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What's Your Favorite Stress Reliever?

2009-11-08T03:36:00Z

via lifehacker.com

A Time for Relaxation, Vol. 1: Guided Relaxation Techniques for Wellness [CD on Demand]

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Fancy a job at Google?

2009-11-08T00:52:27Z

Shared by Mariela
similar questions in http://bit.ly/qLOB2

To get one you might need to know why manhole covers are round – or how many golf balls fit in a school bus

Seattle-based interview coach Lewis Lin recently posted a list of questions typically fired at job applicants to Google. Here's a selection:

1 Why are manhole covers round?

2 You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

3 How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

4 Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

5 In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

6 If you look at a clock and the time is 3.15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer is not zero!)

7 How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

8 Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for 17 minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it's only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in one minute, another in two, the third in five, and the slow poke takes 10 to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

9 How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

10 You're the captain of a pirate ship, and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?

blog.seattleinterviewcoach.com

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The Beginner’s Guide To Minimalist Travel

2009-10-30T14:30:11Z

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Karol Gajda of Ridiculously Extraordinary.

“Is that all your stuff?”

While embarking on my current 100+ day sojourn I’ve been asked that question almost daily. Most people take more stuff for a 3 day weekend break than I’ve taken on this long trip.

If you’ve struggled to pack what you need in a carry-on I will show you the light. It’s not difficult and you don’t have to do everything at once. Remember the old cliché, slow and steady wins the race.

1) The first step to minimalist travel is to use a smaller carry-on.

If you don’t have enough room to pack all your stuff you’ll be forced to eliminate the unnecessary.

Personally, I use a 32L backpack, the Deuter Futura 32. If you can’t grasp the small size of a 32 liter pack, it’s about the same volume as most school backpacks.

I also carry a small messenger bag just large enough to fit a paperback book, an iPod, a small bag of almonds, and my Asus Eee 1000HE, a 10″, 3 pound netbook PC.

I can actually fit all of my things in my backpack, but the messenger bag is great to take out while exploring during the day.

The biggest benefit of a backpack vs a rolling carry-on is a backpack is much easier to carry around.

2) No matter how long your trip, pack no more than 3 shirts in neutral colors so everything matches everything else.

This way you never have to think about what to wear. If your shirts, pants, and jacket always match you simply wear whatever is clean.

I have 2 black T shirts, 1 orange T shirt, and 1 pair of khaki colored convertible pants (which I obviously wear on the plane and everywhere else).

In case it gets cold, I also have a black long-sleeved shirt in addition to my black jacket.

As for shoes, 1 pair of black shoes to wear and 1 pair of flip flops (in my case, Vibram FiveFingers) to pack.

Dark colors are also better for visible cleanliness reasons. If you spill sauce on light colored clothing it stands out. Unfortunately I couldn’t find dark colored convertible pants that fit me (I’m 6′5″), so I had to settle on khaki.

3) Multi-use soap minimizes your liquids considerably.

Dr Bronner’s organic fair-trade liquid soap can be used to wash your body, shampoo your hair, brush your teeth, and clean your clothes. Buy it in large bottles and fill smaller 3 ounce airline-approved bottles to pack in your carry-on.

3 ounces of Dr Bronner’s soap lasts me about 4 weeks and yes, I use it for everything.

If Dr Bronner’s isn’t available in your area you have 2 options:

First, check out your local health food store and ask them if they carry organic vegetable based soap. This will be similar to Dr Bronner’s.

Second, every outdoor/camping store I’ve been to carries something called camper’s (or camping) soap. This soap is also a good alternative to Dr Bronner’s.

4) Wash clothes in the sink.

Limiting your clothing to just 3 T-shirts means you’ll have to do laundry every few days. Wash them in the bathroom sink (using Dr Bronner’s or similar soap) and hang them up to dry overnight with an elastic clothesline. A common elastic clothesline is the Rick Steves brand available on Amazon and at most outdoors stores.

Your clothes will be ready by morning. If anything is still slightly damp in the morning wear it anyway as it will dry quickly. Read more: Wash
your clothes in a bag like I do.

5) If worst comes to worst, buy it.

Pack the bare minimum, but be prepared to buy what you need if you forget or can’t pack something. Unless you’re heading to the middle of nowhere, you will be able to find whatever it is you’re looking for.

Travel is supposed to be fun. If you’re bogged down with luggage it can be a real drag. Who likes lugging suitcases up stairs, escalators, elevators, and around town?

