April 2005 Newsletter
Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. –Will Rogers
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. –John F. Kennedy
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. –Voltaire
No man ever listened himself out of a job. –Calvin Coolidge
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. –Anne Bradstreet
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. –Anatole France
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward. –Napolean Hill
This article examines techniques to build an "enlightened"
programmer's editor (IDE) by integrating the concept of examples which are
paradigm frequently used by developers in their programming. The article is based on the EG plug-in for
Eclipse. A Flash-based demo with audio is also available.
http://subtextual.org/OOPSLA04.pdf
Getting a good deal on IT products requires effort and preparation. This article outlines seven ways to get the
best deal.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/02/18/08FEsourcing_1.html
A recent
study by A.T. Kearney consulting firm shows that business executives are
becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the organizational value of IT and 30%
of executives believe 20% or more of their companies' annual IT budget is
wasted. In particular, executives think
IT spends too much time maintaining existing systems and not enough time
working on longer-term, strategic needs.
One commentator thinks that IT
needs to focus on speed and agility.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159905000
Much is made about IT trying to align with business and cater to business
needs. This article looks at the other
side of the coin in terms of what executives need to do to try to understand IT
and make IT an effective resource.
http://searchsmb.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid44_gci1066110,00.html
Here's a tongue-in-cheek guide for IT folks in how to understand the
vernacular of the business customers.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/01/07/02FEbizpeak_1.html
One of the important, but difficult, aspects of building applications
that please the customer is how to continually make them aware of the value of the
system and how well it works for them.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1748733,00.asp
QA isn't just about testing an application after it has been architected, designed, and coded. QA involves a mindset and "lifestyle" oriented to problem detection and avoidance throughout the development process.
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=276
QAtraq is a test management tool released under GPL and, thus, available for free use. It provides organization for test plan, test cases, test results and more.
http://www.testmanagement.com/index.html
This site provides an online version of a college course in software testing presented by Cem Kaner and James Bach. This site is a work in progress with 11 of an estimated 35 topics complete.
http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/index.html
President Bush awarded the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor for technology innovation, to Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, and Watts Humphrey, head of the Software Engineering Institute and a pioneer of and the leading voice for software quality.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159402875
Some tips for customizing the Unix/Linux shell command prompt, including
adding color to your prompts.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-tip-prompt/index.html
This poster in PDF format provided by an independent Oracle training
company provides a quick reference to all of the DBA views in Oracle 10. (It is relevant to Oracle 8 and 9, as well,
except some of the views are version 10-specific.)
http://www.tusc.com/oracle/download/nonhtml/poster-10g.zip
Excellent site for information about Unix/Linux shell scripting and
general command shell tips and tricks.
Normalization of database structures to remove redundant data is critical
to database performance and efficiency.
This article gives a step-by-step process of normalization using an easy
to understand example.
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/intro-to-normalization.html
Java is fundamentally an object-oriented programming language. For those more familiar with traditional
procedural languages, this article gives a good introduction to how to create
objects in Java and how to create and call methods for those objects.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174371
This two-part series of articles helps you go beyond the basics of the
Unix vi editor and harness some of the hidden power and flexibility of this oft
maligned little gem.
http://builder.com.com/5100-6372_14-5253006.html
http://builder.com.com/5100-6372_14-5254151.html
Sometimes innovation is overrated. In order for organizations to succeed, they must foster a culture of ideas, where new concepts and approaches come from all directions and levels of the organization.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/03/02/negroponte0203.asp
This essay by Carl Honore, author of a book called In Praise of Slowness, gives a nice introduction to the topic of how busy lives and the emphasis on speed are destroying our culture.
http://www.lapismagazine.org/honore.html
A survey of over 40,000 workers done by Microsoft to promote a new product shows that while on average they spend 45 hours a week working, they say that 17 of those hours are wasted due to procrastination, poor communication and other reasons.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=159900390
Holding people accountable without making them fearful of being blamed for problems is a much more effective motivator for productive organizations.
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10593_11-5620696.html
Noted industrial psychologist David Sirota discusses how employees who start a job with passion come to be less than enthusiastic after a while. He attempts to debunk 33 myths that management have about employee loyalty and commitment.
http://www.optimizemag.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=60405780
The telecom merger mania has many business customers wondering what will happen to prices and service quality.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1760382,00.asp
VOIP is the way of the future for telecommunications. This article dispels some of the common misconceptions about the technology and the business aspects of it.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/mar05/0305vip.html
Database Fishing Tool (or DaFT) is a GUI front-end, written in Tcl/Tk, for any database which supports ODBC connections. It provides a SQL editor and tabular view of data, and lists of tables and columns. Likewise, results can be exported to a number of formats include CSV, HTML, and Excel.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/daft
RSSNewsTicker is a RSS news reader (supports RSS versions 0.9, 0.91, 1.0, and 2.0) that displays feeds in a ticker that you can attach to the top or the bottom of your desktop. It supports variable transparency to make it less intrusive.
ProcessTamer is a small (100kB) and efficient background utility which monitors CPU usage. When it finds a process that is hogging CPU, it temporarily lowers the priority of that process until the CPU has more cycles available, which allows other applications to be more responsive. Good for keeping voracious virus scanners and multimedia applications "in line".
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html
OpTool is tray-based utility that allows you to open an HMTL link (from any link-enabled application) in the web browser of your choice. OpTool has built-in configurations for Internet Explorer (multiple versions), Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape 4.x/6.x. In addition, via configuration files, it can be set up to work with any browser.
http://www.kreacom.dk/tools/optool/2.0/
SendToAny adds options to the Windows Explorer Send To menu for all of the items in the Start Menu and Quick Launch Menu and on the Desktop. So you can open a file with any application that has a shortcut or copy/move file to any folder that has a shortcut.
http://www.optionalreaction.com/software/sendtoany/
KatMouse makes the mouse scroll wheel more effective by not requiring you to click on the scroll bar of the desired window to scroll. By moving the scroll wheel, KatMouse scrolls the window directly under the mouse cursor, even if it doesn't currently have input focus.
http://eduard.hiti.bei.t-online.de/
This site is dedicated to children's literacy by using the Flat Stanley character from a children's book of the same name. In the book, the character gets squashed flat by a falling bulletin board, which gives him the ability to travel anywhere in an envelope. The premise of the story is that friends should keep in touch by letters and e-mails. Flat Stanley projects are popular in schools and Flat Stanley's have been on the Space Shuttle, in photo-ops with President Bush, and to the Oscars with Clint Eastwood.
http://flatstanley.enoreo.on.ca/
artPad is an online freehand drawing site. You can doodle just like you used to do as a kid on sheet of paper. You can even save your masterpiece and e-mail it to your friends or print it.
http://artpad.art.com/artpad/painter/
Well, certainly, this doesn't fall into the classification of "fun", but here are some very interesting resources about the 12/26/2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that devastated many areas. Even though this matter is out of the headlines, please don't forget these people, as they still have a long recovery ahead of them.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tsunami/
A fully functional front end to Google search engine that "translates" results into text as if Snoop Dogg had prepared them. Completely hilarious!
This hilarious short starring John Cleese of Monty Python fame and Michael Dorn (you know, Worf from ST:NG) is an ad LiveVault backup systems. Very creative advertising technique.
This site provides some of the most incredible photos of astronomical phenomenon from the Hubble Space Telescope, which are specifically designed to be used as desktop wallpaper. Each image is available in a variety of common desktop sizes, so you don't have to do the cropping yourself!
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/wallpaper/