I've downloaded the latest version of Firefox, both at home and at work. Needless to say, it's quite nice.
Todd Dominey recently mentioned a bookmark synchronizer for Firefox. Pretty cool. But, as I think about it, I realize that I don't really use bookmarks. I rarely pay repeat visits to sites that don't have RSS feeds. And, if I need to remember a specific site, I'll usually blog it, either here on this site or on one of the Basecamp sites I've set up at work. And, if all else fails, I have a little homepage where I store links to other useful sites.
Bookmarks are sooo mid-90s.
Update, slightly off-topic: I've seen a number of recent articles from folks advocating making an IE-to-Firefox switch: SecurityFocus and Slate are the ones that come to mind.
Here's a couple of good recent articles on the user experience and usability fronts:
Lane Becker, "90% of All Usability Testing is Useless." Becker presents a good common-sense arguement:
"We need to abandon the idea that user testing on the Web is a quantitative process...Instead, user research for the Web should delve into the qualitative aspects of design to understand how and why people respond to what has been created, and, more importantly, how to apply that insight to future work."
Peter Morville, "User Experience Design. Morville's "User Experience Honeycomb" diagram will likely influence how people understand the concept of UX. Morville's diagram breaks the concept of UX into it's component parts: Useful, Usable, Desirable, Findable, Accessible, Credible, Valuable.
A few years back a professor I had talked about the shelf-life of knowledge. His point was that informaiton goes stale quickly, especially in the technology world. There isn't much value in keeping it locked away. The value, in the information and knowledge space, is in sharing what you know.
This has stuck with me. This is good, because this was about the only worthwhile thing to come from this particular professor.
One obvious outgrowth of this concept is this weblog. Sure, I could keep it private, and use it as a place to store links and thoughts solely for myself. At one point, before the explosion of weblogs, I did keep a personal knowledge database. I find the weblog much more useful and interesting, not to mention easy to use (google indexes the weblog; no way it could get to my personal DB).
Anyway, I'm reminded of all of this thanks to a post from Evelyn Rodriguez:
I have a feeling this applies beyond professional services. I am always surprised by how much consultants hoard knowledge and even how I've been tempted to guard against "leaking" too much of my expertise. Even professional service firms talk about their "proprietary" intellectual "property" - often not in the form of products, but typically their practices, processes and methodology.
I don't feel that way anymore and had already been considering how to implement an open source innovation strategy - where clients participate in the ideation and solution-finding and the takeaway bonus is learning and instilling new practices and processes).
Here's a couple of nice posts from Christina Wodke on brand consistency. A quote:
We, the ones who look at our site, our brand, our product ever day, we are the deadly ones. What our customers call comfort we call dull. We're like a bored teenager that dies her hair blue over a long weekend. We must curb that energy, and point it toward extention and growth with care, rather than reinvention.
I know I'm starting to feel like like that bored teenager with our site at work. The challenge is knowing if we just need highlights, or if it's time to shave it all off and start over. For sure, we're having something of a bad hair day.
Okay, I'll drop that metaphor now.
Okay, so this is kinda neat: Visitorville.com. But I have a hard time seeing myself paying $30+/mo. for this. It's just a little too goofy.
Evelyn Rodriguez has posted four very interesting entries looking back on her experiences in a startup. I'll link to the fourth entry, in that it has links back to the other three, and it serves as a nice summary. As I am now working in a startup environment, I read this with some interest. Good stuff.
I get a fair amount (okay, about 5 hits a day) of traffic from people searching on the phrase "wifi repeater." They land on a brief entry I wrote a while back. Although the device I referenced in that entry was pretty cool (in theory, I never bought one), I think Apple just released the leader in this catagory. The Airport Express is a little device that plugs into the wall, acts as a wifi repeater/bridge, an access point, and does streaming audio to boot. It is, I should note 802.11g-only. I'm still stuck back in the land of 802.11b, and I'm not planning on upgrading in the near future (no real reason). But when I do upgrade, I'll probably want to pick up one of these gizmos to extend the signal to all parts of my long-and-narrow home.
Update: Kevin Jordan wrote to tell me that the Airport Express does support 802.11b. The specs say so. I should probably read a bit more carefully next time! Thanks, Kevin.
Another update: Boris Kraft wrote in to clarify. Turns out the Airport Express only acts as a repeater for other Airport products. From the spec: "AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network" (footnote 5). The bad news is that I really need to learn to read these things before shooting off at the mouth. The good news is that a) people do read this little weblog, and b) nice folks like Kevin and Boris kindly write in to correct me. If you'd like to correct me (on anything, really), shoot me an email at weblog@karlnelson.net.
I'm cleaning out my "staging" area...
Mike Kuniavsky recently pointed to the Software Acquisition Capability Maturity Model from the Carnagie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. I like the framework, and I imagine it could easily be ported to other tasks besides software aquisition (indeed, the model is borrowed from a more generic software maturity model). The model lays out five levels, from Initial ("Competent people and heroics") to Optimizing ("Continuous process improvement").
InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson writes about outsourcing end-user support:
Right now, my key internal systems are being monitored by a 24-hour NOC (network operations center) using integrated monitoring solutions that I would never be able to buy or integrate into my environment. Our employees benefit from around-the-clock support. A seamlessly automated, proactive patching solution keeps our systems up-to-date and every desktop or laptop is backed up every day regardless of location. I don’t manage these nuts-and-bolts, but I am able to track them via a convenient Web-based dashboard that gives me an instant read on the health of my IT environment, and I receive monthly reports on end-user satisfaction that are audited by a third party. The array of services offered to me has broadened in the past year, but I will actually be paying less for them as my provider continues to achieve economies of scale with a growing customer base.
We're using a similar arrangement at work, and I'm a big fan of the concept. I've seen very few downsides, and a whole bunch of upsides so far.
Update: Dickerson has a blog post following up on his article:
Lest this arrangement sound a little too utopian, the employees at InfoWorld do the usual complaining about IT support (when you're dealing with Microsoft products, nothing is perfect), but through my outsourcer, I actually have third-party audited satisfaction scores to cut through the din and lots of traps and mechanisms to deal with the inevitable instances of dissatisfaction.
Also, for the real flip side of the outsourcing argument, see Jerry Gregoire's article in CIO magazine: "The Vanishing IT Department." A quote:
It is far easier to "order" a programmer, as one might order in a pizza so as not to have to cook, than to sell someone on joining the organization. We pay dearly for outsourcers and consultants that arrest the development of our organizations' internal capabilities and cause us to place the future well-being of our company in the hands of people who have no emotional stake or connection to our business.