I can not even tell you how many books and articles I have read where Jim was an author, co-author or editor. I just read on Grady’s blog that he is retiring from IBM. If you want to be impressed check out the Google Book search on Jim Rumbaugh.
I am always interested in learning the history of computers and the software industry in general. I think I am going to check this book out by Steve Wosniak – the other Steve.
Book Description
The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time.
Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen? The result was the first true personal computer, the Apple I, a widely affordable machine that anyone could understand and figure out how to use.
Wozniak’s life—before and after Apple—is a “home-brew” mix of brilliant discovery and adventure, as an engineer, a concert promoter, a fifth-grade teacher, a philanthropist, and an irrepressible prankster. From the invention of the first personal computer to the rise of Apple as an industry giant, iWoz presents a no-holds-barred, rollicking, firsthand account of the humanist inventor who ignited the computer revolution. 16 pages of illustrations.
I have had the opportunity to be a part of some pretty special teams in my career. Teams that I think were far above and beyond the normal team atmosphere. What made me think of this is an article that was forwarded by a colleague of mine within IBM - it is good to see these kinds of things forwarded throughout IBM. The article is very prescriptive on how levels of management and leadership throughout the organization need to have focus on making sure creativity is not stifled in the company and over all morale remains high.
There were two teams that I have been on in my career that stand out above and beyond the other teams.
The first team where I felt like I was part of something special was the ATLASS Development team in the Marines. This team was very small and our objectives were amazingly clear and team unity was very high. Our officers went out of their way to make sure we knew we were part of something special resulting in our product being deployed around the entire Marine Corps as the standard supply tracking system. The people liked being with each other and going out during the week or on a Friday or Saturday night were common events.
With all the focus entrepreneurs and business executives place on strategy, they can lose sight of the people “in the trenches” who actually have to implement the strategy—the knowledge workers who are carrying out the work of the organization. – Teresa Amabile
The next team I felt something special with was Iris Associates.
This team really focused on quality of life and making sure the engineers felt like they were part of something special (Lotus Notes/Domino). Free vending, coffee, dinners and breakfast during crunch time, beer Fridays, etc. For all of the previous Iris employees out there I am sure I do not have to bend your arms to agree that those times were amazing. Product quality was there because people had an amazing attachment to the product and their areas – in short – people loved what they did. I once told my father that I have the absolute greatest job in the world. He never got into computers so he responded – “you are a professional golfer now?”. Ok, maybe he didn’t respond exactly like that but that is exactly how I felt and I told everyone!
My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have. – Teresa Amabile
So in short – if you are a people leader or a technical leader read that article and make the people you impact and communicate with daily enjoy their jobs. It is bad enough we have to work for the man, we might as well enjoy it.
Either I do not have many readers or my readers do not use the Google Reader. I just started using the Google reader and I noticed my encoding was not correct for my Atom feed! I just fixed it and now you can use the Google reader to view my entries.
I like the Google Reader, it makes reading the daily “headlines” very easy.
ARM is now part of the Eclipse foundation. The new plugin allows you to target development for ARM based targets. This means Eclipse can be used for all of those Palm and Game Boy devices.
The RealView Eclipse Plug-in enables developers to use Eclipse as a project manager to create, build, debug, and manage C and C++ projects for ARM targets. The plug-in provides project stationery to simplify the creation of ARM, Thumb® and ARM/Thumb architecture-based projects, and provides comprehensive configuration panels to specify options for the RealView Development Suite. The screenshot below shows an Eclipse project building an application for Embedded Linux with the compilation tools in RealView Development Suite.
This is another cool feature built into Rational Software Architect. It gives you the ability to Import and Export your project from/to an FTP site.
I use this to synchronize my images and any source code with my site. I like this because I basically use Eclipse for all of my development at this point and my balfes.net is now just a project in my RSA programming development environment.
I just love it when scams come across my desk. This is a classic spoofing attempt where you get an email from “your bank” and are told to update your personal information. Outside of the spelling mistakes and the fact I do not even have an account with Bank of America this is just ridiculous. I also love the threat line in the email about termination of your account, classic!
The problem is I can easily see a person who is not knowledgeable of these attempts to go and give this site their login ID and personal information so I am here to help educate!
Some Tips:
The link below is actually to this URL:
http://www.nikitituning.com.br/www.bankofamerica.com/online_boa_banking/e-online-banking/
I have reported this to abuse@bankofamerica.com
| Subject: | Bank of America Alert: update Your Account Information |
|---|---|
| Date: | Fri, 15 Sep 2006 18:15:00 +0000 (UTC) |
| From: | onlinebanking@alert.bankofamerica.com |
| To: | bob at balfes.net |
Dear Bank of America valued member,
Due to concerns regarding your recent activites involving your account and for the safety and integrity of the online
banking community we have issued this warning message.
It has come to our attention that your account information needs
to be updated due to inactive member status, frauds and/or spoof reports.
We will appreciate if you could spend several minutes out of your online experience and renew
your records to prevent your account running into future problems or even failure with the online service.
However, failure to update your records will result in temporary/permanent account suspension.
This notification expires Sept 15, 2006.
Once you have updated your account records your internet banking
service will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.
Just follow the link below
and renew your account information.
http://www.bankofamerica.com
How many wives would actually purchase a Fathead for their husband and then help hang it in the front entrance of your home!
I thought I would give this a try and it is pretty slick. The “My del.icio.us” section over on the right side is a full Ajax implementation. I used a CGI script on my server that goes and gets the details from “http://del.icio.us/rss/bobbalfe” and then gets processed by the JavaScript to put the list of linked titles into a specific section of the HTML DOM (id=mydelicious). The key here is the CGI Script on my server that retrieves the remote XML. You must do this since the XMLHttpRequest can not access XML from any server but the source of the page.
You can get a look at the script I wrote (mostly stole from samples) here.
The CGI is a Perl script on my server, here is the source. An obvious optimization when I have time would be to generalize this script and have it take in a parameter. This way I could use it for any remote feed.
| #!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple; print “Content-Type: text/xml\n\n”; my $content = get( “http://del.icio.us/rss/bobbalfe” ) or die $!; print $content; print “\n\n”; |
Taking your portal off-line seems to be gaining interest more and more. I was pleasantly surprised to hear how many people are familiar with WED and Lotus Expeditor and also want to have their portlets run in an off-line environment. We also got many requests for running portlets off-line on devices like WinCE and Palm. I was also impressed with the wider knowledge of the Eclipse platform; especially since most of these folks are web-type and portal developers.
Lastly, the biggest interest was in using Hannover components collaboratively with portlets (portal components). I got the most questions around this capability as many in the audience are current Notes customers.