It’s sad that we have become so terrified of litigation that we safe-tify the world that we simply dumbify ourselves and our children.
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I think we can all learn a little from Google. How many times have you cringed at Sybase Central?
Google User Experience
Our aspirations
The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is “Googley” – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world. — read more at Google
Thanks goes to adrianh over on Twitter.com for finding this! 
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In every job I worked at and almost every project I’ve been involved with, there seems to be at least one information hoarder. You know, the person that keeps critical information (processes, etc) to themselves for job security or status or god knows what. The person tends to be insecure about themselves or their position.
It’s almost comical really. These individuals believe they add value to the situation by claiming that X is a “trade secret”, “copyrighted” or “need to know”. It is nothing more than the person being a fool and an idiotic fool at that.
No, I was wrong. It IS comical. The audacity of these people is astounding. Whether it is crazy consultants from the other side of the planet, a coworker or a person online, they …. OMG I’m just amused by them.
To all the information hoarders out there in the world: a big ole stinky RASPBERRY in your face! You suck!
lol
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My dad is an Owner-Operator of his own 18 wheel rig. Anything that involves my dad I’m usually pretty facinated by it:
Imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered the blog The Big Road and a Nut run by “thenose“. He is a big time Linux user and a truck driver. Who can’t love that?
Even though my dad is a 15 to 20 years older and doesn’t ‘get’ the whole computer thing, thenose’s posts make me feel like I’m taking a peek into my dad’s world of Trucking
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SweeperBot is an application written by Paul Fenwick that plays Windows minesweeper for you automatically. It’s based upon code orignally written by Matt Sparks.
Get it at SweeperBot.org!
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Apparently my wife programmed in Turtle on the Amiga 500 when she was in elementary school (she’s 7 years younger than me).
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Taken from the Canon Pixma MP150 manual but here in a nice convenient place:
Press the Maintenance button (icon of a pliers & screwdriver) until the code you want shows up then press the Color or Black button:
| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A | Print nozzle check pattern (prints nozzle patterns on paper) |
| H | Cartridge cleaning (uses a little bit of ink) |
| F | Deep cleaning (uses a lot more ink - use rarely) |
| P | Align print head (prints alignment lines on paper) |
| U | Read in print head alignment sheet (P) and auto aligns print heads |
| B | Clean print rollers (can prematurely wear out the rollers - use rarely) |
| J | Clean bottom plate |
| 1 | ???? |
Does any one know that the “1″ code is?
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This year’s Flourish Conference was held at the University of Illinois in downtown Chicago (UIC). The Flourish web site describes Flourish as: 
The goal of the Flourish Conference is to promote the use and adoption of Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) by demonstrating the practical applications of FLOSS in the business and academic world. While everyone is familiar with businesses that focus on creating non-free proprietary software, the same cannot be said for those who specialize in developing and supporting FLOSS software, and an Open Culture.
I missed a part of Bruce Perens’ Innovation Goes Public presentation due to
Chicago’s closing several sidewalks that go over or under the tristate. I’m not quite sure I agree with him that the road a head for open source is all rosey. Perhaps I misunderstood him but it seemed to me that the idea of simply giving the source of an application to the public would allow the programmers to still be paid via the support/service agreements. This may work for some applications, but for others there wouldn’t be a sufficient number of support contracts to financially support the programmers Personally, I prefer open source but I will also pay for commercial proprietary software. I use what works.
The company I work for, Sungard Investment Systems, uses open source for many internal projects. One such product uses VMware
portable monitoring system so I was highly interested in rBuilder Online from rPath. I attended the Appliance Development and Conary session presented by Stephanie Watson from rPath. I’m currently investigating on how well and easy it is to make a VMware appliance that would house a Sybase ASE server (DBMS) with no unnecessary os files. If the testing turns out well, I will ask my fellow Sybase ASE DBAs whether Sybase need certify it or whether we are ‘on our own’. The monitoring machine itself really doesn’t need Sybase ASE on it but since we have the license….
Dr. John Waclawsky, from Motorolla, gave a feel good presentation about the state of communication between wireless gadgets. The Revolution at the Edge of the Network Abstract. Short version: things are going to get very interesting in the next year
James Gray, from IBM, presented IBM’s Open Source Strategy - Turning Threat into Opportunity. While
essentially a case study of how IBM has interacted as a semi-liason between the business executives and the open source community. IBM, to me, has seemed to be stuck in a love/hate relationship with open source and a dislike/hate relationship with the Free Software Foundation. That being said, it is necessary to give IBM credit giving credence to the open source community with the business executives. The IT folks no longer had to quietly use open source in the business but were free to use it extensively in many places. Linux, in particular, is no longer the wild west in many CTOs’ eyes but a integral part of their business. 
