A Sailor Skis

Virtualization Tools Raise Your Innovation Awareness - Tools to help you in your innovation process.
The Muck That Slows You Down - Jeff Bezos observes “about 70% of a project’s time and effort is spent on tasks that…do not differentiate a product or a business” and Frank ruminates on this thought.
Top ten geek business myths - Myth busters from a VC.
The product vision test - Some advice on making sure your team benefits from the vision(s) you create.
7 Ways to Ensure Your E-mail Gets Read
How is Your Leadership Changing? - Margaret writes that in the last few years leaders have been falling back to the command and control style of leadership. The last section “Some questions to think about” can help you find if you’ve been using command and control leadership.
Internet’s future in 2020 debated - An article from the BBC on the Pew Internet survey on the future of the Internet.
Ian Pearson, Futurologist - Interview with Ian Pearson about how futurologists make predictions and some of his predictions for the next ten to fifteen years.
From the computer mouse to the newest Swiffer, IDEO is the firm behind the scenes

Next Level, IBM Innovation week is finished - Links to live blog entries summarizing sessions on innovation in the Marketing, Health, Public and Finance sectors from IBM’s Innovation Week event.
2007 Technology Predictions Part 1
The MCA Rod: Step 3 – Telephone Screening
XML Compression and Its Role in SOA Performance - Options for compressing XML messages in SOA applications for improved performance.
What Gartner Is Telling Your Boss - Describes what Gartner analysts told the CIO members of its Application Development Summit earlier this month.
DEMO.com Video & Archives - Videos of companies making the launches and announcements at DEMOfall 2006. It’s a good way to keep up on what’s new and where companies are going.
The structures and tensions required to create change
The Business Value of SOA-Based Agile IT Architectures - “The relationship between cost, benefits, and business value”
Architecture Design Question of the Week - Ron asks for suggested architectures to solve a very easily described problem. Good discussions on the comments.
Accessibility Strategy and Architecture - Link to the W3C’s new working draft spec on accessibility of rich Internet applications, plus Rich’s thoughts on the importance of accessibility of web applications.

Security Cleanup For Ajax Apps - A review of four tools to help discover security flaws in AJAX applications.
Domain Specific Languages: A summary of recent ideas & debates
The SPAMMED Architecture Framework - An introduction to another architecture framework.
Reduce code noise with Groovy - Uses code comparisons between Java and Groovy to demonstrate how Groovy can make for code that’s easier to write and read than traditional Java while still being bytecode compatible.
Ruby Developer Center - Yahoo!’s new Ruby development resource.
Code .NET 2.0, Build Java, Run Linux - An introduction to of Mainsoft’s new version of Grasshopper which compiles .NET IL into Java bytecode.
Transpective Dialogs for Learning - An interesting interviewing/learning process called transpection.
State of Web Development 2006 - Results of a survey completed by over 5000 web developers on what they’re doing now and what they expect to be doing in the future.
Best Practices/Take Aways from MIT User Innovation Lab Forum - Some of Patricia Seybold’s notes from Professor Eric von Hippel’s MIT Innovation Lab Forum.

Will It Be JRuby vs. IronPython? - Last week both Sun and Microsoft made announcements about supporting versions of two popular scripting languages (Ruby and Python respectively) on the Java VM and .Net CLR.
Think Like A ‘Disrupter‘ - An article from Forbes on the disruptive innovation business pattern.
Enterprise Architecture Roundtable Conference - Being held in Chicago on November 7th through the 9th.
How leaders take responsibility - I know a few “leaders” that I’d like to read this article! George writes about why leaders should take responsibility and what responsibilities leaders have.
20 Questions to ask when you have to write a proposal
The AJAX Paradigm Shift - Bob compares AJAX to some other software paradigm shifts.
SQL Server Everywhere: the Future of Lightweight Databases - A new lightweight database from Microsoft to hopefully replace Access as an embedded database.
The coming RIA wars: A roundup of the Web’s new face - Descriptions of Flex, XUL, OpenLaszlo and WPF/E and XBAP.
Insight and outlook, Part 7: What are the most influential trends facing developers today? - A DeveloperWorks article with predictions from IBM architects.
What do you need to know to be an IT Architect?
Business Books: Fall 2006 Preview - A preview of recommended books being released August through October.
101 Ways To Brew Up a Great Idea
Innovation Strategies: An Overview of Innovation Tactics Used by the World’s most Innovative Companies - An online book that “takes a look at some of the most well-known companies out there and their innovation tactics. The companies include Apple, IDEO, IBM, GE, eBay, Nokia, Procter & Gamble (and recently acquired Gillette), Phillips, Samsung, Target, IKEA, Toyota, and Virgin”.

