Current button count is 839!
My excuse for using these is that they’re smaller.
Month: July 2003
css tweaks to these pages
I have always been annoyed when, as posts are rotated to the archives, the righthand sidebar content creeps across to the left. I’d rather have whitespace there.
After working through some of Eric Meyer on CSS today, I figured how to fix that. I just needed to add margin-left: 65%; to the side and sidetitle class definitions in the stylesheet and then tidy up some of the elements in the sidebar. There are a few serverside includes in there and I needed to remove any div tags from them to make everything work right.
project management, as it should be
Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts), by Edward Tufte
A fascinating thread on project management, with incisive remarks by Professor Tufte and some excellent “from the field” feedback from hands-on project managers. Perhaps I underestimate the value of the big wall-chart . . . .
I persist in thinking this is something that can be done digitally, in a database of something, but it turns out that folks who manage the kinds of projects I can only dream of use paper for a couple of reasons. They may use a piece of software to handle data entry and printing, but what they actually use and live with as The Plan Document is a pasted-together wall-chart of the project status, written on, annotated, and talked about.
An inflammatory but nonetheless insightful quote:
The design of project charts appears to have regressed to Microsoft mediocrity; that is, nothing excellent and nothing completely useless. (Is the reduction of variance around a modest average the consequence of monopoly?) Most of the charts in Google look the same or make the same mistakes: analytically thin, bureaucratic grid prison, not annotated, little quantitative data. The computer Gantt charts, so lightweight and tinker toy, do not appear to have been designed for serious project management.
I read an article on the use of MS Project by its own development team and the adjustments they made as they got used to eating their own dog food. I’ll see if I can hunt it up.
blogs from the Big House
“Microsoft is like an anthill, and I’m an ant,” explained Scoble, the employee who always thinks about justifying his posts to CEO Ballmer. “I’m allowed to give the ant’s perspective on the world, but I’m not allowed to give the anthill’s perspective on the world.”
There are a lot of MSFT bloggers: they’re too sincere to be taken as a charm offensive, so I just take ’em for what they’re worth. Some of them are good reading.
The internet is sh*t
Give an infinite number of monkeys typewriters and they’ll produce the works of Shakespeare. Unfortunately, I feel like I’m reading all the books where they didn’t.
due diligence
Gartner is not alone among analyst firms in ignoring RSS. Mr. Safe wouldn’t find much searching for RSS at Forrester other than how to “boost margins with merchandise optimization.” Nothing at Giga (which owns Forrester) either (you’ll have to search yourself since they chose POST over GET). Call it whatever you want, it’s invisible to these guys at this point. That doesn’t mean that it’s not important (it is!), just that a lot of people have zero visibility on it right now. Maybe that means it’s a good time to make some changes while no one is looking.
I was re-reading this posting on Chad’s weblog and decided to look into this. It turns out that Gartner is not as ignorant as all that. If you search for RDF, you do a little better. Some stuff about how “XML has grown from a little-known standard to become the foundation of the Web computing infrastructure.”
Likewise, Forrester is somewhat clued in. And Giga had this article in their search results: What Is RDF and Should You Care?: Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a graph-based framework for describing metadata, describing the relationships between metadata, and interchanging metadata. … (Relevance: 93%)
How JK Rowling’s fans find their way here
I dug into the logs and found that her email address is a much sought-after tidbit.
I’m not at all bothered by it: it’s good to see kids reading something with a little heft to it, even if they’re not getting the deeper textures. Goodness knows, they’ll get that later when they re-read the series before book 6 comes out and again for book 7.
While I was looking into this, I discovered this book. Nothing earthshattering to learn that Harry’s world is based on the idea that love is stronger that hate, especially in the Order of the Phoenix: that proves to be our hero’s salvation in this one. It seems to be a thoughtful contribution to the welter of books for and against the whole HP canon: perhaps it’s because unlike most of the naysayers, he’s actually read the books.
the pain of reading someone else’s fan mail
For some reason, people are posting comments to this entry as if I were J K Rowling.
I’m glad to know the young people of today have discovered reading, but I wonder about how well they’re comprehending what they read . . .
Empire Rising: A Satirical History, Part I
Empire Rising: A Satirical History, Part I
In the days of the consul Bilious Clintonius, the Roman Republic was at peace and awash in wealth from the Valley of Siliconia.
But not all were content.
The Bacchanalian revels of Clintonius appalled the high priests. Many senators were suspicious of his scheming wife, Hillaria, and disdainful of his chosen successor, Gorian the Stiff.
As the time approached for the Senate to choose a new consul, the foes of Clintonius searched for a man to oppose Gorian and recapture power for the wealthy families of Rome…
Funny stuff . . . .
Get the poster.
software libre
“For us, software libre (open source software) was the only choice,” said Francisco A. Huertas Mendez, technical coordinator of GNU/LinuEx of the Junta de Extremadura. “We were able to stretch our budget very far and provide a powerful and easy-to-use environment with Linux and GNOME. We are also able to give the students all of the productivity programs they need.”
OK, it allows local governments to stretch their pesetas as far as they can. But there’s more to it than simple cost savings . . .
Said Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Ximian, Inc. and GNOME Foundation president, “This initiative not only gives computing ability to all of its students, it also has the potential to grow a local IT industry in Extremadura. This is an excellent example of the control and flexibility that Linux and open source give governments and public sector institutions.”
If this stuff were bought from an American company, the money leaves the country and the expertise to run the systems will need to be imported, to say nothing of perpetual license fees. This way, the locals own the system and can learn from and build it to suit themselves, not some foreign multinational’s quarterly revenue targets.
<update>
Sadly, this will be pitched as simply Linux activism or something like that. We haven’t yet reached the point where “anything that isn’t Microsoft” is seen as a viable alternative, but instead something you use until you outgrow it. It’s not the case, but that’s how the Conventional Wisdom goes.