Jinn of Quality and Risk

Usable Help: The old journalism standard of "Who, What, When, Where, and Why" applied to documentation design will help you develop more useful on-screen Help... 

The culture of telling prospective clients you are too small, we will not work with you is amazingly arrogant and self-destructive. Today's small clients can pay your bills, bring repeat business, and become tomorrow's giants —benevolent towards you or not, according to how you treat them today. Whatever happened to the ethos of serving the customer? NYT: [EDS], stung by a cash flow drain and failed bids on two huge contracts, says it will focus more on smaller deals and those with a quick payoff. Notice how EDS is (portrayed as) motivated by cash flow problems, the loss of large contracts, and making quick money. Where is the customer in this picture? Of course a company must have revenue and profit, but to what ends, and by what means? 

The Fishbowl: None of this actually matters, though. From a marketing perspective, you only ever publish this sort of document in two circumstances. Either (a) you're losing, or (b) you're Larry Ellison. 

Matthew Thomas: Area man totally confused by sister's mobile phone. Mobile phone usability still has a long way to go... 

The Fishbowl: The basic unit of work in eXtreme Programming is the User Story. User stories describe some functionality that is to be added to the system under development. ... Time after time on projects, though, a set of requirements end up written on cards that do not fit. They are the round peg to the User Story's square hole. These requirements are: security, usability, performance, consistent architecture, and logging (especially audit logs). These are generally shoved in the catch-all category of Non-Functional Requirements. They get written on a card, pinned up onto the board with the rest of the cards, and worried about for the entire project because we're just not sure what to do with them. 

ComputerWorld: The Boeing Co. is changing the way it buys software and is making a product's usability--the ease with which end users can be trained on and operate the product--a fundamental purchasing criterion. It's a move the aerospace giant sees as an essential means of controlling IT costs. [via cognitiveArchitects News] 

Jabir ibn Haiyan (aka Geber) is claimed by some historians of science, such as George Sarton, and many Islamophiles to be the father of alchemy (claimed root: al-kimyia in Arabic) and the inventor of the alembic around 800 AD.

There is a problem with this account, though. "Chemeia" was the ancient Greek word (meaning "Egypt" or "preparation/land of the black soil") related to that field of activity several centuries before Islam was invented. The process of distillation was discovered even longer ago. Alembic distillation is a very old technique, used by the Egyptians 3000 years BC and the Greeks 1000 BC. In 296 AD the emperor Diocletian, fearing that creation of gold would disrupt his economy, ordered the burning of alchemist manuscripts. In the 4th century, Zosimus of Panopolis wrote "The Divine Art of Making Gold and Silver." Much later, in the 7th century, alchemy was picked up by the Arabs when they conquered Egypt and Syria. "Ambix" is a Greek word meaning vase with a small opening, which was part of their distillation equipment. The Arabs changed the words "chemeia" to "kimyia" as well as "ambix" to "ambic" and called the distillation equipment "al ambic" (the vase).

Here we go again, discovering a tale of conquest and appropriation. It is wrong to claim that ibn Haiyan invented alchemy and the alembic. He did compile, describe, and practice various chemical processes, but he is not the founder of chemistry or alchemy by any stretch of the imagination. 

Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius. — William Blake: English poet, painter, and engraver. Blake's poetry is powerful. I warmly recommend a visit to the William Blake (hypermedia) Archive (sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by several praiseworthy institutions). 

I first heard the hypothesis that the Taj Mahal is an old Hindu temple taken over by Muslim rulers while I was visiting Lucknow (India) a couple of years ago.

Here's a scholarly paper: The Question of The Taj Mahal and additional information:

• Was The Taj Mahal a Vedic Temple?
• 103 points of evidence that the Taj Mahal was originally a vedic temple-palace (The Koran and The Kafir)
• 108 proofs that the Tejo Mahalaya was a shiva temple-palace

It's not conclusive proof, but pretty close, and I haven't seen any (Muslim) refutation of these arguments (name-calling yes, but refutation no). The non-alignment with Mecca and presence of Hindu symbols completely taboo in Islam are enough to question the Muslim tale. It wouldn't be the first or only case of Muslim conquest and claim that they created something which they actually appropriated or copied from others.