We’re always struggling with task management, it seems. I’ve got a great system for personal task management, but what about shared tasks—things that depend on other people? Or perhaps things that need to be worked on collaboratively… I’d like to have a system that lets me hand tasks off to other people. And of course, [...]
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Just a little while ago I mentioned Numbers and what Pages needs to compete in the Office space (both to run head-to-head with Microsoft Office and to be useful in a business setting). Now Apple has rolled out iWork ’08—a huge upgrade to the iWork suite. So, how does iWork ’08 stack up—and should you [...]
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Formal inspection is a defect detection, removal and correction verification process carried out by a small group during the pre-test phases of the development life cycle. The primary objective of formal inspections is to remove defects as early as possible in the development process. This is a brief introduction into formal inspections and the background behind them.
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There are two kinds of organizations: Those that ship faulty software, and those that don’t. Unfortunately, trying to change from one that does ship faulty software to one that does not is nearly impossible. Why is it that changing into a “defect free” organization so difficult?
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Yet another upgrade completed this morning. I’ve now moved all of our web sites to a shiny, not that new PowerMac server. Setting up PHP 5.2.2 and Zend 3.2.8 to get everything back online and healthy took about an hour (which makes me worry how much it’s going to break when and if I upgrade [...]
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Quicksilver is a powerful tool and, perhaps surprisingly, not just for power-users. While everyone seems to agree on that point, it’s also true that almost everyone has the same initial impression: “This looks really cool, but I just don’t understand how it will make my life better.” To say Quicksilver is a bit obfuscated is [...]
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Now this article on the saga of spam prevention and, ultimately, an introduction to Postini and Spam-X may well be enlightening. I’m going to have to look into using Spam-X services here. At just a few dollars a month, this may well be the wave of the future — fully outsourced, firewall-like spam filtering.
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I stumbled on this excellent article providing a good summary of OS/X applications for writers. In my never-ending search for better writing tools my eye has started to wander from CopyWrite. My only real gripe with CopyWrite is its inability to order documents into a sequence, though this is arguably not something to focus on [...]
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Now and again I find myself wanting to track time and billing information for clients. Until fairly recently, there has been a dearth of such tools for Mac users. Doing a quick inventory of the market though, I found that picture has changed.
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Wow. It’s done, and it really wasn’t that painful after all. WordPress is now running my blog. After having using Moveable Type for about a year, I’m happy to see it go. There were so many things I wanted to do with the site for ages, but didn’t want to struggle with Moveable Type. I [...]
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I’ve been putting up with the commercial version of PGP for OS/X for some time now — chiefly so that I would have a reliable, military-grade encryption of virtual disks. PGP looks great at first blush and, usually, works great too. Unfortunately, it’s commercial, getting more expensive and lately it’s been plagued by a number [...]
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Python is cool. Having mentioned it I couldn’t resist coming back with a brief and slightly more technical discussion on why I think it’s such a great language. First of all, I should point out that I’m still recovering from my Java addiction, one that lasted about six or seven years. I’ve come to find [...]
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This is me. Martial artist, zen student, programmer, writer and author, technologist, father of two, photographer and a resident of Los Angeles (well, the outskirts of it).
I also publish Rational Scrum and am President & CEO of Hyrax International LLC, delivering comprehensive process improvements to its clientele. Specialities include audit and assessment of program areas such as project management, quality assurance, risk management and customer satisfaction as well as delivering focused initiatives to improve customer efficiency.
