Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Long live Developer Beers!
Alt.bug has been a lot of fun, gathering .Net developers via Twitter and blogs for beer and good discussion. But, in getting beers after the last Raleigh.rb meetup, I realized there are many developers out there who exist in totally different ecosystems, but who have great insights, and an appreciation for beer.
I think in changing the name, we can alter the focus, and make Developer Beers a chance for software development professionals to gather, outside of platform, and exchange ideas on software development.
Also, in changing the name, and the focus, I'd like to also change the locale, and have Developer Beers at the great bars, breweries, and taphouses in the RDU area. Ideally, we have it on a rotating schedule, rotating through great bars in all of the Triangle cities.
Hopefully you will join us - details are on the linked page or HERE.
Friday, February 20, 2009
I've been in enough companies, that I have started to develop an almost pathological aversion to meetings. The
wikipedia entry on meetings actually touches on the problems I run into:
"In organizations, meetings are an important vehicle for personal contact. They are so common and pervasive in organizations, however, that many take them for granted and forget that, unless properly planned and executed, meetings can be a waste of time and resources."
So, how properly plan and execute a meeting? I have a few rules that help:
- Does this have to be a meeting? Some meetings are often incorrectly substituted for other business activities - for example as a method of reporting status. Often there are other, less resource and time-intensive methods to accomplish the same goal. So I find a great first question is "Can this be accomplished using some other means?"
- What is the agenda? The agenda is the entire purpose for the meeting, and what it will accomplish. It dictates the length of the meeting far more than the amount of time blocked out in the schedule. Without an agenda, meetings run a greater risk of not accomplishing their goals and wasting time and resources.
- Who really must be in the room? Often requests are sent to whomever is on the project team, so they don't miss out on valuable information. That can be better communicated by publishing the meeting minutes afterwards. Instead, focus on who needs to be in the room to accomplish the agenda.
I think by making sure those three questions are carefully considered, meetings called have a much greater success rate and value.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
I recently saw the announcement that Hotmail now supports POP access. Awesome news, as logging into the web version is a pain on a mobile phone. I grabbed my phone, and gave it a go:
After entering my Hotmail information, I got a nasty surprise:
Windows Mobile is smart enough to recognize the "Hotmail.com" extension and redirect you to their web interface. How helpful!
So, you are forced to do what you often have to do when someone walls you off with BS: you have to lie to them.
Here we have gotten extra sneaky and renamed Hotmail to hotmail2 - don't worry - this isn't actually used for anything.
Upon entering our new email address, we are through the gates:
Windows Mobile will offer to try to hunt down your settings for you, but since we have them in hand (see first link on this page), and since we gave them a bogus account, we will pass on this offer.
Next we specify this account as an Internet email provider
After that, we provide a couple names. These are for display purposes only:
Now we start entering useful settings for the POP account:
And finally, we can be truthful about our Hotmail account:
Finally, we set up our outgoing server:
And we are done:
Click Finish to tidy it all up, but you now have POP3 access to Hotmail from your Windows Mobile Phone.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Happy to say I managed to back up the data, test drive 2.1 locally, and push it up to the site here to finally run on Subtext 2.1.
True credit goes to
Phil Haack and the guys on the
SubText team for making an OS blog engine that "just works".