What's in a name ....er, everything and nothing- May 29, 2008 Craig Bailey blogged recently about a new product, Elcom, had introduced with a name of Elcom TrainingManager.Net. In his post, he briefly mentioned they were talking about renaming it and one of the responses was from a company named Igor that talked about the importance of naming.By now, I think everyone has seen the Microsoft iPod parody where it shows what Microsoft marketing might have done with an iPod and certainly, while it was done as a joke, the reality is Microsoft's product naming...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-in-name-er-everything-and-nothing.html Soulhuntre's rules to code by- May 24, 2008 I don't typically post items directly from Twitter but Soulhuntre hits upon something that I believe many developers have to deal with every day, regardless of the platform.Twitter Soulhuntre: Ok. Rules to live by 1) don...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/soulhuntre-rules-to-code-by.html The End of the Web Not Even Close.- May 19, 2008 Everyone's got their tin-foil hat on today, it seems.Scoble posted this morning on twitter - http:twitter.comScobleizerstatuses814823578That if Microsoft buys Facebook and Yahoo search - the end of the web is coming.There will be a lot shaking out from that but I wanted to reply specifically to this post on Herd Watching - Special Microsoft Facebook Edition - The End of the Web where the statement is made "first off, Microsoft is just evil".Really I started to comment directly there but then...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/end-of-web-not-even-close.html Craig Kills off an entire generation- May 18, 2008 Craig posts his thoughts on The Death of Gen Y amid the upcoming poor economic times. It's a good read but be sure to get down to the bottom for his four key points of how to survive.These aren't sure-fire ways to stay employed but they are good guidelines:a) Work for a company that focuses on benefits rather than features (and I would suppose that if you were a consultant, YOU would focus on benefits rather than features - but don't consultants do that already)b) Work for a company that...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/craig-kills-off-entire-generation.html Say No to Feature Creep- May 13, 2008 Chris Saad has a great post over on his blog: Leadership includes saying no Paying Attention Not sure if he just went through a specific scenario to inspire the posting but it's a great read, especially for technical managers.One of my clients had a problem: they have a list of over 397 enhancement requests to their product. Now, to be fair, some of those are fairly cosmetic and but at least 200 of them require some kind of review for someone to say "no - we are not doing this"So why don't...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/say-no-to-feature-creep.html Dynamic Languages Strike Back- May 13, 2008 Garrett pointed over to this post Stevey's Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back which is really a transcript of a speech Steve Yegge gave at Stanford.Very interesting readvideo whichever you prefer.When reading about half way through (I've marked to come back to but it's definitely a good read) , I immediately thought of the TIOBE index and how excited VFP developers (including myself) got when we had broken the top 20 - whybecause of this quote"So that brings us full circle back to the...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html Tweet, tweet, twitter , twitter- May 11, 2008 Rick Strahl writes up his thoughts on Twitter - Twitter this, Twitter that... - Rick Strahl's Web LogI've been on Twitter for a while as well (started for keeping up with Newsgator and BuzzOutLoud items) and completely agree with his quote:"Since I'm a single developer shop and live in sort of a bubble on a far away island (or a small town on the mainland when I'm back there) Twitter is providing a little more sense of being a part of greater community to me."(albeit, I'm not on an island.http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/tweet-tweet-twitter-twitter.html Finding movie information with IMDB.DLL- May 9, 2008 OK - I don't know how long he'll be able to continue calling it IMDB.DLL - but this DLL totally rocks. Samir has created a very easy to use DLL that retrieves movie information directly from the IMDB database. As easy as:REGSVR32 IMDB.DLLoIMDB = CREATEOBJECT("imdb.imdb")oIMDB.Login('andrewaksel.com','Password123') oimdb.Search("Smallville") oimdb.Search("The Fountainhead") oimdb._GetWriters() && Returns a string of valuesMy Story with IMDB (imdb.dll) Now - do we have one like this for...http://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/finding-movie-information-with-imdbdll.html Techdirt: Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them- May 8, 2008 Dave Winer pointed to this article over on Twitter and it's a great read on the foibles of patent protection on ideas.I hadn't heard of what Myhrvold was doing before but when I read it, I cringed at the thought and how those people were just screwed simply for discussing ideas.Makes me glad that Da Vinci wasn't around to get all of his ideas patented - then where would we beTechdirt: Ideas Are Everywhere... So Why Do We Limit Them Too bad Gladwell didn't get it. ihttp://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/techdirt-ideas-are-everywhere-so-why-do.html Poll: When do you do your best development work- May 7, 2008 So after being up way too late watching primary results (political junkie - go figure) and then waking up early to get some new updates moved into our Fleet Management product, I was struck with a thought and wondered...when do developers do their best development workPollhttp://akselsoft.blogspot.com/2008/05/poll-when-do-you-do-your-best.html |