Packing light makes travel simple, so you can focus on having a good time, and not on how you’re going to avoid paying airline checked baggage fees. :)

Karol Gajda blogs about Freedom, Health, Travel, and Life at RidiculouslyExtraordinary.com. To read more about his quest to help 100 people achieve Ridiculously Extraordinary Freedom subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you like this post, please Digg it!

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Elsewhere:

On mnmlist: The beauty of small and The 400-word promise

'Kurbaan Hua' music video from Kurbaan

2009-11-07T16:05:00Z

via img36.yfrog.com

Kurbaan (Cd)

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Ten gadgets to make Google Wave more productive - and fun!

2009-11-06T19:00:00Z

It's still early days for Google Wave but already there are a large number of Gadgets and Robots being developed. If you don't know the difference, Gadgets are local, client-side (as in they run on your computer), Javascript and HTML. Robots run remotely on another server.

Gadgets change how you interact with waves, whereas robots process your input in some way or pull in data from another service (such as Twitter or Wikipedia). Robots are generally more powerful, but Gadgets are more fun.

This article is all about Gadgets. There will be another one on Robots soon: you folk that want to aggregate your Twitter and RSS feeds into Wave will have to wait a little longer! It's surprisingly hard to find good gadgets for Wave at the moment, so hold onto this guide even if you've not yet been invited to the beta.

Note: You should bear in mind that these are all 'beta' gadgets. A lot of them work just fine but you might hit some bugs along the way. The 'direct import links' might also change at any time, so feel free to report any broken links!
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Ten gadgets to make Google Wave more productive - and fun! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GoogleWave - Google - Download Squad - Twitter - RSS

Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data

2009-11-07T00:00:00Z

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.

Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.

The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.

Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.

Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Download Squad - Firefox - Add-on - Mozilla Firefox - Google

Follow the Money: The Best and Worst Places to Work by Average Salary

2009-11-03T22:33:45Z

Not happy with your present salary? Wondering what city holds the gold at the end of the rainbow? We’ve done the research for you. Above you will find the lowest, average, and highest incomes by profession in the USA. So before you move to Scranton for that writing job, take a look above.

Next: Computers and Mathematics

Thumbs down! Firefox users can now "dislike" posts on Facebook

2009-11-05T18:00:00Z

Filed under: Social Software, Humor

You might have seen the various petitions on Facebook to add a "dislike" feature to the site, to complement the "like" option in the News Feed. Well, Facebook hasn't listened. However, if you're a Firefox user, you can add a thumbs-down feature to FB with (what else?) a Facebook Dislike add-on.

It sounds kind of silly to keep track of your own dislikes, but it turns out that the extension feeds them into a database, so they'll be visible to anyone else who has it installed. The dislikes blend in seamlessly with the Facebook News Feed, appearing right below regular likes. It looks as if the members of those pro-dislike Facebook groups should be downloading Firefox and checking this extension out.

[via CNET]

Thumbs down! Firefox users can now "dislike" posts on Facebook originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Download Squad - Firefox - Mozilla Firefox - Add-on - Facebook

Sketch Your Search

2009-11-05T01:15:54Z

GazoPa is a service that analyses the content of each image — the shapes, colors, tones and lines that make it up — rather than just inferring it’s content based on it’s file name and the surrounding content as most traditional images searches do.

However, GazoPa also adds a few interesting new strings to it’s bow.

Firstly, GazoPa allows you to sketch a rough image directly into the search panel which it will then try to match.

Of course, that’s OK in theory, but does it actually work?...

via sitepoint.com

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The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something

2009-11-04T06:56:28Z

“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” - Albert Einstein

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.

I’ve even seen tutorials claiming to teach a skill in just a few hours. Pretty soon we’ll be demanding to know how to do something in seconds.

Instant mastery of skills and knowledge! Hey presto!

Unfortunately, the reality is something a little less magical. Or maybe that’s a fortunate thing.

There’s only one way to become good at something:

1. First, you must learn it by reading or listening to others who know how to do it, but most especially by doing.
2. Then do some more. At this point, you’ll start to understand it, but you’ll suck. This stage could take months.
3. Do some more. After a couple of years, you’ll get good at it.
4. Do some more. If you learn from mistakes, and aren’t afraid to make mistakes in the first place, you’ll go from good to great.

It takes anywhere from 6-10 years to get great at something, depending on how often and how much you do it. Some estimate that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but I think it varies from person to person and depends on the skill and other factors.

