fun

The intro/description from IBM's new Project Zero caught my eye right away: "We're building an agile development environment leveraging scripting runtimes such as Groovy and PHP, and optimized for producing REST-style services, integration, mash-ups, and rich Web interfaces. This is the community development site for IBM WebSphere sMash, offering users a chance to interact with the development team as we build this new product".

Generally, I don't believe in software frameworks that do not emerge off of a successful real-life project and are built "in-theory", around a vague idea. This attitude of mine is backed by facts: Spring came out of a real project, so did Hibernate, Erlang was heavily used at Siemens... even Drupal was initially built for a college website Dries was putting together. Nothing ever came out of just wanting to create a software framework and thinking you have enough experience ("more than others" is usually the feeling). At least, I know no real good examples.

But besides that, WebSphere and "agile"? :) If you ever had to work with WebSphere, you will understand and will have to forgive my natural sarcasm.

P.S. Nice domain, though. I wonder how much they got that for.

Nice and funny "analysis" of the Internet community on CreateDebate

Just how addicted to Apple are you?

Apparently, I am 94% addicted.

Not really a surprise to anybody who knows me :)

In college, our civil engineering professor opened his first class with an anecdote. According to the story, a bunch of engineers were planning trail paths at a newly built campus in city X. There was a large set of lawns on campus. Instead of building sophisticated simulation models to find optimal trails, the engineers did not pave trails for the first couple months. During these months people walked on certain paths on the lawns enough to cut natural trails through the grass. Eventually, the engineers simply paved those trails. The story concludes that the paths turned out to actually be the optimal trails.

In the modern Web 2.0 world we would inevitably call this story a blazing example of the "wisdom of crowds". Back then, however, James Surowiecki had not yet written his famous essay, so the story was told to us as simply a great example of a common-sense approach.

Since I was one of the roughly 1 million fanatics, that against all rational arguments, bought iPhone early, I became eligible for the $100 Apple credit. I got it back today from Apple website (look in the footer). It took me about 40 seconds.

Now the big question is - what to buy with it, since I already own like half of anything at the Apple store? :)

The subject of real.com is a broad one. You can talk about it for hours, touching the matters of outdated technology and lousy business model or falsely admiring their desperate attempts of come-back, but then - is it worth it? I find it much more amusing to bust their balls for petty archaic spellings, like this one:

"On-line" for God's sake? Real, how 90s, of you :)

As employees all over the country keep getting fired over their MySpace profiles, one man is trying to get "hired" as nothing less than the President of the United States of America. That's right, Dennis Kucinich, has a professionally designed MySpace profile with all the bells and whistles that, typically, only music bands or TV shows get.

Mr. Kucinich currently has 10,280 friends, which falls short of John McCain's 20,173. With all fairness, these numbers are very impressive for a 60 and 70 years old men on MySpace. Yet, both of them get beaten hands down by Hillary Clinton's two MySpace profiles one with 35,370 friends and another with 41,873. If you ever doubted Hillary's charms, now you know!

Profiles of Kucinich and McCain seem to be part of their official campaigns, but senator Clinton's profiles are clearly just fan pages.

Last but not least, a shocking result from Barack Obama - with 161,728 "friends" he beats even U2 at 136,270.

You probably know that CeBIT is going full force, right now. As you would expect from a leading IT and telecom trade fair, loads of new interesting solutions were presented. However, one stands out, right away. Not so much with its features but rather by price - $1,500 for a keyboard? And it's not even platinum-plated or carrying proud tag of some insanely famous designer.

Optimus Maximus is a creation of Russian web/industrial design company Art. Lebedev Studio. Each key on this keyboard is an OLED screen that can be programmed to display any character. So, effectively, the keyboard is fully customizable. Cool, but... it ends up costing more than any keyboard you have ever seen. According to some reports, it also "features" a constant high-pitch noise from all the OLED goodness, but we have not tried it so - maybe not.

In any case, even with the supposedly breakthrough approach to designing keyboards, the first reaction when you look at the price tag is inevitably in line with one of the comments to the wired.com blog post: "These Commie douches must be out of their arrogant minds. $1500 for a keyboard? Yeah, right, how about - GET REAL?". However, if you give it a second thought you may appreciate the marketing genius behind the price. Seriously, if not the scandalous price tag, what else would make this gadget appear on the front-page of the wired.com coverage of CeBIT and be a highlight of the show?

Well, maybe the "commie douches" are not so stupid, after all and they've learned a thing or two about Shock Advertising from their Western brothers? Maybe... We'll see how this one goes and if the keyboard will capture any real market. In my humble opinion, unless they significantly drop the price very soon, they will prove right the wired.com commenter.

pru·dent [prood-nt] - careful in providing for the future;

Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian recently wrote a wonderful blog post about successful hiring practices.

A related, interesting subject is the matter of discipline, often emphasized by HR professionals. Apparently, well-organized individuals are better workers, or so they tell us. Well, we know it is not necessarily true for creative work. But is it true for service industry?

I don't know, but here is what Operations Management theory tells us. Apparently, according to the Waiting Lines Models, for constant arrival rate, flow time increases exponentially with mean processing time, but it increases quadratically with the standard deviation of processing time.

If you remember little off of your calculus class, in human language it means: being able to, on average, complete jobs quickly is more important than the variation in job completion times.

I will leave the pleasure of making conclusions to you :)

We have all heard about the relaxed corporate atmosphere at Google. Nothing wrong about that. In fact, it's awesome.

However, aparently somebody at Google's external communications (or whatever the department is called there) thought it was a good idea to share a piece of internal "nerdiness" with the public at large. Recently, they have published a teaser on the GMail log-in page:

Clicking on the link, not surprisingly, brings you to a YouTube video posted below. Ugggggggh, no comments :)