain a healthy work/life balance and come to work and be creative, rather than dragging their asses into the office and having their heads full of sleep. I believe that this balance has helped us to keep the defect rate as low as we do and to maintain the velocity that we do. We are not perfect (far from it) but we are a merry band and have many many release to complete this year, if each one is allowed to become a firestorm of late nights you can assume attrition will rise, quality will fall and the product will suffer.
Occasionally I will concede we have to put in the long hours but these days must be few and far between.

Software development is a creative task, it requires fresh minds and bodies.

Hero's putting in long hours don't impress me, someone working smart impresses me. It is rare that pulling consecutive 12 hour days is the right answer, instead finding a creative way to get the job done in a repeatable way seems more valuable, few tasks we do are really one offs, improving the process to decrease the effort required to get the results seems like a good plan.

Compare my team to a hero and I bet the hero gets more done in one "day" but I bet the team produces more consistent quality work in a year. Wot do you want? I know my preference.

......end rant.

Google and News

It is interesting to see how Google have moved to meta search (Universal Search) by including their News and Web results, they have placed greater emphasis than before on Freshness, which seems only appropriate for News.
Whilst catching up on my RSS feeds {I use Outlook 2007 and read only 44 regularly} I found this link to a page which analyses where Google gets it's news from, it makes fascinating study.

Live Plasma growing

It seems that CNET is adopting LivePlasma as a navigation metaphor even more now. Today I was able to full screen the interface and navigate the world of the GPL3 news with extreme ease. I think search is a misnomer for what most of us want to do which is to "find" quite often we don't know what we are looking for when we start, and searching seems to assume we do. Navigation tools like LivePlamsa only require a rough starting point and then allow the relationships of content to be navigated to "Find" the interesting items. I hope they win.

Compare Pipes, PopFly etc

This great article compares Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft's Popfly, and Google's Mashup Editor.
The article only really focuses on the RSS feed side of their potential but still is worth a read. It will be interesting to see what happens in this space.

Silverlight link

Thanks to Scott for this link to tutorials, references etc for Silverlight.

Thinking of other cool things, Popfly really rocks. I got an invitation to the beta last week and have been enjoying mashing up some solutions. When i can I will share some.

Why?

In the world do we need these?

SOA This

Jason put me onto this!