Like the book in my previous review, I bought "Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise into a Remarkable Online Presence", by Antonio Cangiano, during a winter e-book sale...
I picked up "Bad Data Handbook: Cleaning Up The Data So You Can Get Back To Work" during a recent O'Reilly ebook sale, hoping that there might be a few relevant nuggets for the work I'm doing with Bittwist...
I started drafting a blog post about the self-defeating effects of micro-management when I came across this interview response (from Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz) which sums it up perfectly:
What classic mistakes do you see managers making over and over...
The findings from this Nielsen report, "Secret to Successful New Product Innovation: Keep the Boss Out of It", ring all too true, and are worth considering if your company creates, wants to create, or is struggling to create products...
I've come to enjoy the link-sharing that happens on Twitter, but a few months back I found myself with less time to regularly scan my Twitter stream...
For one of my projects running on Google App Engine, I'm using Google Analytics to track traffic, but I didn't want the tracking code showing up in my local development environment...
I was reading Ben Fry's thesis Organic Information Design yesterday, came across the section on Conway's Game of Life, and thought it would make a nice NodeBox demo...
I recently posted about Bill Buxton's book, "Sketching User Experiences", so I thought I'd share an example of how I used sketching techniques on a recent project...
I finished "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design" last week in preparation for the upcoming UX Austin Book Club meeting...
"Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity...
I finished a couple more books off the Personal MBA reading list this week -- only this time I'm sharing them with you not so much in recommendation, but to suggest that you flip through them before making the purchase...
"You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired...
It's ironic how much sci-fi involves saving Earth from robot space invaders, yet we're the one's sending laser-packing robots to Mars:
(Via:
Newest Mars Rover packs heat
NASA's next Mars rover is a laser-equipped monster
Future NASA Rover Will Scare Aliens with Rock-crushing Lasers)...
There was a bit on NPR this morning about the Hindenburg (today is the 70th anniversary of its crash) and the part of the story that stood out the most to me was that the majority of deaths were caused by people jumping out of the burning ship, rather then staying on-board...
Even though most articles indicate that Ubuntu Edgy should have automatically patched itself with updated timezone files, my laptop (and apparently a few others didn't get the update either...
I've been doing a lot of consulting work lately researching content- and web-service providers, and it's amazing how differently companies respond to inquiry...
I was hoping to write this post as an announcement for my new blogging solution, but instead (since I haven't flipped the switch yet) I thought I'd start off with why I'm doing it, and what software I've pulled together to keep from reinventing the wheel...
Even though I find the title a little inappropriate (sorry, Kevin) there's a question being posed over on the Forum Nokia blogs that's worth responding to if you happen to use Python for S60:
"What's Python good for, anyway...
For one of my Django-based projects, I decided to setup an automated functional-testing system using Selenium to add content to the Admin tool and verify that it works in the site...
Here's an obscure link, but if you happen to have a cat, you might want to click over and have a read just in case you need the info: "How to Get a Cat Out of a Tree...
I've heard from a number of University groups doing work with Python for S60 (PyS60) but the Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles program though the University of Nairobi and MIT is perhaps the most inspiring...
In my day job as a Product Manager of mobile development tools, there's a frequent struggle between feature-bloat and a desire to simplify the development process...
Geotagging and geophotosearching have taken off considerably since Flickr's new maps integration (which if you haven't seen, stop what you're doing and go play with it...
Found another mobile-python hacking gem: The PaperKeyboard project is attempting to use an S60 phone's camera to recognize character input on a printed, paper keyboard...
Here's a great example of using a corporate blog to explain an unfortunate product decision to customers, "Living Photoshop: Macintosh and the Intel switch"...
Instead of blogging throughout SXSW Interactive (there were plenty of bloggers there) I decided to wait until after the conference and pull together a few highlights from my notes...
A friend just sent me a link to Teemu's Blog to check out his two recent posts:
Coding for Nokia 770 using Python - Part 1
Coding for Nokia 770 using Python - Part 2
The examples cover Python for Maemo on the Nokia 770, and make it look extremely easy...
