Since few weeks we have started internally use an interesting microblogging tool named Yammer. It works very similarly to Twitter, which means that you are posting very short posts, focusing on the stuff you are doing or working on. Unlike with Twitter, Yammer is company oriented and your posts will be visible ONLY to the recipients that share your company's email address.
Yammer is free service with interesting business model: everybody can join your company's network (if that person has proper email address), but to gain administrative rights, you have to pay dollar a month per user. I actually like this approach because it gives hope that the service will be around and available next year :-)
Several people asked what is going on with me: no blog posts for almost a month, litlle presence on Gtalk / MSN. It is simpler to answer this way that write same email over and over.
Unfortunately the reason for being quiet is not that I am taking time off and enjoying myself somewhere in Caribbean on a secluded island without internet connection. Those who know me well also know that I would never go somewhere without access to Web for longer period of time than week - and even that would cause serious withdrawal issues. I am in Ottawa or Montreal or somewhere in between - physically or virtually.
This was error I have received while trying to convert physical machine running Windows 2003 SP1 into VMWare image.
After some googling around and experimenting (this link was most helpful to point me in correct direction) I found solution that worked for me.
All I had to do was to disable Floppy Drive in the System applet of Control panel. After this, the conversion continued and right now is squeezing 100 GB disk into 50 2 GB files on external USB disk.
Yes, I mean *that* dry, boring Deweys Decimal Classification used by libraries around the world.
Here is what I noticed in Ottawa Public Library:
Can you imagine two subjects so far apart from each other - and sometimes sooo close ;-)
A wonderful gem I found here:
I remember telling a friend
that being a project manager
is a little like being a bouncer:
where there's a problem *here*
and a door *there*
and it's your job to get the problem out the door.
So
For some a gentle gesture will do
while others need a push
and still others need to be picked up by their pants and carried
It is always a nice surprise to find something that is free and actually useful on the Net :-). Like this one: a fellow Ottawan Karl Sequin wrote and generously made available as free download "Foundations of programming" eBook.
He touches many topics of various levels from high level design concepts (dependency injection) to low level "Back to Basics" - how memory allocation and pointers work. Especially the later is often neglected and overlooked (and consequently misunderstood) by younger developers who started their education with a garbage collected language such as Java or C# and never were exposed to beauty and horrors of C ;-)
Few days ago, I have received an email asking to attend the SpringSource conference and offering $300 discount if I decide to buy before end of month. The timining was pretty ironical, considering the recent contraversy about SpringSource Entreprise Maintenance policy change. The was a heated discussion on TheServerside.com and even FAQ was compiled by Rod Johnson to explain the whole thing.
So what is the issue: SpringSource, commercial entity behind community driven Spring Framework decided to capitalize on the investment and push the community toward paid service suport contract. Whether or not it was related to funding round and VC's entering the game, is not important. Unfortunately, the terms were not really well explained and SpringSource did initially very poor job explaining and communicating the actual change. The community overreacted and lot of people started to call for code fork, project Summer or similar - or switching to different framework.
Before I forget :-)
1) The Git Magic
2) Two git books Pragmatic Git Book and Git internals - nice complement each other
3) Linus Torvalds slightly offensive and very funny talk at Google
in addition to great, precise but not necessarily most digestable manual ...
I was brave and updated right away last Friday, as soon as the update appeared, both the iTunes and the iPhone firmware. And so far, so good. Initial observations are quite positive - at least so far, from using it during last few days.
I never had any issues with the dropped calls, so I cannot report any improvement. What seems to work better is browsing: I get much less (if any) connection errors. It is hard to say whether it was the firmware, or Rogers fixed something - or the fixed firmware causes less issues to network - it looks like improvement.
If this thing is real, I am buying one. Regardless that I really, really do not need another Mac :-). Form factor of thin screen of size 9-12 inch, with reasonable subset of touch gestures would be EXACTLY what I need from a internet terminal / reader. Plus the option to tether it with iPhone for ubiquitous connectivity ...