Sunday, September 07, 2008

Interesting Finds: September 7, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Greg Duncan - Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) CTP2 Released – Now with the full source and Mix PowerShell, some Would Bank data and a little NetMap and you get… Some cool data visualizations…
owen654321 - Applied Use of LinFu/Cecil and Aspect-Oriented Programming Concepts - A Library
Morten Lyhr - How to create fully encapsulated and simple Domain Models
Papenoo pa - WCF Security Guidance
Jan Van Ryswyck - Ventilation of Thoughts
Don Box - Oslo
Chris Anderson - Oslo
Chris Sells - Oslo Defined
Mike Taulty - Vista Complete PC Restore, 0x80042401, DiskPart, WbAdmin

Web stuff
Vishal Shukla - Auto Save/Load Template server control for asp.net or HTML control collection
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Tip #41 – Create Cascading Dropdown Lists with Ajax

Database stuff
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - Explanation about Usage of Unique Index and Unique Constraint

Architecture stuff
JD Meier - Layers and Components and Services Layer

Career stuff
Steve Pavlina - Physical vs. Non-Physical Reality
Guy Kawasaki - Winners of World's Best Presentation Contest

Business stuff
Robert Scoble - Let’s cry for the poor fragmented, underreported startups and Startups: your web site sucks
Freelance Switch - Starting a Remote Business, Remotely

Community stuff
Chris Bowen - New England Code Camp 10 Update

Other link blogs
Alvin Ashcraft  - Dew Drop - September 6, 2008
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for September 6, 2008

posted @ 5:01 AM | Feedback (0)

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Interesting Finds: September 6, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Jason Bock - Great Article on Exceptions in .NET
Keyvan Nayyeri - How to Split a Text into Words
GASARCH - Tracking Trends in Computer Science
Chris Brandsma - BSDG Meeting post mortem
Greg Duncan - FFLib.NET (Alpha) – All the FFMPEG based (not wrapped) goodness in a free .Net package
Sara Ford - Did you know… You can quickly view other variables in the QuickWatch window? - #307
Scott Hanselman - Windows Live Mesh, Silverlight and the CoreCLR and Family Calendar Management - Sharing Life between Outlook and Web Calendars and the Magic of iCalendar
Dave Burke - CodeSmith Tip of the Day: Quotes in Property Value Defaults
Brad Abrams - Microsoft Extensibility Framework released on CodePlex
Papenoo pa - Software Factories Document and Assembly Diff

Code to look at
Joel Bennett - NativeConsole.cs - Run console apps and get their output

Web stuff
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #1 – Create the Perfect Application and ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #2 – Create the First Unit Test and ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #3 – Post Messages
Tim Huffam - CSS Absolute positioning in Firefox and IE
Phil Haack - MvcFutures And ASP.NET MVC Beta
Dave Burke - Setup notes on Ben's Dynamic Navigation CS Add-on

Database stuff
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - Find Primary Key Using SQL Server Management Studio

Architecture stuff
JD Meier - Layers and Tiers
Papenoo pa - Best practices Posters in Architecture

Cloud Computing stuff
AWS Blog - AWS Security White Paper

SAO stuff
Joe McKendrick - Does SOA matter? (Part 4)

Business stuff
Rich - Five Important Lessons I’ve Learned As An Entrepreneur
Freelance Switch - Review: Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Career stuff
Celine Roque - What to do When Your Work is Criticized Publicly
Travis Wright - 6 Essential Areas to Being a Great Leader

Innovation stuff
James Todhunter - Idea Generation or Selection

Other link blogs
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for September 5, 2008
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - September 5, 2008

posted @ 5:21 AM | Feedback (0)

Friday, September 05, 2008

Innovation Notes: September 5, 2008

Innovation Through Internal Promotion, Thiago
This is an entry summing up the points in a blog entry on the Innovating to Win site titled "Internal Promotion of Innovation".  Short discussion of "pillars of internal promotion", which are:

  • Selling Up
  • Selling Outward
  • Make it Personal

Why so little innovation?, Dave Winer
Dave points to a video on the Zdnet site: Silicon Valley's Judy Estrin warns we are running out of innovation, which is a conversation about some of the content in her new book: Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy.  A good quote that Dave picked out:

"She warns that we are living off of the innovation investments made in decades past and that is going to be a problem in the future."

Other links that discuss Judy's new book: The Easy Road To Incremental Innovation and Is innovation falling behind in the US?

How to Increase Your Odds of Getting a Big AHA!, Mitch Ditkoff
Mitch offers a look at some great creative legends of the past to offer tips on how you might be able to reach your breakthrough.  A good quote:

It is sustained and focused effort towards a specific goal -- not luck, wishing, or caffeine -- that ultimately prepares the ground for creative insight.

