How to Succeed at Consulting. Nice take on how consultants can really help your company. [Blunt Force Trauma]

» Tom DeMarco describes the effects of a "rank & yank" culture very well in his book Slack.  It creates a culture of fear where no-one is prepared to help anyone else for fear of falling down and being one of the "yanks."

In his book The E-Myth revisited Michael Gerber talks about a totally different hiring policy.  Based around the idea of a turn-key operation with fully documented processes he recommends hiring not A-graders but people who have the skills to do the job and are willing to play the game you have created for them.

It's certainly a different way of thinking.

 

Wired: "Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing weblogs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms." [Scripting News]

» This is such a fantastic idea.

It does, however, raise some serious security issues.  At the moment there is no real trust issue with what goes in a weblog.  But if someone is really going to treat a weblog as their external brain pack then their going to have to be sure that no-one can tamper with it, thereby altering their perceived reality.

It puts me in mind of the Christopher Nolan film Memento (with Guy Pierce).

 

Hmm... Ya think?. See I think that all the cute little features that are being added to Radio are going to "in a few years time" bog it down terribly. However MT is a wad of perl code, which means it can be a point of departure for whatever anyone wants to do with it, without having to learn a proprietary "less than impeccably documented" scripting language (grumble grumble.)

However, initial ramp-up with radio can't be beat (to say nothing of the 40m of cloud space), so here I am.

I like radio alot, but I have to say the more compelling reason to use it over other blogging software is ease of setup & the year of service that comes with using radio.

As a developer, I've given up on trying to do really neat things with radio. It's just too hard to track down the documentation. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

» I think there are two different issues at play here: language and platform.

Is MT a better blogging system than Radio because it is a wad of Perl code rather than a wad of Usertalk code?  I'm not sure but I guess so if only because of Perls popularity.  Neither would be my first choice for writing a complex application but both are adequate to the task.

But the important issue for me is the platform.  I would class MT as an application and Radio (along with Frontier) as a platform.  In particular an ideal platform for delivering groupware applications. 

Here's an example from my experience:  About 5 years ago att UNL we were looking for a learning mangament system for lecturers to use to construct & deliver on-line courses.  A question which stymied most vendors we spoke to was:

"How do you handle a lecturer who wants to update his module whilst on a cycling holiday in the south of france?"

For the most part they had no answer to the disconnected scenario and had to bluff or fall back to legacy software "Oh they can edit stuff in Word and then C&P when they get back."  Right...

I can imagine constructing some very novel solutions to this kind of scenario with a combination of Radio & Frontier.  I can imagine some novel applications for k-logging too.

It's the flexibility and power of the platform that I'm betting on.

 

New activeRenderer.root Updates RSS Feed. Following UserLand's lead, I've created a new RSS feed where I log all modifications to activeRenderer. This way, aR users who subscribe to this feed can get an idea of which new aR parts are downloaded . [read more] [s l a m]

» This is a very good idea.

 

1. US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies - smh.com.au (53.8 points). US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies [( blogdex : recent )]

» I think this is a fantastic idea.  Everybody living withing a mile and a half of a senator, congressman, local polician, law enforcement officer, or corporate chief should sign up today.  Then immediately start a whispering campaign against their neighbour.

Heck I wish they'd bring it in over here in the UK.

Where do I sign up!?!