I met Tony Wong in the Chicago Perl Mongers ‘booth’. We discussed the upcoming Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC::NA 2008) that is being held in Chicago and the horrible documentation of the Catalyst MVC web framework. I informed him that the only way to learn Catalyst was the new book Catalyst
The panel discussion on Friday afternoon was highly entertaining and a bit of a kangaroo court for Bobby 
Moore of Microsoft. I do not believe Mr. Moore was expecting Bruce Perens to repeatedly ask very pointed and informed questions. Moore did an excellent job of remaining cool and listening with an open mind to the criticism of Microsoft as a company. He explained that, yes, Microsoft did some not so nice things in the past but they are attempting to work with the open source community. Bruce Perens, Jon “Maddog” Hall, and James Bottomley brought up the pending MS Office OpenXML standard format issue where much of the format is proprietary and the published format won’t actually be used by Microsoft. 
Moore conceded that it was unlikely that Microsoft would use the published format as-is but the Office developers would likely base the actually used format off of the published format. Perens, Hall, Bottomley and James Gray all expressed their opinions that this was very typical of Microsoft. (side note: Microsoft has been accused of having the attitude of Embrace, Extend, Eliminate when it comes to industry standards.)
Perens, Hall and James Bottomley, as well as members of the audience, pummeled both James Gray of IBM and Bobby Moore of Microsoft for their companies’ approach and support of software patents.
Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first day as my mother was in town from North Dakota to visit my three month old daughter (and the rest of us). If only I could have cloned myself… Don’t forget to check out the Flickr photo group for the Flourish 2008 Conference in Chicago!
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In episode 27 of GigaOM, Joyce Kim discusses the future of MMO games. Is it possible to make money off of free to play MMOs?
The GigaOm Show - Free-to-play MMOs profitable?
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Those dastardly fiends at work threw a baby shower for Rod (a coworker) and me. Here are some photos. More to follow.
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In the last episode of this saga, we learned that Neumann Homes is planning to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As of yesterday, Tuesday October 30th, Neumann Homes had not filed. No one has been able to explain why they haven’t filed with the court yet.
According to reliable sources, Kenneth Neumann, the CEO of Neumann Homes, is planning to force the home buyers to purchase the Neumann Homes. With reports of shoddy building of the houses, many families are opting to forgo purchasing the Neumann houses and are attempting to receive their earnest money back.
In many cases, Neumann Homes had violated the purchase contract by not finishing the homes within 150 days of the issuance of the building permits (paragraph 12). The contract states in paragraph 21 sub paragraph A:
- Negotiation:
- When either party feels a dispute has arisen, that party shall notify the other party in writing of the nature and details of the dispute (”Dispute Notice”). Within fifteen (15) days after such Dispute Notice, a meeting shall be held between the parties to begin a good faith attempt to negotiate a resolution. During this procedure the parties will communicate directly with each other in an effort to reach an agreement that serves the interests of both parties.
All of the real estate lawyers I’ve asked, if either party does not respond to the Dispute Notice, the requirement of Mediation and Mandatory Binding Arbitration is no longer binding. The most that Neumann Homes is likely to be able to do is to keep the earnest money but even that is questionable.
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Is you’re running on an Intel x86-64 processor based box and VMware Workstation complains that the host machine is incompatible with working with your Windows 2003 64bit client os (or any other 64bit client OS)? Well, go into your BIOS on boot and make sure that the VT functionality is enabled.
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I just received a “Security Deposit Settlement” from them. The Property Manager, in my opinion, is a lying thief. She makes up ‘cleaning’ and ‘repair’ jobs so they can keep your security deposit. Avoid these thieves like the plague!
Edgewater Walk Apartments
16703 Lakewood Drive #103
Tinley Park, IL 60477
Property Manager: Darleen Filas
The apartment was spotless.
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Neumann in Chapter 11
October 22, 2007
The crash in the Chicago-area market for new homes has claimed its biggest casualty. Suburban builder Neumann Homes Inc. said Monday it will file for bankruptcy and has laid off most of its employees.
Warrenville-based Neumann blamed its predicament on a drop of more than 50 percent in annual sales within the Chicago and Denver markets. It also pointed to a decision in 2005 to invest in the Detroit market, a move it said cost the company more than $60 million.
To say that I’m a bit upset is a bit of an understatement.
Corresponding articles at Chicago Tribune, WBBM News Radio, Chicago Daily Herald, Crain’s Chicago Business News and a second article at Crain’s Chicago Business News.
For those of you that don’t know chapter 11 bankruptcy is a restructuring of the company.
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I picked up an extra Song of the Day from Starbucks this morning. The song is from Alice Smith: New Religion. This code can only be used once and by only a single person. So, grab it quick!
Enjoy
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Several people have requested that I open up the comments a bit more. So I have. In addition to OpenID we now support ReCaptcha. Not only is writing comments a lot easier, we are also helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive by using ReCaptcha. So please, comment away
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For all the moms out there! A work safe video of what your mom told you every single stinking day of your miserable life 
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