This kind of effort does not always generate immediate results and sometimes leads people to conclude that it's just not in the cards for them.

Creating Innovation "pull", Jeffrey Phillips
This is a short entry in which Jeffrey discusses the push vs. pull approaches to innovation (as a means for growth).  Interesting, it does seem that push might be more popular than pull these days.  Interesting quote from entry:

So, in many companies, the strategy for encouraging innovation is what I'd call innovation "push" - the senior leadership will push innovation into the business. What I'd like to recommend, and what I think you'll find is common in most successful innovation firms, is what we call innovation "pull".

Pixar on Creativity (Find Good People, Ideas Will Come), Ben Casnocha
Ben links to a new article up on HBR by Ed Catmull: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.  Its a long one (7 pages) so I haven't read it all yet, but here is a good quote that Ben picked out of it:

A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people—it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I’ve asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there’s a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn’t disagree more with the studio executive. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs.

Another link to the HBR article: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

posted @ 4:04 AM | Feedback (0)

Interesting Finds: September 5, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Sara Ford - Did you know… You can add variables to the Watch window from the QuickWatch window? - #306
Roy Osherove - Finding Deadlocks with ReaderWriterLock and Typemock Racer
Jarod Ferguson - Continuous Improvement in Software Development Conference

Code to look at
Todd Hile Hoffer - ASP.Net 3.5 Sample Application of LINQ, WFC, JSON and AJAX
David Sackstein - A Simple Facade for .Net Remoting
Samer Abu Rabie - Using Generic Extension Methods
Sunasara Imdadhusen - Slideshow XML-Javascript
owen564321 - Applied use of LinFu/Cecil and Aspect-Oriented Programming Concepts - a Library

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - Dojo Multifile Uploader with Flash
Ryan Dunn - PhluffyFotos v2 Released
Steve Schofield - IIS6 to IIS7 migration tips / tricks.
Jason Gaylord - IIS7 Integrated Mode and Global.asax

Database stuff
jchang - IO Cost Structure – Anticipating SSD arrays
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - 2008 - Creating Full Text Catalog and Full Text Search

Debugging stuff
Miguel de Icaza - Using Visual Studio to Debug Mono

Architecture stuff
JD Meier - Scenario Frames for Presentation, Business, Data, and Services

Cloud computing stuff
Ryan Dunn - SSDS REST Library v2 Released

SOA stuff
Test - On-Demand/SaaS Reality: Test

Career stuff
Johanna - A Little More About Program Management
Joe Webb - The certification treadmill
Tim Ferriss - Stop Rationalizing and Make Hard Decisions: Learning from Dr. King
Ben Casnocha - Decision-Making Ability Matters More Than Experience
Jeff Lash - Adapt your product management practice
Freelance Switch - Why Should Freelancers Use Mind Mapping?

Business stuff
Jason Kincaid - DreamIt Incubator Holds Funding Day To Commemorate First Graduating Class
Imran Ali - LimeExchange: A Social Network for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs
Microsoft Downloads - .NET Rocks! - Steve Smith on the Transition to Entrepeneur
Darren Rowse - How to Make Money With Affiliate Programs on Your Blog - More Thoughts

Other link blogs
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - September 4, 2008 and Dew Drop - September 5, 2008
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for September 4, 2008
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #173
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #285
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - September 4, 2008

posted @ 3:16 AM | Feedback (2)

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Interesting Finds: September 4, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Sara Ford - Did you know… you can reevaluate expressions in the QuickWatch window - #305
Ahmed Negm - Introduction to Model Driven Development with Sculpture – Part 1
Nicholas Allen - Composing Compression and Encryption
Greg Duncan - Saving/Exporting your XAML Canvas to an Image/Bitmap/PNG
Joe Stagner - Dynamic Data with Stored Procedures
Travis Illig - Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team Uses Typemock Isolator
JD Meier - App Arch Meta-Frame
Nathan - Flowing Identity from a Client to a Service when using RESTful WCF Part 2 - A Solution

Code to look at
jgauffin - A Flexible Plugin System
Alberto Ferrazzoli - Babel Obfuscator
Laughing.John - Generic Lazy Load Cache Class

Web stuff
Brad Neuberg - Adding Custom Tags To Internet Explorer, The Official Way
Rick Strahl - DataTable JSON Serialization in JSON.NET and JavaScriptSerializer
Joe Stagner - Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets
IE Team - Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2
Dion Almaer - IE 8 Security and nosniff

