Archive for November, 2007

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

openbravo - opensourcing ERP system

I like to look at most downloaded/active projects on sourceforge because it gives me an idea of what is popular in th e industry and a good indicator of trends. As expected bit torrent and p2p applications are the most popular for downloads. However open bravo is the most active project. I had a […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

ads on sourceforge work, but splunk is a waste of time

after seeing an add for a tool on sourceforge, I downloaded the product and gave it a go - ie. the ad worked, but I wouldn’t buy the product.
splunk. All it does is allow you to search your log files on that machine very rapidly and the results are shown in a nice graph.
I like:

the […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

Norton commander for your server:)

Very simple tool that seems to have a high number of downloads on sourceforge
php script that you can put on your apache server and manage the files on that server. Its distributed as a single file.

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

we don’t need a imdb equivalent for sport - just a twiki

Is there a need for a imdb equivalent for sport - a site that would show who played in a game similar to imdb for movies. Seems that sites like imdb now days are defunct and could simply be replaced with a wiki?
Examples:
Beckham
Bryan Habana
Jake White

However mining sites like wikipedia and imdb are very interesting because […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Saturday, November 24th, 2007

Comparison of aquisitions by yahoo, google and microsoft

From library house
“Yahoo had half as many acquisitions and they seemed to be more focused on content than technology. Companies like rivals.com (sport site), wretch (a Xanga equivalent from Taiwan), and Bix.com (American Idol on the web) appear to be aimed at purchasing audiences. This seems reasonable in a world where advertising is incredibly valuable.”
It […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

Croatia beats England in football

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/internationals/7103110.stm
Paul Birnie: so what happened to england?
yoel marson: they have 7-8 world class players for sure but underperform as a unit
yoel marson: it is caused by exhaustion, overcrowding of star players and problems with the national psyche

No Comments » - Posted in life by pbirnie

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

Content dating - being a good dealer

There is now so much content out there - that products that allow people to see just the content that is relevant to them are in demand.
“supply and demand curves of information” - in normal economics if you supply something, people need less of it. An example: we are in the desert […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Fastest way to understand what a web app is doing

The fastest way I know of to understand what a web application is doing - is to simply get some logging on the database and webservice calls.
You could print the output to the apache error log, but I like the technique shown below simply because its really easy to use and you get […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by admin

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Intel VTune Performance Analyser

Came across  Intel VTune product
First impression is its an attempt by intel to lock developers into intel  hardware.
Just another example of :
“Hardware companies write software to sell hardware, software companies supply hardware to sell software”.

No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by pbirnie

Monday, November 12th, 2007

Asking developers if they are done-done?

Whenever project managers ask developers “Are you done?” with a task they will always say “yes”. The problem is that project managers assume that means that they are “finished” with the task. This is not true - what they mean is “yes, I am done coding but I still need to test” or “yes, I […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Monday, November 12th, 2007

Maslow’s Hierachy of needs and product roadmaps

I was thinking about how product roadmaps evolve a little like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
“Deficiency needs must be met first. Once these are met, seeking to satisfy growth needs drives personal growth.”
Product roadmaps first focus on deficiencies and then growth in a tiered hierarchy and if a deficiency appears we must first have this satisfied […]

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

The Day The Routers Died…

the day we ran out of ip addresses

a tough crowd

No Comments » - Posted in technology by pbirnie