Patience
serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For
if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power
to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet
with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
–Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
C makes it easy to shoot yourself
in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your
whole leg. –Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of C++
Do what you would do if you knew
you could not fail. –Jamie Buckingham
We win first prize when we are able
to see not just the actions of others, but also the context out of which
these actions come. We win second prize (and it is not an inconsequential
prize) when we know that, for the most part, we don't. –Barry Oshry
in Seeing Systems
This brief article provides some advice and tips to technical team leaders. It focuses on some of the common mistakes that people make when moving from a technical position to a supervisory role.
We as an industry seem to search in vain for the magic silver bullet—the right combination of methods and tools that would make predictable software cost, schedule, and quality performance a reality across the industry without a significant cost or schedule expenditure. Program managers, company presidents, controllers, and customers are continually surprised and disappointed when the magic does not appear.
Designing a good user interface (UI) is one of those skills that beginning programmers sometimes put off learning. As these beginners progress, they often continue to put it off, concentrating instead on "sexier" skills. Indeed, UI design is often thought of as someone else's job—the realm of the academic or the QA guy, not worthy of the time and effort of a "real" programmer.
This article reviews the limitations of testing, such as only proving the existence of problems, not their absence, in ensuring quality software. It emphasizes the importance of design and documentation in preventing problems early in the software development lifecycle and proper test requirements analysis which ensure a good system.
This article discusses the importance of not only focusing on the tactical approach to a test effort, but of including the test strategy. Focus of article is on using the test strategy in a risk-based testing stance to identify and minimize testing risks.
A good article on how to assess severity of problems found during the course of testing. Applies some sound reasoning to objective severity assignment.
This is a four-part series of articles on the basics of Microsoft Project including some of the quirks of the application to watch out for and how Project calculates things. The articles cover the following topics: duration and task types, building your plan, assigning resources, and tracking progress. All of these articles are excellent and gentle introductions to the topics and are more helpful than the MS Project help files.
Brint is a business and technology web "portal". Brint provides topical organization of Internet content in the areas of business, technology, e-business, knowledge management, and more, as well as, news headlines. Portal is well organized and easy to navigate.
This site has some excellent examples of the basics of the SQL language. It's a very good refresher if your SQL skills get a little rusty.
In this editorial, the author emphasizes why our business customers are interested in the information side of IT rather than the technology and offers some suggestions on how best to deliver value.
This article examines the future of SONET and how it will need to adapt to remain a viable core network technology. [Editor's Note: Brent Bomer of the WCG marketing group is quoted in this article about metro services.]
Bell Labs scientists have discovered that chalk-like calcite crystals in brittlestars may act as the foundation of improved optical detectors in networking equipment.
This article looks at the trouble that many end-users experience in getting optical connectivity and looks at some of the rumors and myths surrounding the bandwidth "gluts".
Hardware revenues for fiber-optic equipment makers are expected to rise by 52% this year (over last) to $10.3 billion. Most of the spending is on equipment for metro services/access versus long-haul.
In Windows 3.1, one of the nicest features of the Program Manager shell was the ability to tile or cascade any open windows. WinTool restores this capability to the newer generations of Windows. This allows you to arrange any open windows for viewing by selecting the desired applications from the WinTool main window.
XClip adds X Windows-style Copy and Paste functions to MS Windows. This allows you to use <Ctrl>+<mouse button> to copy the selection to the clipboard and <Shift>+<mouse button> to paste its contents. By default, the utility uses the middle mouse button, but the left or right mouse button can be used by specifying a command-line parameter on startup.
Most folks
know that pressing <Ctrl>+¬ and <Ctrl>+® in MS Word and Outlook moves the cursor backward
and forward, respectively, one word at a time. You can also use <Ctrl>+ and <Ctrl>+¯ to move
up and down one paragraph at a time.
Windows
NT and 2000 has a rarely used utility known as CHKDSK ("check disk")
that is very useful for keeping your system in top condition. CHKDSK
comes in two "flavors": command-line and GUI. To use the
GUI version, open Windows Explorer and select the desired disk to check.
Right-click and choose Properties from the context menu. In
the Properties window, select the
Tools tab and press Check Now… Choose the appropriate
options in the Check Disk window and press
OK. To use the command-line version, open a Command Prompt and
enter "chkdsk /?" (sans quotes) for the various options.
One advantage of the command-line version are the /I and /c options which perform a less rigorous and, therefore,
less time-consuming check.
Sharing
documents is a way of life in a large IT organization. And sometimes,
others who were intended to simply view the shared document accidentally
update the documents. One way to prevent this is to set the read-only
attribute via Windows Explorer. However, MS Word and Excel offer a
simpler way. When saving your document or spreadsheet, in the
Save As dialog, click on the
Options… button. In the Save properties dialog, enable
(check) the Read-only recommended option. Press
OK and save the document normally. This will enable a prompt
whenever the document is opened that suggests opening the document as
read-only. Anyone can still edit the document, but they'll need to
make a conscious decision to do so. (If you'd like to apply this technique
to an existing document, simply use the
Save As option and save the file with the existing name.)
Remember "Mad Libs" when you were high school? If not, it was that wacky game where you filled in words of a particular part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) not knowing the context. Then the story was read back with the contributed words. Hilariously funny at times and soberingly on-target others. This site provides an online version of "Mad Libs". You can even look at others' creations.
Was American History your passion when you were in school? Well, maybe not, but then again history was never this fun. This site from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution has a plethora of interactive topics from various areas (art, science, etc.) in American history.