Database stuff
Tara  Kizer - Defragmenting Indexes in SQL Server 2005

Agile stuff
Mark Levison - Agile 2008 a Personal Retrospective

SOA stuff
David Bressler - Actional @ Codecentric.de

Cloud Computing stuff
Anand Iyer - Windows Server support for Amazon EC2 - coming soon

Career stuff
Celine Roque - Are You a Competitive Web Worker?
Zen Habits - 7 Habits of Great Writers
Scott Sehlhorst - Effective Status Reports

Business stuff
Darren Rowse - 5 Lessons on Making Money with Affiliate Programs
Aliza Sherman - WWD Interview: Non-Disclosure Agreements

Innovation stuff
Clarke Ching - How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
Thiago - Innovation Through Internal Promotion
Dave Winer - Why so little innovation?
Simeon Simeonov - The Easy Road To Incremental Innovation

Other link blogs
Sam Gentile - New and Notable 272
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for September 3, 2008
Dave Burke - Everyman Links for September 3, 2008
Steve Pietrek - Links (9/3/2008)
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #172
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #284
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - September 3, 2008

posted @ 3:59 AM | Feedback (2)

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Interesting Finds: September 3, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Don Reisinger - Angelsoft 3.0 Launches With 400 Angel Investment Groups In Tow
Bart Read - Close Encounters: The Making of ANTS Profiler 4
Greg Duncan - MSBuild your way to ZIP Deliveries – Using MSBuild and MSBuild Community Tasks to zip your Build
Ayende Rahien - Inline Anonymous Visitors and How to execute a set of statements in an expression
Robert Pickering - Genetic Programming – A Language Oriented Programming Example
Windows SDK Team - How it works: Windows SDK Documentation Part 2
Microsoft Downloads - DiscountASP.NET Case Study
Poupou - Hack Week 3 - Gendarme Recap
David Starr - Technical Currency Metric
Tim Stall - Collecting machine information using WMI
Anatoly Lubarsky - Design Tip: String vs. Enum

Web stuff
Sasha R Lahijania - 9 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons That Will Save Your Time
Rick Strahl - Watch out for Date Kind in JSON Deserialization
Dion Almaer - Coverflow again…. with Canvas

Database stuff
Kevin Kline - Counting Context Switches, PerfMon Counters, And Other Miscellaneous Notes
Mosha - Finding lowest common ancestor in set

Debugging stuff
Tess - OutOfMemoryExceptions while remoting very large datasets
Dmitry Vostokov - Heap and early crash dump: pattern cooperation

Architecture stuff
JD Meier - patterns & practices App Arch Guide 2.0 Project

Cloud Computing stuff
pdestoop - Goldman Sachs: Cloud computing last item on priority list CxO?
AWS Blog - Announcing the AWS Start-Up Challenge - Win $100,000 in Prizes

SOA stuff
Joe McKendrick - Another view: do we spend too much time trying to sell SOA to the business?

Career stuff
Joe Webb - Creating Technical Presentations
Ben Casnocha - Organizing the Rhetoric Around Why to Go to College
Freelance Switch - 9 Ways to Enjoy Freelancing More
Aaron Lerch - Staying Sane as a Technical Manager
Dwayne Melancon - Jedi Mind Tricks: Influence

Innovation stuff
Jennifer - Is innovation falling behind in the US?
Jeffrey Phillips - Creating Innovation "pull" and Getting out is harder than getting in
Mitch Ditkoff - How to Increase Your Odds of Getting a Big AHA!

Other link blogs
Sam Gentile - New and Notable 271
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for September 2, 2008
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #171
Mike Gunderloy - DOuble Shot #283
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - September 3, 2008

posted @ 4:21 AM | Feedback (2)

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Interesting Finds: September 2, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Davy Brion - Make It Work, Make It Clean?
Greg Duncan - Putting the final, professional touches on your UserControl - “How to use UITypeEditors, Smart Tags, ControlDesigner Verbs, and Expandable Properties to make Design Time editing easier.”
Keith Fletcher - C# command line parsing
Victuar - How to Get Notifications from .NET Web Service
Frohmen - Full implementation of IShellBrowser
Alvin Ashcraft - My Dev Kit
Nathan - Flowing Identity from a Client to a Service when using RESTful WCF Part 1 - The Problem
Michael Giagnocavo - Become a better F# programmer via Real World Haskell
Jb Evain - Cecil performance issues

Web stuff
Mike Gunderloy - Google Chrome is Coming and 3 Ways to Edit Documents Collaboratively
Dion Almaer - addSizes.js: automatic link file-size generation and toStaticHTML: Sanitize your HTML in IE 8
Scott Guthrie - ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios

Database stuff
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - 2008 - Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2008

Workflow stuff
Kirk Allen Evans - Enabling Long Running Conversations in Workflow Services

Career stuff
JD Meier - SourcesOfInsight.com is Now Live
Zen Habits - 6 Questions to Ask Yourself to Get the Most Out of Life
Freelance Switch - Supplementing Your Freelance Career With Blogging and Expert Content
Darren Rowse - How to Get Noticed [the Art of Positioning]
Jeff Cornwall - Entrepreneurship Builds Character

Business stuff
Michael Arrington - How To Demo Your Startup (Part Two)

Community stuff
Dave Sussman - Read, Steady, Speak

Other link blogs
Rhonda Tipton - Weekly Link Post 57
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for September 1, 2008
Steve Pietrek - Links (9/1/2008)
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - September 1, 2008
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #170
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #282
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - September 2, 2008
Darren Stokes - Visual Studio Links #70

posted @ 4:01 AM | Feedback (2)

Monday, September 01, 2008

Interesting Finds: September 1, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Caio Kinzel Filho - Factory Method + Reflection : Achieving better extensibility in applications
John Lam - My Dev Kit
Matt Hinze - Obligatory Utility Roundup Post
The Moth - Use the DebuggerDisplayAttribute for your types
JD Meier - My Favorite Software Books
Sara Ford - Did you know… There is a QuickWatch window? - #303
Robert Scoble - The expo war over startups
Tim Stall - Why I still read technical books
Steven Smith - Keep Vista from Changing Folder View

Web stuff
Matt Hinze - Self-signed SSL Certs on IIS 6 part 2

Database stuff
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to Filtered Index – Improve performance with Filtered Index
Brad McGehee - Get a Free Copy of My New E-Book: Brad's Sure Guide to SQL Server 2008: The Top Ten New Features for DBAs

Other link blogs
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #169
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #281
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - September 1, 2008

posted @ 5:38 AM | Feedback (1)

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Some more interesting finds

Caught up on unread blog count ... Interesting Finds should be back to normal tomorrow

Other stuff
Microsoft Downloads - F# September 2008 CTP
Matevz Gacnik - XmlSerializer: Serialized Syntax and How to Override It and No, really, the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern IS bad
Inside F# - Welcome to the F# CTP project system: project templates
John Robbins - So You Want To Set a Windows Journal Recording Hook on Vista? It’s Not Nearly as Easy as You Think!
Dave Burke - An End of Week Community Server Riff
Jaime Olivares - Custom Enumerators
Papenoo pa - NArrange

Web stuff
Nikhil Kothari - FxCop for Ajax Code
Henry Work - Some CrunchBase API Stats and Apps
Papenoo pa - AjaxControlToolkit Script Browser

Career stuff
Rosa Say - Coaching on Self-Leadership: Is your growth plan set?
Entrepreneur.com - The Entrepreneur as Leader and The Fear Factor

Business stuff
Darren Rowse - 8 Reasons Why Your Blog Might Not Be Accepted Into an Ad Network
Escape From Cubicle Nation - No excuse to forgo business and marketing plans

Innovation stuff
Mitch Ditkoff - Innovation Slush Funds

posted @ 9:37 AM | Feedback (1)

Some more interesting finds

I'm almost caught up ...

Other stuff
David Cumps - Exam 70-536 - Input/Output
Dana Epp - How to break into a PIN locked iPhone
Windows SDK Team - How it works: Windows SDK Documentation (Part 1)
C Stephenson - CSTA Looking for Local Volunteers
Michael Giagnocavo - Why are there still delegates?
Rhonda Tipton - Great Design Pattern Resources
Simon Fell - binary data + meta data
Omer van Kloeten - Announcing New C# 4.0 LINQ Features and Book

Web stuff
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Tip #39 – Use the Velocity Distributed Cache
Rick Strahl - Unable to debug Web Site with Top Level Location
Stephen Smith - Render Control as String
Keyvan Nayyeri - Building a Custom XML Configuration System for ASP.NET – Part 2
Omar Al Zabir - HTTP handler to combine multiple files, cache and deliver compressed output for faster page load

Database stuff
Joe Webb - The undocumented sp_MSforeachdb procedure
Aaron Bertrand - SQL Server 2008 cumulative updates and hotfixes, oh my!
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - 2008 - Introduction to Merge Statement - One Statement for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
Greg Low - SQLCMD mode and batch separators