It's finally official -- Python for S60 is now open source: "Nokia to Release Python for S60 Source Code to Open-Source Software Developer Community...
The Nokia Research Center just announced a Mobile Web Server project that has ported Apache and mod_python (using Python for S60) to the S60 platform...
"Tower lights mark victory at Rose Bowl":
"The Tower at The University of Texas at Austin will be lighted entirely orange with the #1 displayed tonight (Thursday, Jan...
I finally watched Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (torrent) (IMdb) last night, a film which is self-described as the "first-ever Finnish science fiction adventure", and declared by wikipedia to be "the most popular Finnish movie ever...
Hot off the presses: Nokia introduces a new Web browser for S60 3rd Edition:
"The browser's open source codebase and extensible architecture will enable other industry parties, such as S60 licensees and the open source community, to develop new features for the browser...
Normally I'd say this isn't the device for me (I tend to go for the "fashion phones" more then the "business phones", and I'm still holding out for an N90) but I've been growing more and more interested in the Nokia E61 (pictured above...
Another great post from the frog Design Mind series, this time exploring risk-taking in product design by comparing data-driven design (aka Rain Man) to emotional-driven design (aka Spider Man):
"Spider-Man products inspire passion because they tap into people’s latent emotions, creating a bond that goes beyond reason...
The Media Lab of the University of Art and Design Helsinki has recently created a Mobile Hub to focus on rapid prototyping and creative projects for mobile devices...
Last night's Mobile Monday Austin was a bit smaller then the August event, but there was still an enjoyable turnout of people from a wide variety of mobile-related companies...
I've been slowly shopping for a new mountain biking helmet, and in the process, heard a rather interesting story yesterday that I wanted to pass along...
Here's another interesting application built on Python for Series 60: Mobile Google Maps with GPS combines a Bluetooth GPS unit, a Nokia phone, and Google Maps to bring in map tiles based on one's current location...
I finally finished reading "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity" by David Allen, and I wanted to post it here as a recommendation for anyone who's interested in techniques for optimizing your workflow, your inbox, and your overall productivity...
Not only did they open source WebKit, but they're using live CVS servers (meaning, the same CVS servers the developers are using) and the source ships with build scripts that make it super easy to build and test the framework without breaking the rest of your system...
This project was registered in February, but I didn't find it until today: pyed is an open source Python source code editor, written in Python, for Series 60...
I read through some of the XBox 360 announcements last week, and the one bit that really caught my attention was that all XBox 360 owners will get free weekend access to XBox Live...
Russell has a nice post today titled "Getting to the Mobile Web" where he discusses some of the challenges people face, and the bad decisions they make when building mobile websites (or more accurately, mobile versions of existing websites...
If you're visiting a part of the world with a significantly different climate then you're used to, and the locals are leaving work early because of "the weather"...
I'll be presenting a session titled "Python in your Pocket" at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on March 16 (1:45pm - 2:30pm, Plaza Room B...
I just finished reading "Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent" and was pleasantly surprised to find the book more enjoyable then I had expected...
In my post, Cold Weather Fuel Leak, I mentioned that my Subaru Impreza was hit with the infamous fuel leak problem that seems to be affecting many of these early models...
The Personal Distributed Information Store (PDIS) project at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has released a couple really nice utilities for Python on Series 60:
pyexpat for Series 60
"This is a port of the expat XML parser to Python for Series 60 enabling the standard Python xml package to be used in Python applications running on Series 60 phones...
The FDA approval of RFID implants made headlines yesterday, but so far, my favorite post about it belongs to Phil Libin with his post: FDA approves giant pennies...
As a nice follow-up to my post yesterday about packing for international flights, I came across a good post on
T-Mobile global roaming tips over at MobileWhack...
I had a sudden burst of inspiration the other night and wrote a Python script that can read/write map files for the TurboXS UTEC, along with generating or inserting the proper checksum value into the map...