tknight.org

Software which stays soft

Writing software which you can modify easily is not an easy task. Over at InfoQ they have a nice video of a panel discussion which discusses this topic. Watch it here.

For me two things stood out:

You need a solid and clean design + automated testing if you want to be able to change your software later. While this should be obvious it is still not the case in our industry that all developers use and care about techniques like encapsulation, tell don't ask, dependency injection, unit testing,...
It is important that you do not make any premature decisions regarding your design. Always wait until the last possible moment for making a decision especially if this descision is hard to reverse. This rule can be applied not only to software but to every important descision which has to be made. For example Giuliani writes about this topic in his book Leadership.

Lessig on the relationship between creativity and law

I blogged before about Lawrence Lessig presentation style. Especially his usage of slides. Thanks to TED everybody can now see what a brilliant speaker he is and the way he supports his talks with slides.

By the way he is not only a brilliant guy but also a truly inspiring person who founded the creative commons organization.

OOPSLA 2007 Podcasts

The OOPSLA 2007 podcasts have been available for quite a while, now. If you are interested in software engineering make sure to have a listen. I especially enjoyed Frederik Brooks talk on "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".

Get it here.

Creative slideshows

In a world of death-by-powerpoint a small group of speakers demonstrate that creative slideshows are still possible. Have a look at this one:

| View | Upload your own

Thanks to Coulix for sending it along.

Wiki's at work

Have a look at the following video made by Sun to promote their customer facing wikis.sun.com. I especially like the way it shows how collaboration on the web has been evolved in recent years.

They are running their wiki's on Confluence developed by Atlassian. It is a really nice piece of software which I enjoy working with every day.

Netrenderer

Once you start writing websites on a different platform than windows, you have to go the extra mile in order to access the Internet Explorer for compatibility reasons. Fortunately there is handy website which you can use to render your site with a variety of IE versions.

The service is called netrenderer and you can find it here. It is completely free of charge.

It's a Visa!

Over at copyrighteous Benjamin wrote a nice post about how online stores could fill in the type of the credit card you are using automatically.

"Any decent credit card system knows that if a sixteen digit credit card number starts with 4, it's a Visa."

Actually some websites are already smart enough, e.g. shopify. However I would be interesting to know why not more websites are implementing a similar system like shopify has.

Wow!

I still remember how my father and I investigated the sky through a telescope during those crystal clear summer nights and learned more about the Universe. Yesterday at TED Microsoft presented for the first time their new project WorldWide Telescope which allows anybody to explore the Universe just by using their computer.

From what I can see the execution of the idea is absolutely stunning. I can't wait to show it to my father.

The offical site for the project can be found here.

Google Reader and shared items

For a long time I used Thunderbird as my main feed reader. It's main advantage compared to other tools is that instead of displaying just the the text of a feed item, it renders the whole item using the Firefox engine. Therefore the layout of the site which you subscribe to is not getting lost. However once I joined SAP last year I had to switch to something else because I wanted to check my feeds in the office and at home. Since I heard good things about Google Reader I gave it a go and I am still happy with my decision.

There are lots of things I like about Reader. One thing which stands out for me is how easy it is to send items you like to your friends via email. Another thing which is a neat idea are the so called shared items. It means that while I am skipping through my feeds I can mark anything interesting as shared. All my shared items end up in an extra feed + an extra website. You can check out my feed here and my website here. Why is this cool? It allows you to subscribe to items which were already marked as interesting by people you know and trust. Similar to what the people over at Digg are doing.

Make your own sugar sprinkler

Inspired by the cool videos from Make magazine, here is a simple idea for making a sugar sprinkler. All you need is a nice bottle and a bottle pourer.

New Media and EveryBlock

For quite some time now I am interested in new types of media and try to get a feeling for how people will consume and produce information in the future. One project I am actively following at the moment is EveryBlock which is run by Adrian Holovaty of Django fame.

The basic idea is to offer the people all relevant news for the block which they live in. Current information range from civic information (e.g. restaurant inspections, crimes,...) to news articles. Adrian's team really tries to push the limits when it comes to making information available for anybody in an innovative way. If you got interested make sure to listen to this excellent podcast in which Adrian talks about the project and the future of journalism in general.

last.fm and guerrilla testing

Informal testing sessions on the street, in cafe's (also called guerrilla testing, ghetto testing,...) are a great and inexpensive way to get valuable feedback from potential customers of your software. I wrote about the topic before here.

One of my favourite websites last.fm is currently beta testing their next version and guess what they use guerilla testing to do so. Fortunately they also spread the word and write about it. So hop over to their blog and learn how they organize their testing sessions and how it works out for them.

Good thinking

While visiting a post office in Switzerland I stumbled upon a really nice idea on how lost keys can be returned to their owners.

The idea is simple, you buy a tag which you add to your keychain. Engraved on the tag is a unique number which is linked to your address. Now, if someone finds your keychain on the street the tag tells the person to throw it in the next postbox. Then the post just look up the address using the ID and mail the keychain back to you. All you have to pay is the postage fee. Beautiful idea and nicely executed. Would love to have the same service in Germany. The service provider has a website which can be found here.

The bubble project

Some time ago Stefan Sagmeister showcased a funny guerrilla art project on TED. The artist sticks speech bubbles onto public advertisement and then the pedestrians fill the blank spots with their own thoughts.

In his talk he showed a lot of funny bubbles already however there is also a website which allows you to browse throw a lot of those bubbles and some of them are truly hilarious. Have a look.

Photo courtesy of Bubble Project