Debugging stuff
NT Debug - Basics of Debugging Windows

Cloud Computing stuff
AWS Blog - RightScale Webinar: Leveraging Amazon's Elastic Block Store and Cloudbursting - Hybrid Application Hosting
Brad - As the Cloud Rolls In
Phil Wainewright - Mashing up the client to the cloud

Career stuff
Michael Specht - 10 tips to build your network
Freelance Switch - 7 Ways to Turn Miss(ter) Modesty into a World-Class Freelancer and How to Scale Your Freelancing Practice & Automate Income
Gasarch - If a Hobby relates to your work, is it a Hobby?
Ben Casnocha - Should We Consider Preparation Time When Evaluating Someone's Performance?
Darren Rowse - 10 Ways to Make Money BECAUSE of Your Blog

Innovation stuff
Ben Casnocha - Pixar on Creativity (Find Good People, Ideas Will Come)

posted @ 6:44 AM | Feedback (1)

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Some more interesting finds this week

Other stuff
Andrew Stopford - Software Estimation is hard (right)?
Michael Giagnocavo - Extension Methods Suck
Dave Burke - Nordic Track Book Club Review: Blog!
IKVM.Net - Cecil Conclusion
Fredrik Normen - Played around with Microsoft Extensibility Framework - MEF
Sasha Golshtein - Managed Synchronization Primitives and Thread Apartment States and New Silverlight SOS.DLL Command: !AnalyzeOOM and New Silverlight SOS.DLL Commands: !HeapStat and !GCWhere and New Silverlight SOS.DLL Commands: !FindRoots and !ListNearObj and Debugging Shutdown Finalization Timeout
Member 2941560 - How to call a long running method asynchronously and display a wait image on UI

Web stuff
Matt Hinze - Self-signed SSL certs on IIS 6
Dion Almaer - Proxy issues with querystrings in path names

Business stuff
Mark Hendrickson - Google Will Now Manage Your Website’s Ads
Tim Heuer - Startup Weekend – A great idea
Jim Glass - CRM 4.0 Trial Site – Now Available
Erik Sherman - What is Amazon Trying to Become?

posted @ 7:01 AM | Feedback (1)

Friday, August 29, 2008

Some Interesting Finds this week

Its been a crazy week (more on that some other time), so I've been unable to get enough time to do the usual ling blogs ... so here are some links I've had the time to notice.

Other stuff
Michael Arrington - Technorati Acquires BlogCritics, Gets Into Content Game
Microsoft Downloads - .NET Rocks! - Ted Neward and Joel Pobar on Rotor 2.0 and .NET Rocks! - Jeffrey Richter on the Windows Memory Model and Advanced Debugging Techniques with Visual Studio and Windows IE8 Beta 2: Developer Technology Overview and A Medley of Debugging Tools
Vibro - Interview with Mark Russinovich on EDGE
Soumitra Sengupta - Jon Udell cURL's with SQL Server Data Services
Nathan - Data Structures and Algorithms E-Book (Or, the fast track to limitless power and wealth) and Simple Expression Evaluator project now on CodePlex

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - navigator.geolocation: Using the W3C Geolocation API today
Mike Gunderloy - QuarkBase Dissects Web Sites
The Moth - Debug into Fx 3.5 SP1 source

Cloud Computing stuff
Jason Corsello - SaaS Model to "Collapse" According to Lawson CEO

Career stuff
Rich - Learn Steps Needed To Make Change
Mark Curphey - Management Training Notes
Leo - 7 Little Habits That Can Change Your Life, and How to Form Them
Celine Roque - Negotiating the Web Worker Way

Business stuff
Samuel Dean - 3 Top Open Source CRM Solutions
Mike Gunderloy - Choosing an Online Storage Vendor
Scott Sehlhorst - Market Driven Competitive Advantage

Innovation stuff
Mitch Ditkoff - Managers Need to Become Innovation Coaches

posted @ 4:21 AM | Feedback (1)

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Innovation Notes: August 28, 2008

How to Form an Innovation Strategy, Scott Anthony
Scott briefly discusses a figure called "Goals and Boundaries" which is a visual aid to help communicate areas that innovators (who are creating products).  The areas captured in this diagram are things like:

  • Target customer
  • Distribution channel
  • Steady-state revenue
  • Type of offering
  • Brand
  • Revenue Source
  • Suppliers/Partners
  • Tactics
  • Go-to-market approach

Scott also mentions a link to his new book: Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, by Scott D Anthony, Mark Johnson

Pay As You Drive impact equivalent to taking 10 million cars off the road in California, Pay As You Drive
Entry about a press release from the California Department of Insurance.  Interesting read, my first reaction was - 'why would I drive less with a PAYD policy?' ... especially to the amount that the entry mentions.  I would get the policy just because I only drive once a week, but to drive less just because of it ... not sure about that - what do you think?  Interesting quote:

...if 30% of Californian drivers participate in Pay As You Drive insurance, California could avoid:

  • 55 million tons of CO2 between 2009 and 2020.
  • That is the equivalent of taking 10 million cars off the road!
  • It would save 208 billion liters of petrol.
  • It would save Californians US$40 billion in car-related expenses.

