Lars Pind

Holonic software development. It sounds very intriguing, about creating software development methods that work with the human nature, although he’s still not being very concrete about it.

Tog: Call Center: Profit or Loss?. This message surely haven’t been lost on Dell.

How to Think With Your Gut. Something I’ve always been practicing.

I started reading Direct from Dell last night, and though I’m not done with it yet, there were a few valuable lessons already. Michael Dell seems to have progressed in a very haphazard, practical way, without too much structure. I think there’s something for me to learn there. I’ve been spending quite a lot of energy on establishing the right structure for my company, as in trying to think about advisory board or management board, in trying to think about what the organization and the organizational processes should look like, etc.

It seems like Michael Dell only did this as real problems arose, and instead focused exclusively on growth. I’m not talking about how to arrange the assembly line. He’d always ask himself the question “what’s the most efficient way we can get this done?” But when it comes to information processes, to calculating profit & loss for each product line, etc., he didn’t do it until it was necessary.

I think the lesson I can learn from Dell is to focus on increasing sales, delivering top-notch service, making sure ours customers stay thrilled and loyal, hiring and holding onto ubertalented employees, and staying profitable. The rest will come when the time is right.

Joel Spolsky: Lord Palmerston on Programming. A few great snippets:

There are lots of other programming worlds. There’s the world of people developing for BEA Weblogic who know J2EE, Oracle, and all kinds of Java things that I don’t even know enough about to enumerate. There are hard core Macintosh developers who know CodeWarrior, MPW, Toolbox programming in System 6 through X, Cocoa, Carbon, and even nice obsolete things like OpenDoc that don’t help any more.

Very few people, though, know more than one or two worlds, because there’s just so much to learn that unless you have to work in one of these worlds for more than a couple of years, you don’t really grok it all.

...

Java attempted this but Sun didn’t grok GUIs well enough to deliver really slick native-feeling applications. Like the space alien in Star Trek watching Earth through a telescope, they knew exactly what human food was supposed to look like but they didn’t realize it was supposed to taste like something. Java apps have menus in the right places but there are all these keyboard things that don’t work the same way as every other Windows app and their tabbed dialogs look a little scary.

Six new book reviews up now.

I’ve added a couple new photos today.

Checkout Aaron’s amazing segway movie. It’s silly and funny :)

Po Bronson in Fast Company: What Should I Do With My Life?.

Very important question. Related to my previous entry about the Gallup books on strenghts.

Thanks to Alexander for the reference, and for encouraging me to sign up for Fast Company’s newletters.

I started reading First, Break All the Rules more than a year ago, but I simply haven’t managed finish it ever since. Maybe it’s because the message-that we all have unique talents, things we’re conditioned to excel at, and that we should focus on improving what we’re good at instead of remedying what we suck at-clicked with me so quickly that I find the rest of the book full of needless, endless repetitions.

Not so with the sequel, Now, Discover Your Strenghts, which I started reading just yesterday. If you don’t need convincing about the idea, I’d recommend just picking up this. It’s much more consice, practical, and useful, explaining clearly the concepts of strenghts, knowledge, skills, and talents, and putting them to use right away. It has a catalog of 34 strength themes, and an online tool-which I’m going to try in a minute-to help you find out where your talents lie, so you know what you should bet your future on.

Hm. I really hate that they only let you take the survey once per copy of the book you buy. That’s absurd.

FastCompany: Love Is the Killer App.

So true. Share the love, baby! Did anybody say Open Source Software?

I’m doing a little, very little, research on the network effect, and stumbled across these interesting pages:

• Network Effects from FastCompany, September 1999.
• Dictionary entry from marketingterms.com
• US vs. Microsoft findings of fact

Jakob’s done it again: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002.

Nice list. Wish more people would fix ‘em. I don’t think I’ve committed any of them. Have I?

Wired News: Blogs Make the Headlines

This description of Chandler from Kapor’s weblog sounds very much like OpenACS’ ACS Objects. Judging by the comments on his entry, apparently it also sounds like how many other systems are designed. Object-oriented, anyone?

The fundamental way data is stored in Chandler is as a collection of items, also known as a repository. Every individual email is represented by an item, as is every meeting on a calendar, and every contact. Not only that but every attachment, document, and annotation is also an item. In short, each piece of content is represented as an item.

An item contains a set of elements, which can be thought of as a collection of attributes and their values as well as relationships to other items along with a “payload”. For example, attributes of an email item would include its sender, the date sent, the subject, and other information which is represented in the header lines of the email itself. The “payload” is the body of the email. Similarly, attributes of a meeting item include its start time, end time, location, participants, etc. An item may have a relationship to another item, as in two emails which constitute part of a thread.

