This really is an amazing device. Extremely easy to use, amazingly small and can hold a lot of songs. With a 1GB storage and the size is just a bit larger than a quarter you really can not go wrong. It amazes me how Apple continues to out do itself and the industry in this space.
Apple 1 GB iPod Shuffle Metal (2nd Generation)
Tags: apple ipod shuffle music mp3 player
An article I wrote for Expeditor 6.1 just posted to Developer Works.
Get an introduction to the IBM Lotus Expeditor Property Broker and learn how you can create a component that contributes to the declarative communication offered by the broker. We show you how to wire components declaratively using extension points, the IBM WebSphere Portal Wiring Tool, and the Property Broker APIs.
Yul won but I really wanted Ozzie to win.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever felt bad that somebody didn’t win,” host Jeff Probst said. “It was so evenly matched.”
Some key predictions I found interesting from the article.
JASON BELL – “A slowdown in the AJAX hype”
DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON – “ATOM will become the assumed default syndication format“
GARY CORNELL –
“IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share. “
“The open-sourcing of Java will have no effect whatsoever on Java’s slow decline in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#.“
“Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.”
DAVID S. LINTHICUM – “The success of AJAX drives traditional software back to the drawing boards. ”
LUCA PASSANI – “JAVA ME will not gain much more ground.”
MARK HINKLE –
“Red Hat Will Become an Acquisition Target”
“Microsoft’s launch of Vista will start to prompt hardware refreshes which can be nothing but good for Apple.”
COACH WEI
“IT Enabled Services is going to fly high in 2007″
“Growing adoption of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise”
JOHN EVDEMON
“The WS-BPEL 2.0 specification will finally be approved as an OASIS standard.”
“We stop talking about SOA and “just do it.”
BRANDON HARPER
“Server virtualization is just getting started, and will really make itself known in the coming year.”
Reference Link.
Tags: software programming coding code java predictions
I can not thank FedEx enough for making a great day at Ralph Wilson Stadium yesterday. The Bills crushed the Dolphins 21-0. The food, beverage, service, parking and the trip in general was great.
It is amazing how the blogging world gets the industries finest to respond and react. This CS student wrote asking how one starts out in programming. Grady responded and so did many others. It made me think how I started and it is pretty much the same as the advice given – code, write more code, and read a lot of other peoples code. I remember when I was working in the military and even at the Bank; I use to live a dual life. I mostly did IBM technologies by day and Microsoft technologies by night. What was interesting was how many times I was able to do something because I knew both. In the military I wrote Ada and Delphi all during my real job and when I went home I practiced writing Windows applications in C and C++, then eventually VB. Worlds started colliding when I worked at the Bank and started doing heavy Lotus Notes and Domino programming in Lotus Script, HTML, JavaScript and Java. I was tasked to write many server side tasks on the Notes and Domino servers and my choice was C++ for speed. Until then I really did not do much “professional” work in C/C++. I was introduced to some cool cross platform development for the Domino platform – which ultimately got me a great job at Iris.
Unfortunately I do not have the time to be in both camps any more and most of my MS Windows based knowledge is a good 5-7 years old. My life lately has been mostly Java, Eclipse and portal technologies and there does not seem to be time for much of anything else – except the never ending design reviews. The good news is, as we all get more knowledgeable and “mature” in our careers we become less dependent on the languages we know and more intrigued in things like software design and architecture.
I am currently trying to enhance my writing and communication skills – something that was never really tasked throughout my career. So my advice to the young developer is just skip development all together and go take some writing classes and off shore the development! (just kidding) But ironically enough I want to write about coding, best practices, testing and architecture. So the only way to stay sharp is to keep reading, writing code, and learning the latest and greatest!
My advice is to read a lot of books on software development. Become an “Expert” in an area, language, or platform. Do the things you “love” to do and success will follow. Do things that are in high demand and money gets thrown at you!
Tags: software programming coding code
I just posted this same thing on the IBM Composite Application blog here. I am still struggling with blogging in two places. I want the information to get out but I do not want to have one blog “win” over the other.
| The IBM Education Assistant site now has the Lotus Expeditor 6.1 on-line tutorials posted. The Composite Application tutorial can be viewed here, however there are tons of freely available online presentations and demos for all areas of the Lotus Expeditor. This medium is a great way to get educated quickly on the features available in Expeditor.
Some other presentations relative to Composite Applications: And a heck of a lot more! |
Tags: lotus IBM expeditor RAD
Joel talks about how simplicity can be viewed a few different ways. I do agree that for many reasons software sells because of features and that really is the bottom line in the industry. Unfortunately if you have 100′s of features and the software is just plain hard to use people might buy it but they most likely won’t upgrade and continue to support it. If you happen to have a novel product then you have time to make it easier to use because people will buy it in the first round. A few days ago I wrote about the Logitech Harmony remote I purchased. This remote to me is extremely simple yet contains many features. With one or two clicks I can setup my entire entertainment system to do X. I can also control every single device down to the last function – feature rich. After reading Joel’s posting and then realizing the remote is a similar “great” product fit to his description I started thinking about other aspects of software development where this is greatly needed. One being Automation – this is a place where testing a product should not be time consuming to anyone on the development staff – whether they are a manager, tester, developer, etc. Anyone should be able to run the regression suite on the product. Why? Because if I am writing a piece of code I should be able to test that code in the context of the automation with little work. If I am a manager and produced a crash (which only happens on my machine) I should be able to run that suite against my installed binaries – on my machine. If I am a tester I should be able to say – just run test X and you will see the crash. I still think today that automation, unit testing and build verification testing are all done in closed boxes. Developers can only run their unit tests, testers can only run their automation, and if you are lucky the build room runs the build verification tests. I have always preached that the automation tools developed in house need to be like products themselves and the customers are the entire company. When you approach software testing – and specifically automation – like this, you will see huge benefits in the very short term. Testers will easily be able to communicate their bugs and developers will be able to run the tools prior to delivering their code. Second being collaboration. Sametime 7.5 is an amazing product. Grady talks about this in a recent post and products like Sametime 7.5 are leading the way. Many products do the individual features of Sametime very well but not many integrate them so nicely – and also do not integrate into an existing infrastructure like Notes/Domino/Sametime. One of the best features I use very frequently is the Call button when chatting with someone. If I am not in a meeting and the “chatting” gets a little too “chatty” I simply click the button above the chat window to call them. This is voice over IP – and amazingly enough the quality is actually better than my Vonage connection. Once again, simplicity on the covers but feature rich. Tags: testing software development Simplicity
Go Bills!
Not only did the Bills crush the Jets today but I get a call the other day from my cousin – who is a Miami Dolphins fan – and it looks like I will be sitting in FedEx box seats at next weeks game in Buffalo. If anyone has sit in a corporate box seat at a professional game they know what I am in for. Wooo Hooo!