The Key to Innovation Within Your Association Just Might be a Mentor, Stuart Meyer
A short entry on a way to keep the creativity and innovation working in an environment that may not be the most creative environment.  Interesting quote from the entry:

... So how do we keep from stifling the innovation pipeline? How do we inspire new generations of association staff to take risks?  How do we maintain the motivation to weather the obstacles of change to make a lasting difference within our association?

The answer is a tiny spark of encouragement.

Creating the Preconditions for Innovation: Maximizing Diversity, InnovationBIT
Long piece excerpted from chapter 2 in Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates, by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson.  Discusses the importance of who makes up an innovative team and what the effect of diversity is on that make up.  An interesting quote:

We specifically look for the following diversity characteristics:

  • People who are divergent thinkers, and people who are convergent thinkers
  • People who are younger, and people who are older
  • People with a lot of experience, and people with a lot of imagination
  • People who understand technology, and people who understand people
  • People who are more analytical, and people who are more creative
  • People who are close to the head office, and people who work farther away
  • People from inside the firm, and people from outside the firm

The Challenges of Innovation, Front End of Innovation
This is a short summary of an article on BusinessWeek's web site: The Challenges of Innovation, by Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  Three ideas are discussed:

  • Indifference
  • Hostility
  • Isolation

I haven't read the BusinessWeek article yet, but this summary makes me want to ... some really good points in there.  A good quote from the blog entry:

Collaboration does not come natural in an organization, and so companies must make an extreme effort to make it part of their culture. What are some things that your company does to create a healthy environment where employees are not scared of bringing forth new ideas?

posted @ 6:12 PM | Feedback (0)

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

No final draft of interesting finds today

I'm a really busy this week and can't get to the second round of visiting my blog finds from this morning, so there won't be any final draft today.  Actually, there may not be any final drafts this week.

posted @ 5:37 PM | Feedback (1)

Interesting Finds: August 25, 2008 - [Final Cut]

A day late...

Other stuff

Web stuff

Database stuff

Debugging stuff

Agile stuff

  • Virtual Scrum Board, David Brabant - pinter to a utility named "Virutal SCRUM Board (VSB)".  Can download a free trial.
  • Introducing Kanban at Xclaim, Dave Laribee - entry on personal experience using agile and some views on things that didn't work for them.

Cloud Computing stuff

SOA stuff

Career stuff

Innovation stuff

Other link blogs

posted @ 5:16 PM | Feedback (2)

Interesting Finds: August 26, 2008 - [Rough Draft]

Other stuff
Member 3422877 - Unit Test Utility: Restoring Database State after each unit test execution
Jeff Atwood - Deadlocked!
Emergent Chaos - Authenticating Alan Shimel is Certifiably Hard
Travis Illig - Windows Home Server First Impressions
Er. Verendra - File Manager using C# and multithreading
Know It All, - Behind the Curve
Dwayne Melancon - On my radar
Sasha Goldshtein - Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 3.5 SP1
Mike Gunderloy - Network Storage for the Web Worker
Sara Ford - Did you know… How to hide or show the Script Debugging Disabled warning message? - #298
Bhupindra Singh - Type Forwarding in .net from one assembly to another assembly.
Omer van Kloeten - Throw Before You Yield
Shawnfa - Using RSACryptoServiceProvider for RSA-SHA256 signatures
Andrew Stopford - MbUnit TypeFixture and MbUnit RowTest
Tara Kizer - How to run a process using different credentials
Jeff Alexander - Technet Magazine: September 2008 Edition
Brad - It's Not About Being Cool

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - Razor Profiler: Check out your Ajax code and Firebug 1.2: The final release is out there
Scott Mitchell - Download CopySourceAsHtml
IE Blog - Privacy Beyond Blocking Cookies: Bringing Awareness to Third-Party Content and IE8 and Privacy
Ryan Farley - Scraping, or Programatically Accessing, a Secure Webpage

Database stuff
Denis Gobo - Interesting Bug/Feature In SQL Server 2008 RTM
Tibor Karaszi - Make sure you play with data collector on a virtual machine
Aaron Bertrand - Planning on using FILESTREAM? Read this first!
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - How to Rename a Column Name or Table Name