Google Image Labeler: Collaborative Tagging Game - A new tool from Google to make image searching easier. Mostly it’s interesting for the approach of paying people to do a job that’s easy for humans but hard for computers (similar to Amazon’sMechanical Turk and Distributed Proofreaders).
Third-Party Testing: Risky Business? - Looks at two types of security tests (vulernability and penetration) and risks of each.
No Bug Database - How about fixing bugs when they’re found instead of entering them into a database to rot?
Testing: Coverage Reports Considered Dangerous - John Casey’s bad experience when relying on code coverage statistics to tell him if his unit tests were adequately testing his refactoring project.
Finding Great Developers - Joel’s strategies for finding and recruiting top developers.
30 minutes Flex test-drive for Java developers - Christophe Coenraets from Adobe put together a demonstration of what Flex can do. It’s as simple as deploying a .war file in your favoirte J2EE app server.
The Usual Suspects - An entertaining list of different types of “architects” you’ll run into (e.g. the PowerPoint architect, the Gartner Architect, the UML Architect).
Wanting to become an MCA : Step 1 – Self Assessment and Step 2 – Filling in the forms - Simon blogs about his initial experiences with the MS Certified Architect application process.
When “Near Enough” Isn’t - “Too often, the adequate blocks the best when it comes to problem solving.”
The SOA Magazine - A new online magazine all about SOA, published bi-monthly.

Make Gloom Part of Your Strategy - The need for using a pessimistic mind set when doing project risk assessment.
Design Futures: Part 1 - Thoughts on the future of design from a group of designers from Apple, Nike, Palm, Yahoo and more
Reason #39 That Nothing Gets Written For Phones (Yet) - Technical and usage problems mobile developers face.
Code In .Net, Run On J2EE - Mainsoft’s Visual MainWin for J2EE compiles C#, ASP.NET and VB.Net code to Java byte code.
TechTracker: XBRL - An introduction to the Extensible Business Reporting Language, a standardized language for business reporting.
Interview About Web 2.0 - An interview with Paul Graham.
Open source companies to watch - A list of 10 OSS software companies, what they do and why they’re worth keeping an eye on.
Developing Sales Savvy - “If you’ve ever tried to sell your ideas, proposals, or recommendations, you’ve used some sales savvy. The question isn’t whether you are a salesperson, but rather how good a salesperson you are”
Steve Martin has an hCard - Mostly interesting that microformats are making more inroads.
Announcing Tesseract OCR - Google open sources an older, but very effective, optical character recognition package.
COWS Ajax - An enhancement to Ajax that supports packaging a third party Ajax component into your own webapp that communicates with the third party’s site and deals with the cross-site browser limitations. For example, an USPS provided Ajax component that looks up zipcodes from the USPS site.
Language Wars - Joel talks about what platform/language to use for web app development.

August 2006 Survey: CIOs Put Out Help-Wanted Sign for Business-Savvy IT Professionals - Results on Cio Insight’s survey on what skills IT execs are looking for.
Event Driven Architecture - A nice description of EDA and some good links.
Alberta team studies artificial intelligence with poker-playing computer - Researchers are finding poker is better than chess for AI research.
Software + Services: An Architectural Perspective - A look at “the melding of SOA and Web 2.0 into a Software + Services model and the opportunity for innovation that it will generate”.
OO Primer - A nice lesson on the fundamentals of OO.
Architecture vs. Design Part 1 and Part II
Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006 and Luis Suarez’s thoughts
Software in the Next Five Years

Industry Use of OSGi Continues to Increase - Links to several initiatives using OSGi to allow dynamic updates to running systems.
Focus on the Customer - A blog entry on the importance of customer focus. The “Featuritis Curve” chart is nice.
Simplifying Enterprise Applications with Spring 2.0 and AspectJ
Are Architects the Key to Aligning IT to the Business? - Architecting in an agile development environment.
An Architect’s Perspective on Application Quality: Part 2
Practicing Generosity - The benefits of leaders displaying generosity with their time, respect, compliments, etc.
Facilitative Leadership - I really enjoyed this article. I expected it to be about meeting facilitation, but it’s really all about being a leader that encourages a team to be effective.
Widgets Everywhere… - An very quick observation about the emergence of widgets on the web.
Don’t let HR specify your Architect role - Links to a few descriptions of the architect role (none of whice are from HR folks).
Is there value in Microsoft Certifications? - A defense of technical certifications (including Microsoft’s architect certifications).

AOA – Appliance Oriented Architecture - The virtues of virtualization.
Technology options for Rich Internet Applications - Describes several RIA technologies and how to choose one.
Getting Management Buy-in For KM - A calloborative research project consisting of collection of user contributed suggestions on how to get management buy-in for KM projects.
Becoming an Architect - Bobby Woolf as put together a wiki page on why become an architect and resources for going about it.
Net Promoter Score - A simple process for finding how your customers feel about you and your products. Typically when a survey asks “How likely are you to recommend <some product/company/person/etc.>” it’s being used to calculate a Net Promoter score.
Apples to apples - The importance of using same units for comparisons in your presentations.
Don’t let these disasters happen to you: The top five engineering hints you’ll rarely hear
Ajax: Future of Web App Development - Some dangers and advantages for AJAX.
WS-* Specs and Status at a glance - A nice little graphic that shows the status of the various WS-* specs.
A Web Architect ?!?! - One more type of architect title and what technologies the role would need to understand.