Oops! Project under-estimation

Boring subject, boring title, but really useful information about how to plan a project and avoid the common mistakes that lead to under estimating.

Building on failure

Adam Savage, one of the two heads of the show “Mythbusters”, talks about his job, and how two major failures have affected and shaped everything he has done since them. Very interesting and thought provoking.

Adam’s failures.

Great programming cartoons

Ah! Humor! Gotta have it!

Corporate trolls have Dilbert. He tells tales of corporate life.

Army guys had Beetle Bailey (is he still around anymore?). He tells tales of military life.

The little kid in us has Charley Brown. He tells tales of our childhood.

Childish adults had Calvin and Hobbes. They told tales of what we would have liked to do when we were children.

Programmers have — lots, including Dilbert, who is, after all, an engineer. And this helpful article collected some of the best programming/programmer humor for us.

Speed, size and dependability of programming languages

Ah! A really useful bit of research that can pay off huge dividends!

While it has been true for some time that the most expensive part of application development is the human involvement, I think we have used that as an excuse to not prune our code, use the most efficient language for the circumstances, or otherwise seek to optimize the code aspect of the application. Which is really strange, because we’ll pay big bucks for a faster CPU or a faster buss, and we look to see the RPM on our hard drives in order to eke a bit faster response from our machines, and then we’ll smother that architecture with bloatware.

In a previous life I worked for a company that had a couple Assembler programmers who wrote and maintained the read and write routines for certain high-traffic databases. As a rookie I used the typical IO routines that I was familiar with, the ones that came with the language package. When we ran our stress test on the code changes for the month’s implementation package, my code was the bottle neck, specifically my IO. When we changed the IO calls from the generic IO routines to the company’s custom Assembler routines our thru-put returned to normal, and I became a believer in efficient code, especially in critical high-volume areas such as key data calls. And those Assembler guys weren’t some anachronistic dinosaurs but key components of the Systems group.

With all the hype the latest cool language gets, whether it is Java or Ruby on Rails, HTML or CSS, it can be easy to loose sight of the fact that these are meta-languages, using high-level language concepts to implement in one statement the things the old timers might need 100 or 1000 lines of COBOL or Fortran to implement. A benefit of working in nGL languages is that it is easier to put together an application from a concept; a potential cost is that the implemented code is, as I discovered with my IO routines, bloated and less efficient.

But how do we know of our code is bloated? It isn’t necessarily the disk space it keeps, it is also the programming efficiency, whether a routine is smothered under 15 loops, or only 2 loops, even if the 2-loop option has an extra statement or two.

Fortunately, the guy who wrote this article, or at least the guys about whom this article was written, took the time and energy to delve into this very question. They pulled together a bunch of languages and wrote identical applications so we could have a definitive answer. And the article that was written by/about them is appropriately called, “Speed, size and dependability of programming languages“.

Tutorials

A page overflowing with tutorials and other info in a variety of web design, coding, and Photoshop.

Autorun USB drives – or not

Autorun USB drives can be pretty handy and convenient – and open your computer up to some serious infiltration by viruses.

This article in Make Use Of tells how you can keep your USB drive from being suceptible to Autorun.

Web safety with Firefox extensions

This looks to be a useful and practical article on safer browsing using certain Firefox extensions.

Top 100 Productivity Tools

The article’s title is “100 Terrific Productivity Tools for the Bored or Unemployed”, but I think that is misleading at best. What I find here are 100 useful productivity tools, regardless of who you are. Granted, some are more useful to the unemployed than to those gainfully employed, such as the resume builder and job coach, and they aren’t all aimed at work productivity. Skype and WordPress are more often than not used in non-work settings, but they certainly could be used in work settings as well. (Maybe I should start a blog on the technical and public aspects of my work?)

But hair-splitting aside, here is a great list of 100 terrific productivity tools, regardless of who you are!

Presentation software alternatives

PowerPoint is the Kleenex of slide show software: it’s brand name is nearly ubiquitous in describing the product. But, as with Kleenex, it is not the only product out there, simply the most well know brand.

What alternatives are there to PowerPoint in the arena of presentation software, presentation application, presentation development? (It’s even hard to find a term that adequately describes the product!)

Well, there are a number of alternatives, both for sale and free, and I’ll lay out a number of them for you, giving you links to evaluations of the products.

• PowerPoint is the defacto standard
• Camtasia
• Proshow Gold
• Dryfork
• StarOffice
• WordPerfect Office
• ThinkFree Show
• SmartSuite
• OpenOffice
• Apple’s iWork Keynote
• Google Docs Presentation
• Zoho Show
• Flash (yes, that Flash!)

Sources and reviews:

• http://www.msboycott.com/thealt/alts/powerpoint.shtml
• http://archive.laptopmag.com/Features/Best-and-Worst-PowerPoint-Alternatives.htm
• http://louisville.bizjournals.com/louisville/stories/2009/03/09/focus1.html

Professional Presentations

Let’s clarify the above title: Good Professional Presentations! Whether it be PowerPoint or an alternative, knowing the basics of putting together a good professional presentation is an important skill everyone should know.

Sadly, there are still too many people who do not realize that there are a few basics when putting together a presentation. We’ve all seen too many presentations by professionals that make you want to slap the person who put it together. Whether they went overboard with with dissolves, text in every color of the palette, or whirligigs reminiscent of horrible home-brew web pages, the special effects overwhelmed the message.

But then they probably read each slide word for word, so we really didn’t miss anything. But that’s a whole different story.

What makes a good presentation? You’ve probably seen a few that made you realize – afterwards, of course – how good a presentation you saw. What were the attributes of the presentation? I’m betting among other characteristics were simplicity of template, a simple color scheme, consistency throughout the entire slide show, and readability. One can argue whether too much information on a single slide is a presentation design issue or a a message outline issue – I’ll come down firmly in both camps.

Fortunately we don’t need to deconstruct the good, the bad and the ugly here in order to develop rules for good presentations, the good folks at MakeUseOf.com have done that for us. And, the folks at CodingHorror.com put together a set of examples on what NOT to do!

This won’t take care of the butterflies in your stomach before you begin your talk, but it will give you the confidence that the information is well laid out for the people listening.