How do you know that?: March 2003

Saturday, March 29, 2003

It's not all bad... really.

Everything has been lookng pretty bleek lately. Fortunately a few things have gotten better. Yes, a perspective hit... Thanks David.

Poetry about movies?

Go Rageboy Go!

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

What the?

Atomz sends top search phrases on my blog, here's last weeks:
Here are the top phrases searched:

- 2 for "how many soldiers are in a troop"
- 1 for "business"
- 1 for "extract gold from seawater"
- 1 for "extract gold seawater"
- 1 for "gay"
- 1 for "gold seawater"

My question: Do you think it was one person?

Wierdness

A good sole just recently let me know that every time I update my blog radio's rss aggregator is displaying all my entries. Very odd. I checked the xml returned by my rss link and it only contains a few very old entries. Looks like another note to Pyra....

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

When someone else articulates

an idea better then you, let them.

Monday, March 17, 2003

Oh yeah...

we were discussing how Bush should so blithely disregard the protests against the war. Then it hit me. This guy wasn't elected into office, so why should he listen to the people anyway.

blog from Iraq

We all long for first hand news hear. Thanks Kevin. And Kevin, for my part I have to tell you that it's pretty tense here in Tribeca.

Hiring

Any interesting round-table on technical hiring. In a previous life I was technical manager for a consulting firm here in NYC. In the rising tide of the dot com era I was interviewing more than 30 programmers a week. The linked discussion has some solid advice, but I think it's more relevant to the 'second interview' stage of the game rather than the first. If you do it frequently enough, you can usually tell within ten minutes if someone is going to be good addition to your team.

The first thing I would look for is honesty. This was shockingly rare in many of the people I saw. Did the person do what they said they did on their resume? A lot of times, no. It was as if they expected the person doing the hiring to be ignorant of the technology and therefore easily conned.

I could rant, but....

Saturday, March 15, 2003

oops

I forgot national pi day yesterday. Damn.

.net

Here's one for the collective memory. ASPSmith has a great regular expression reference.... Most useful.

Friday, March 14, 2003

I know you can do this...

I want to write code to the full text search index in our hummingbird docs fusion libraries. This will allow me to offer targeted searches based on matter information in our data warehouse. Locating the appropriate API documentation is the squirrelly part. If anyone there is doing this I'd love to compare notes....

Monday, March 10, 2003

"We have nothing to lose but our stupidity"

The cluetrain guys are at it again. Required reading.

CRM and punishment?

MS is getting beaten up for placing a GUID in the subject of email generated by their CRM product. Yep. I agree, seems like a nasty little hack. I can't believe that they haven't had more push back on this.

Saturday, March 08, 2003

Way Cool

... check out Roogle

Thursday, March 06, 2003

KM - ROI

Good article by Michael Koenig on cost justifying KM initiatives. Thanks James.

Music

Went to see King Crimson last night at City Hall. A friend in the office couldn't use the tickets, so off I went. I can't say I'm a huge fan of their music. But the concert was outstanding. Robert Fripp is one of those musicians I've 'heard of' for ages. He made incredible sounds come out of that guitar and stack of electronics. It was odd to see how incredibly inanimate he was while playing that well. Jarring.

Adrian Belew fronts the band most of the time. Again another great player (I'd see him play with Bowie on a stadium tour). A very happy guy as well.

Picture if Spinal Tap could play really well and had slightly better stage craft and you get the picture.

Wednesday, March 05, 2003

You mean there actually is a plan?

Scott W points to the MS guidelines for team .net development. Thanks dude.

Mole central

Dave pinpoints a list of MS Employees who blog.

KM

OK, this is where it gets good. We're using Hummingbird's DM5 for our document management. We have a separate library for precedents that is indexed for full text searching. This works great, but the regular document management tools have extra stuff that is unnecessary if you're going to do research only.

Yesterday I finally got a copy of the API for Hummingbird. This is where the real fun begins.

visual studio.net

twice now, strange things are starting to happen when I'm editing both a c# and vb.net application at the same time. My cursor goes into 'highlight' mode all the time and I end up having to stop and re-start the ide. most peculiar.

Monday, March 03, 2003

I want my CRMTV

Cnet is reporting about a Gartner report on the little black cloud of failure over most CRM implementations... Hey guys CRM is tough. If you think of it for ten minutes after the sales pitch you'll realize this. Yes it can work. But it's not just software and it is not easy.

Sunday, March 02, 2003

Congrats Alinghi

The Swiss win! I'm impressed.... very cool. I know there are a lot of bad feelings in NZ... But the world's changing.

Kids, try this at home...

yes it's so easy to roll your own aggregator. Everyone's doing it, you know you want to.

How do you know that?