Month: January 2005

and offshoring, work means much more than doing your job. 6 tips to keep you working: Do not plan to write code for your entire career – code is a commodity and can be created by others for much less money Learn to communicate effectively – develop your public speaking and writing skills Develop people… Continue reading in times of outsourcing

Linguists, however, are slowly coming to discover the joys of a free and searchable corpus of maybe 10 trillion words that is available to anyone with an internet connection: the world wide web.

I took part in last week’s STC web seminar on pre-emptive project planning by John Hedtke. Found it practical and useful. His main points: Plan ahead The real problem is the projects you don’t know about that land on your desk suddenly and without warning. Keep it simple Use a simple excel sheet to track… Continue reading pre-emptive project planning

stumbled across this entry at Language Log: […] The Elements of Style offers prejudiced pronouncements on a rather small number of topics, frequently unsupported, and unsupportable, by evidence. It simply isn’t true that the constructions they instruct you not to use are not used by good writers. Take just one illustrative example, the advice not… Continue reading Throw out that Strunk & White…

it’s sunny and cold. just right for jogging in the woods. did about 3km. it feels good to have the cold fresh air rushing in. Maxwell is right: Motivation comes when you get started. i’ve started cleaning up my olde laptop (4+ years old). there’s no space left on the hard disk. it doesn’t shut… Continue reading beautiful day

At times it is useful to send a text message… Some friends keep asking how i manage to send text messages to their cell phones even though i don’t have one myself. Well, here’s the secret… (oh nooo, i can see all of my faithful geek readers yawning) I use the text services at sms.de… Continue reading sending sms via the web

The Economist on software development. the problem: 30% of all software projects are cancelled, nearly half come in over budget, 60% are considered failures by the organisations that initiated them, and nine out of ten come in late the solution: better software tools and processes The three big industry trends—lifecycle management, testing and open source—come… Continue reading managing complexity

It’s Sunday evening and I can’t think of anything blog-worthy to write. Feel tired and restless. Weather has been unusually warm for January. Yesterday felt a bit like spring. Beautiful sunshine and about 15 degrees warm. For those of you that are waiting for snow, here’s a snow photo I took 3 weeks ago: or… Continue reading nothing much

interesting read: Joe Winchester’s JDJ article, Who Needs “Hardship Programming”? quote: Let’s take cars, for example – my attitude is that when they break I take them to the mechanic; what’s fun isn’t so much tinkering with the engine myself and gaining some kind of machismo pride in doing so, it’s the journeys I take… Continue reading about hardship programming

Massimo Rocchi will be performing at the Tabourettli from 11th Jan to 12th Feb. The CD “äUä” is great… and it was at the same time my first formal introduction to Swiss German, when I was still staying far away from the Swiss German Kantons in southern Switzerland. I particularly like his observations on language… Continue reading Massimo Rocchi in Basel