PowerShell stuff
JohanS - PowerShell - An introduction, Part II
The PowerShell Guy - PowerShell Load-MdtConfigManager Function
Windows PowerShell - PowerShellPlus V2.0

Debugging stuff
Tom - SOS Best Practice: Match the SOS version with the process being analyzed and ASP.NET Tip: Keep hidden files hidden
Nicholas Allen - Pipe Properties

Security stuff
Schneier - Full Disclosure and the Boston Farecard Hack

Architecture stuff
Sam Gentile - Thoughts on Evolutionary Design
pdestoop - Enterprise Architects finally value Infrastructure Architects

Career stuff
Zen Habits - Life’s Enough: Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Be Excellent - Introducing Change Into Your Organization
Rosa Say - The Self-improvement Targets of Self-Leadership

Business stuff
Guy Kawasaki - The Five Most Important Lessons of Entrepreneurship
pdestoop - Businesslink: Pricing your product or service
Be Excellent - Strategy Execution and High-Impact Firms

Innovation stuff
Thiago - The Challenges of Innovation
Jeff Cornwall - More Ideas

Community stuff
Dion Almaer - Want a Free Pass to The Ajax Experience?
Dan Hounshell - One Thought: Why Regional Conferences + Open Spaces Rock
Davy Brion - Why The ALT.NET Community Needs To Change Their Ways
Evan Hoff - Community Reality Check: Is INETA a concrete life raft?

Other link blogs
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - August 25, 2008 and Dew Drop - August 26, 2008
Harry Pierson - Morning Coffee 172
Darren Stokes - Visual Studio Links #68
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 25, 2008
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - August 25, 2008
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #165
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #277

posted @ 4:16 AM | Feedback (2)

Monday, August 25, 2008

Interesting Finds: August 25, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Omar Shahine - Executor, the Ultimate Windows Launcher
Davy Brion - Software Development Books: Investing In Yourself
Tharindu Nishad Patikirikorla - Dynamic Assemblies
Greg Young - Fast Serialization
Phil Haack - Streamlined BDD Using SubSpec for xUnit.NET
Dare Obasanjo - Best Practices for Web Sites Seeking to Prevent Service Degradation due to 3rd Party Widgets
Sasha Goldshtein - More on Converting Native Exceptions to Managed Exceptions
Jonathan Edwards - Too many cores, not enough brains
Tim Stall - Book: Code Leader
Robert Scoble - Story Pitch: Microsoft’s “flattened” Windows 7 team and what it means for business
David Brabant - Desktops: a new utility by the SysInternals' folks
Udi Dahan - Domain Events - Take 2

Web stuff
Daniel Cazzulino - How to get ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 to run with .NET SP1
Helbrax - Custom Alert Boxes using Javascript and the DOM
Philipp Lenssen - Pitfalls to Avoid When Designing Forms

Database stuff
Muhammad Shujaat Siddiqi - SQL Server Alerts
Linchi Shea - Large Query Performance and Query Parallelism
Kimberly Tripp - SQL Server 2008 fails to send database mail, Sparse columns with filtered indexes, Upcoming Events, and - as usual - catching up (i.e. cookies)! and Installing Data Dude CTP16 with SQL 2008 and Visual Studio and Auto update statistics and auto create statistics - should you leave them on and/or turn them on?? and Updates (fixes) to sp_helpindex2
Pinal Dave - SQLAuthority News - 4 Million Visits - over 675 SQL Server Articles
Aaron Bertrand - Pushing for more tools-related fixes for SQL Server 2011

Debugging stuff
Sasha Goldshtein - Debugging Silverlight Applications: SOS.DLL

Agile stuff
David Brabant - Virtual Scrum Board
Dave Laribee - Introducing Kanban at Xclaim
Ade Miller - Scrum Bestiary - The Rubber Duck

Cloud Computing stuff
Alessandro Perilli - Gartner forecasts that Cloud Computing will be mainstream in 2-5 years
AWS Blog - Amazon SimpleDB Releases QueryWithAttributes

SOA stuff
Joe McKendrick - Is SOA an elixir or real fix for ‘medieval’ data practices? and WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest
Todd Biske - ITIL and SOA
Jack van Hoof - Service Oriented Architecture with Java

Career stuff
Celine Roque - Dealing With Speculative Work
Mike Gunderloy - Web Worker 101: Working with Subcontractors
Zen Habits - The Dirty Little Secrets of Productivity Bloggers
Dave Horne - Software Careers: The Starting Salary Game

