The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life—mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical. –Julius Erving
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. –Frank Tibolt
Plan for what is difficult while it is easy; do what is great while it is small. –Sun Tzu, The Art of War
A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself. –Adm. Arthur W. Radford
There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good. –Samuel Johnson
Integrity is keeping my commitment even if the circumstances when I made the commitment have changed. –David Jeremiah
The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is a commercial software development
process that is widely used. This article
gives an overview of the process and explains some of the benefits of the
process.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp=?p=169549
The book excerpt gives a good, non-technical overview of web services and
some of the differences between web services and traditional applications.
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2004/0,4814,94720,00.html
Recent studies indicate that 77% of IT projects run over budget by an
average of 169% of the projected cost.
This article looks at 10 common causes and their solutions.
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2004/0,4814,95196,00.html
This author argues that data without some internal context is not
valuable for enterprise reporting such as business intelligence or analytics.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/05/07/19OPcurve_1.html
Regardless of the side of the outsourcing debate that you are on, this
author says that the fundamental issue to overcome is that lack of long-term
commitment in the "assembly line" approach to software development is
the main problem. Very insightful
article.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/12/11OPcurve_1.html
This is a volunteer, open-source effort to develop a three-volume guide on software testing. The three areas are fundamentals; testing for various architectures, such as client/server, embedded, etc.; and platform-specific topics focusing on white-box testing. The first part on software testing fundamentals is already available.
http://www.softrel.org/STGB.html
This article provides one-page examinations of a dozen important skills for software testers, ranging from the technical and analytical to the "soft" skills.
http://www.professionaltester.com/archive/2001/ProTester-SkillsOfProTester.pdf
Marathon is a testing framework for GUI applications developed using Java/Swing. It includes record-playback tool and an script editor. Scripts are recorded in Python, which is a very intuitive, structured scripting language.
http://marathonman.sourceforge.net/
Very insightful interview with Brian Marick, one of the most well-known software testing practitioners and maintainer of Testing Foundations and a proponent of agile software development.
http://www.whatistesting.com/interviews/bmarick.htm
This is a virtual library of some of the O'Reilly titles that are either
out-of-date or simply published with an "open" copyright. The texts cover a variety of topics, mostly
in the open source arena.
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/
The Eclipse IDE is now the de facto
standard for Java IDEs. This Quick Start
guide helps you get up and running using Eclipse with the least amount of
difficulty.
http://techrepublic.com.com/i/tr/downloads/home/article_comp/quickstart-eclipse.pdf
PHP is becoming one of the most popular
programming languages for web applications.
One of the main reasons is PHP has simple syntax, but it is also very
powerful. This tutorial uses a
console-based application approach to learning PHP syntax and constructs.
http://www.softwareforeducation.com/php/index.htm
New terms and acronyms seemed to come into the technology industry
vernacular daily. This extensive
glossary will help you sort out the alphabet soup.
http://searchsmallbizit.techtarget.com/glossary/0,294242,sid44,00.html
This article provides some practical tips for maintaining continuity and focus on tasks at hand and avoiding loss of concentration due to interruptions.
http://www.digitalocean.cc/sample.html
This blog article provides links to a number of tips on preparing a good technical resume.
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2004/08/16/resume-tips-roundup/
A recent Hudson Index survey shows that IT worker optimism is at a high for 2004 and the highest level since December 2003. Notably, the optimism index for IT was higher than average worker optimism across all industries.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=26806178
Long-term IT strategy is no longer viable, according to this author, because of how executives make decisions. IT must become flexible and able to adapt to quick decisions and business direction changes.
http://www.misweb.com/magarticle.asp?doc_id=23563&rgid=5&listed_months=0
SS7 is the basis of most all telecommunication technologies. This general overview of what SS7 is and the role that it plays in telecom is a nice introduction to SS7.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=330805
WinMover allows you to move or resize any window by clicking anywhere within the window along with a user-definable shortcut key. Likewise, it provides support for snapping/docking windows to the edge of the screen. The utility is lightweight and unobtrusive.
http://www.eliasae.se/winmover/
TinyResMeter is a very small (<100kB) resource meter on steroids. It can display not only system resources, but used and free disk space, system uptime, the current time, number of processes and/or threads, cache values, and more. You can also make the display transparent, force it to dock to the screen edges, make it always on top, and even "pin" it so that it won't move.
http://perso.accelance.net/~pesoft/trm/us_trm.html
This Microsoft Word add-in provides a toolbar with programming language syntax highlighting for a number of popular languages, including C, C++, Java, Perl, and more. The text font and coloring, including for language keywords, is customizable. Very handy for code documentation in Word.
http://www.add-in-express.com/adx-toys/adx-toys-word.php?r1=submit&r2=adxt2word
X-Deep/32 is an excellent Windows X Window Server utility, which was previously available commercially and has been recently released as freeware. Based on X11R6.5.1, it allows connectivity from your Windows system to any system running X Windows (Unix, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.).
The command line parameters for MS Word can be used to create a shortcut that will launch Word and automatically open the most recently used document. To do so, simply create a shortcut to the Word executable (e.g., C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\ WINWORD.EXE). Right click on the new shortcut and choose Properties. In the Properties window add /mFile1 to the end of the Target specification. If you like, you can add a keyboard shortcut in the Shortcut key to quickly access the new shortcut. Also, you can replace File1 with File2, File3, etc., to open the second, third, or other most recently used documents.
Sometimes you need to capture data from an Excel spreadsheet as a picture to put into another non-compatible application. Excel makes this easy: Simply hold down the <Shift> key and select Edit | Copy Picture… from the main menu. (When <Shift> is pressed, Excel changes the Copy option in the Edit menu to Copy Picture… along with a few other subtle changes.) In the Copy Picture dialog, choose whether to capture only the on screen data (As shown on screen) or all data (As shown when printed) and the format. Then just paste the captured image into your graphics editor (e.g., MS Paint).
In Windows 2000/XP, you can display the UNC path of mapped drives at the Command Prompt by making a simple update to PROMPT environment variable. To do so, open the System Properties window (<Windows>+<Break>) and select the Advanced tab. Press Environment Variables… In the Environment Variables window, add a new variable (User or System) named PROMPT and set its value to $m$p$g. Press OK three times to close the windows and save the new setting. Next time you open a Command Prompt and navigate to mapped drive, the prompt will include the UNC name along with the mapped drive letter.
This incredible site (and downloadable companion program) teaches special and general relativity in a gentle, easy to understand manner. The site provides great Flash animations of the concepts along with simple explanations.
http://www.aliceinphysics.com/
This unique dictionary provides word definitions as limericks. The definitions are quite unique and often humorous, too.
http://www-b.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php
Billed as "the world's largest archive of classic print ads", this well-organized site has thousands of advertisements from magazines from the past 100 years. Some of the nice features include a list of the top 25 and 100 ads, a search facility, organization by particular issue of a magazine, and even e-cards of your favorite ads.