By treating items as the first-class elements of data, it is then possible for the user to obtain an integrated view of all the information in her universe. One simple feature which takes advantage of this is that when you use Chandler you will never have to look in multiple places to find what you’re looking for. In today’s world, you use your PIM to look for information sent by email, and you use a file manager to locate information contained in a document stored as a file. You may have to use other tools to find other types of information.

Link to Kapor’s weblog entry.

Digital Mass: Sharing the riches.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the Open Source Applications Foundation progresses over time. I’m particularly interested in what the business is going to look like. I believe that what we’ll see is corporations funneling the money that they’d otherwise pay in licensing fees into a consortium that can hire people or companies to develop the software they need for them. Perhaps the OSAF will become such a company.

From The Register on November 4: How did Microsoft end up policing Microsoft?

Dvorak in PC Magazine: Microsoft, Innovation, and Linux.

Hard to argue with. Let’s try to do something new. However, while I’m certain we will get there eventually, I also think we need to get money flowing into open source software development first. Then we can show the world what we’ve got.

We need to make the mental shift from “Hey! Open Source! Cool! Let’s see if there’s something we can grab for free!” to getting the companies and organizations who use this software to take ownership and be part of developing it in the direction they want it developed in.

Slate: Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?

I certainly believe in Apple’s approach. Data might be just bits and bytes to the computer, but to people, all data are not created equal. There’s a tremendous difference between photos, word processor documents, spreadsheets, software bugs, customers in a CRM system, and groupware groups. Just to name a few.

No idea how long they’ve had this service up, can’t find any info about it on Google itself, but http://www.google.com/linux is pretty neat: Only searches sites that are about Linux.

Hmm. There seems to also be a http://www.google.com/microsoft. And a http://www.google.com/mac. No http://www.google.com/oracle, though. But there’s a http://www.google.com/bsd. I wonder where the complete list is?

Aha, it’s here: http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html.

News.com: Patent creates IM wrinkle. This software patenting insanity must stop. Note, that AOL didn’t even invent this thing. They bought it. So this all about big money big business, it has nothing to do with innovation.

“The claim is it’s a system where you have a network; you have a way to monitor who’s on the network; and if you want to talk to them you hook them up,” said Gregory Aharonian, publisher of Internet Patent News Service, a newsletter that’s critical of technology patents. “If you’re doing something like that, you’re potentially infringing.”

Customers who wear clothes also shop for… I love that they poke fun at themselves like this. (Update: Seems like they only show this every once in a while. Bastards!)

Yahoo! News: Sony, Panasonic to use Linux in consumer electronics

InformationWeek: Red Hat’s In The Black. It’s great to see that they’re making money in this market. I’m sure it’ll get a even better from here.

Find quotes about sites that match your search. Nice.

From the Register: MS fights Open Source with freebies – an eyewitness writes, and MS un-denial leaves Linux option open.

New study by Meta Group says so. I’m not sure they’re right, but I’m certain that their prediction that the pressure from Open Source software will become really big is dead-on.

It’s funny that Microsoft is so afraid of getting caught in the Innovator’s Dilemma, yet this is exactly what’s happening to them. Open Source is the disruptive technology that’s pulling the carpet away from under Microsoft. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show! :)

Mono does ASP.NET, which means you can - supposedly - write ASP.NET applications and run them on Apache and Linux. Interesting.

The Register also has the story.

In case you wondered where I was all day yesterday: Mydomain.com got DoS’d. At least, that’s what they say. And let’s just say that people got pretty upset in those forums. 22 pages of postings so far. Phew!

Here’s the original interview from a couple of weeks ago, and here’s the response he’s gotten: Snail-mail spam. And loads of it.

Why can’t I feel sorry for this guy?

Mohan sent me this link to a paper titled A Framework for Pedagogical Evaluation of Virtual Learning Environments, which looks quite interesting. Another item on my “stuff to read”-list.

From Slashdot: Usability and Open Source Software. Looks like a paper I’ll have to read. And hey, they even quote my friend Klaus Kaasgaard a couple of times.

The Register: MS paper touts Unix in Hotmail’s Win2k switch. Very interesting indeed. Thanks to John for passing this along.

ZDNet UK News: Microsoft: Linux on desktops a threat. I’d certainly hope so :)

John is continuing his work to make OpenACS run on Windows, Apache, in TclPro, etc. Check out the screenshots. Thanks to Talli for pointing me to this.