Innovation stuff
Mitch Ditkoff - Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

Other link blogs
Rhonda Tipton - Weekly Link Post 56
David Vidmar - Links of the Week #50 (week 34/2008)
Steve Pietrek - Links (8/24/2008)
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - August 24, 2008
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #276

posted @ 3:52 AM | Feedback (1)

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Interesting Finds: August 24, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Other stuff

Web stuff

  • ASP.NET MVC Tip #37 – Create an Auto-Complete Text Field  and The Evolution of MVC, Stephen Walther - a couple of good links about extending MVC (adding the ajax Auto-Complete behavior to MVC) and a good history of MVC.  No wonder Stephen's books are always 1000's pages long - his daily posts are around 6 pages.  I like his writing style of using textual explanations, step-by-step walkthroughs (with code) and visuals to get his point across.

Database stuff

Career stuff

Business stuff

Other link blogs

 

posted @ 1:29 PM | Feedback (0)

Interesting Finds: August 24, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Keyvan Nayyeri - Is There Still a Community for Telligent?
Alvin Ashcraft - Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc for Visual Studio
Brad - Microsoft Licensing Changes: Greedy and Monopolistic?
Omar Shahine - First iPhone Exchange bug fixes in 2.0.2
Michael Arrington - Amazon Confirms Student Version Of Kindle
Dave Burke - Open Source Podcast to Stack Wood By
Scott Hanselman - SmallestDotNet: On the Size of the .NET Framework
Nathan - Anatomy of a LOB (Or, Mind Mapping a Modern .NET App)
Dare Obasanjo - I Want a Windows App Store and RESTful JSON: Bringing REST and RPC Closer Together
Michael Stiefel - X509 Certificates for Developers

Web stuff
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Tip #37 – Create an Auto-Complete Text Field  and The Evolution of MVC

Silverlight stuff
Itamar Kotler - SilverLight 2.0 - 3D Rotating Image Cube / Box
Hannes Preishuber - Silverlight 2.0 plugin ID or not ID

Database stuff
Joe Webb - DevLink 2008 Presentation
Kalen Delaney - Geek City: Reading the Transaction Log
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - Fix : Error : 40 - could not open a connection to SQL server - Fix Connection Problems of SQL Server

Career stuff
Aliza Sherman - Do You Want More Web Work?

Business stuff
Freelance Switch - Not Getting a Rise out of your Elevator Speech?

Other link blogs
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 23, 2008
Dave Burke - Everyman Links for August 23, 2008

posted @ 4:27 AM | Feedback (0)

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Interesting Finds: August 23, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Other stuff

Web stuff

Reflector stuff

  • Thanks Lutz Roeder!, Aaron Skonnard - I like Aaron's reaction to the news.  Some of us take things for granted and forget that Lutz did all the hard work for us for years (plus support) ... so I agree we should give him a big thanks for what he has accomplished ... of course now we are addicts and need know that we can still get our Reflector fix :)

Database stuff

Debugging stuff

Architecture stuff

Cloud Computing stuff

Career stuff

Business stuff

Blogging stuff

Innovation stuff

Community stuff

  • Code Camp 5 - Registration Count is Over 150, Jason Bock ... impressive listing of sessions - 2 months before the event (one important thing to remember about Code Camps is a good lead time to get the speakers and sessions).

Other link blogs

posted @ 5:20 PM | Feedback (0)

Unread items and my latest opml

Do you see unread items in your rss reader as todo items?  Do you think you have to at least look at it if it is unread?  I would have to say I 'sort of' do see it as something I should at least look at ... and after reading through my subscriptions I prefer the unread items to be 0 ... but maybe I'm just weird like that ;)

For those of you interested in what I subscribe to, I just put the latest version of my opml at: http://jasonhaley.com/files/subscriptions.opml

posted @ 5:52 AM | Feedback (3)

Interesting Finds: August 23, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Other stuff
Greg Duncan - My favorite kind of Friday, one where we get a new Sysinternals Utility - Desktops v1.0 and FreeImage 3.11 released - C# wrapper added
Steven A Lowe - Dashboards Are For Driving
Kathleen Dollard - Interfacing with Insanity
CoolBusinessIdeas - Hotspots On Chrysler
Sara Ford - Did you know… How to show or hide the “No Debugging Information” warning? - #297
Jean-Paul Boodhoo - Building A Solid Core Contest - Announcing the winners
Rico Mariani - Hard and Soft Mode Debugging or The Woes of Soft Mode
Michael Kleef - How to get USB booting working
Jason Bock - A Subtle DI