I was looking for this site the other day, a source of feeds...http://www.syndic8.com/

Andrew Orlowski: "What Spring does is what we wish Apple had been bold enough to do with OS X, and make a really radical departure from the 2D file/folder office automation metaphor of the 1970s into a more loosely structured and spontaneous UI more appropriate to an always-connected world." [Scripting News] DesktopX and Spring the future of Desktop or application in general, basically where can we still innovate?

http://www.neowin.net/archive.php One more source of windows information...also so kewl windows specific utilities...

Doctors clamor for PDAs. Doctors and hospital staff prepare to use PDAs to track patient care and record data on the run. [Computerworld News] I just met with this CO TrialStat They are in the medical trial business, taking care of the results...they also make use of PDA big time, they say it's the way it ought to work, paper is so passé!

You know, I've been following the TabletPC space very closely (my favorite weblog is tabletpctalk.com.) [The Scobleizer Weblog]

http://bricolage.cc/index.html An open source content management system. It was reviewed a few weeks back in eweek.

A new Windows news site... hmm... this might just be good...

Good morning. Mary Jo Foley just wrote me and told me to check out her new Windows News site and promptly learned that Microsoft might be working on a new programming language called X#. Hmmm, Don Box is involved.

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

http://bricolage.cc/index.html An open source content management system. It was reviewed a few weeks back in eweek.

Google Cooks Up Even More in the Labs As usual Google has got some pretty interesting things cooking...

M$ buying Rational/Borland Heck it makes sense that they at least try to take Rational away from IBM. If that doesn't work, then Borland is the next logical step, since they just acquired TogetherSoft. Does MS need an competing alternative enough to justify buying Borland. In my mind the Rational stuff is used in large lucrative accounts, so it would be justified for M$ to actually spend some pocket change on Borland... M$ in my mind wouldn't want to risk loosing accounts/money to IBM... or opening the door to more IBM sales guys in their accounts...

patrickWebFive Big things technologically speaking.... PatrickWeb is a former IBM guy, Autonomic computing is an IBM thing big time if you ask me.

The 10 Technologies that Will Help You Stay Employed Well who knows about this? But this list sounds ok.

I was reading Joel's feed, and I stumbled on this which makes a lot of sense to me...

Good Books( The Goal, Critical Chain)

A few months ago I read, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, mainly because it has become extremely popular at business schools, and it looked fun. It was interesting, and fun. I didn't understand how the book's theory, called the Theory of Constraints, could possibly be applied to software development, but it was still interesting enough, and I figured if I ever found myself running a factory again, it would be helpful.

Last week I discovered his newer book, . This book applies the Theory of Constraints, introduced in The Goal, to project management, and it seems to really make sense.

Lets say you're creating Painless Software Schedules. Most people's intuition is to come up with conservative, padded estimates for each task, but they still find that their schedules always slip. Goldratt shows that the slip is precisely because we pad the estimates for each step, which leads to three problems:

1. "Student Syndrome" - no matter how long you give students to work on something, they will start the night before. Phil Greenspun noticed this: "The first term that we taught 6.916, we gave the students one week to do Problem Set 1. It was pretty tough and some of them worked all night the last two nights. Having watched them still at their terminals when we left the lab at 4:00 am, we wanted to be kinder and gentler the next semester. So we gave them two weeks to do the same homework assignment. The first week went by. The students were working on other classes, playing sports on the lawn, going out with friends. They didn't start working on the problem set until a few days before it was due and ended up in the lab all night just as before."
2. Multitasking, which, as I discuss, makes the lead time for each step dramatically longer, and
3. the fact that delays accumulate, while advances do not (for example, if you have finished this week's work on Friday morning, chances are you will waste time on Friday afternoon rather than starting the next week's work. But if you don't make it on time, you'll still leave at 5 o'clock on Friday, accumulating a delay.)

Goldratt's solution is to choose task estimates that are not padded: each individual task's estimate should be exactly in the middle of the probability curve, so there is a 50% chance you will finish early and a 50% chance you will be late. You should move all the padding to the end of the project (or milestone) where it won't do any harm.

I can't do justice to an entire book in this short post, but if you're doing any kind of project scheduling or management, I highly recommend that you read both books (read The Goal first no matter what you do, both because it's more entertaining, and because it teaches you the foundation you need for Critical Chain).

[Joel on Software]

John Walkenbach says my RSS feed has no titles, which means that his aggregator (Newz Crawler) displays my description content as the title. Any hints on how to fix this?

I'm still looking for a RSS reader that integrates better with its surrounding environment...[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Joel on Software - Lord Palmerston on Programming In a way this is right on the money. Minimize your risks by sticking to what you know, otherwise get people on board who know what they're talking about before starting on with an alien tech on your project. Understanding a tech is not about reading one book, you to have felt the pains of going through a few cycles before it becomes a mastered domain. At the end of the day there is no way around this complexity, we build abstractions on top of abstractions.

Sifry's Alerts: Supernova Wrapup

Mass High Tech I should read more about Trellix and what they would have toffer to a business like mine, a SMB business. I have lots of respect for Dan, even though I only met him once and the Groove Networks kick off in October of 2000. A hardcore technology lover.

What is social-software.com? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Because I haven't read it yet, but it's an interesting topic.

What is social-software.com? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Because I haven't read it yet, but it's an interesting topic.

Google searches out an e-tail niche - Tech News - CNET.com With holiday spending in full gear, Google is testing a new service that uses the company's search engine to help shoppers find products online. Dubbed Froogle. Ding! Ding! and Ding! Does this mean Google is capitalizing on web services apis offered by eBay and Amazone like estores?

The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, December 9, 2002 Howard R: We need to re-read what Doug Englebart wrote in '63 about people using three things: artifacts, training and language... Point: we overstress artifacts. JP: We have three email populations: 1) college graduates who have used email all along; 2) old people; and 3) people who don't get it. Two can't be trained.

Another RSS that looks more lightweight... AmphetaDesk

RSS Reader search... first of many.... Don't understand why this is so awkward to use... this should be simple... and I'm tired of three pane views ...Feedreader | new.media.tool