Be smarter at work, slack off

Be smarter at work, slack off - Mar. 17, 2006

Well thank goodness. At last someone notices my ahead-of-my-time leisure time is billable!

My robot - The Boston Globe

I've been wanting to get one of these Roombas for a while, now. And look, according to this article, now you can hack it to do more.

"Everything but the kitchen sink."

Network drives

Meant to publish this a year ago (or more). Just noticed I never got it past draft status.

Too bad I didn't have it in a virtual drive on a network folder somewhere. I would have noticed it and done something about it!

Came across an article about a network drive system from Google (read this: Going for a GDrive with Google News). If it is true, and that is far from certain, since Google took the information off-line, it suggests that Google is attempting to provide for a single file system that users can access regardless of which machine they are using at the time, so long as the user has network access to Google's servers.

Geeking with Greg: In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power has a PDF of the original slide presentation, and I'll tell you... it's quite startling to see Google, a company I watched within month of its creation, suddenly showing itself off as a boardroom-ready corporatin.

I heard about a related site on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and then came upon a link to this site: Overheard in the Office: The Voice of the Cubicle. This so reminds me of little snippets of conversation I have during my typical work day. There's some really funny stuff here!

Decided to create a second blog here, one specifically devoted to the topic of software development and the challenges of development in a business environment.

I just shared with my project manager today that I don't think the act of development in itself is necessarily a challenge. There is a reason that so many coding tasks that used to be developers-only tasks ten years ago have become tasks for graphic artists and business analysts today.

HTML design, used to be coders only.

BizTalk is a tool that can be done by non-programmers and still be relatively useful.

SharePoint allows you to manage many functions like standards and document management, as well as scheduling and basic database needs, without wasting your programmers' time.

The biggest challenge for most developers is often less to do with actual programming, and more to do with dependancies with other software resources, with configuration of web servers and networking, with managing security against usability, with designing software so that it serves its purpose in the company while still being easy to maintain.

These challenges are not always so simle to solve, and are often very effective in solving one class of problems while exacerbating other problems.

These are the kinds of topics I'll cover in that blog. So visit the CodingBlog: http://www.pandorasdream.com/blog/CodingBlog.html.

V