Want to be a great writer? It’s possible to be great within a few years, if you have the God-given talent of Fitzgerald or Shakespeare, but most of us toil for over a decade and are still trying to get better. We’re still learning, to this day, and if we look back on our first few years of writing — of any kind — we’ll tell you we sucked (for the most part) back then.

Want to be a great blogger? Same deal. I’ve been doing it for almost three years, and I’m still only competent. Gruber’s been doing it for, like, 7 years and he’s still only … well, he’s pretty great by now. You have to do it, make mistakes, learn, really begin to understand it, and someday, if you stick with it, you’ll be great.

There’s no one who is great at his profession who hasn’t been doing it for at least 6 years — no designer, no programmer, no carpenter, no architect, no surgeon, no teacher, no musician, no artist … you get the point. I dare you to name one. Most have been doing it for over a decade, and are still looking to improve.

It takes desire, it takes drive, it takes lots and lots of doing.

So here’s the thing: don’t get discouraged if you’re just starting out. Have fun, like we all did in the beginning. If you have fun, you’ll learn to love it, and THAT’S when it clicks. When you love something, you’ll want to do it all the time, sometimes late at night and often, you’ll jump out of bed and want to do it before you move your morning bowels.

THAT’S how you get great. By loving it so much your morning bowel movement takes second seat.

“Everybody has talent, it’s just a matter of moving around until you’ve discovered what it is.” - George Lucas

Find that desire. Do it, don’t just read about it. Don’t buy a single product or book or magazine that claims to teach you something in minutes, hours, days. They’re lying to your face, with a hand in your pocket at the same time.

Do it, keep doing it, then keep doing it some more. It’s the only way to get great, but the good news: anyone can do it. It just takes some time and some doing. Hey presto.

When the world says, “Give up,”
Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.”
~Author Unknown

—

On mnmlist: The sweet science of less mail & Simplicity is the path, not just the destination

Forget malware infections, hackers want to ransom your files and devices

2009-11-03T22:00:00Z

Filed under: Security, News

These days, cybercriminals seem to have one thing on their mind: your money. Gone are the days where a virus would simply infect your .exe files and make your system hard - or damn near impossible - to use.

It's bad enough that the bulk of the malware and malicious web scripting we're confronted with on daily basis wants to trick us into installing rogue antivirus software - which tries to trick users into paying to register the useless scareware. Now, they're moving up to hostage taking.

Yep. Digital hostages could be the next big thing in cybercrime, whether it be your iPhone or your important .DOC files.

Ars Technica reported recently about one hacker who exploited vulnerabilities in jailbroken iPhones to gain access, alter the lockscreen to display the warning in the screenshot, and ask for €5 to leave users alone. He also promised to provide a link to instructions on how to prevent this particular hack.

In this particular case, the hacker had a change of heart and has now posted said removal instructions at no charge. If we hear about one, chances are good there are dozens more - many of whom won't show this kind of courtesy after-the-fact.

iPhone aren't the only thing under attack. Computer Associates have discovered a new ransomware variant called LoroBot which targets a PC user's data - specifically doc, xls, zip, mp3, txt, docx, xlsx, and others. Once a system has been infected, the malware then goes to work encrypting those files so you can no longer access them.

The only way to gain access again? Why, to pay the piper, of course. $100 will get you the necessary file to undo the encryption. Fortunately, CA has also provided a tool to do it for free (download here) if you've been victimized. Rogue antivirus apps were once fairly uncommon and now they're everywhere. Could ransomware be the next big thing?

One thing is for sure: if you're running Windows you're using the most popular OS in the world - and because of its massive market share, it's the number one target for malware. Make sure your system is fully updated and you're running a good antivirus app.

Forget malware infections, hackers want to ransom your files and devices originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Download Squad - antivirus - Malware - Microsoft Windows - Security

How to Really Browse Without Leaving a Trace

2009-11-02T17:30:00Z

Think that your browser's private mode keeps your browsing completely private? Not so! More often than not, you're still leaving traces of your browsing session behind, and today we'll tell you how to get rid of them for truly private browsing.

The Problem

Keeping track of where you've been doesn't end with simply clearing out your browsing history and other private data—your operating system continues to store more information about what you've been up to, like cached DNS lookups and worse, Flash cookies that don't get wiped. It's worth noting that you won't be able to erase all of your tracks all the time—if you are browsing stuff that you shouldn't at work, you can still get caught by a system admin even if the history on your PC is gone. On your own PC, however, here's how we suggest boosting your browsing privacy (complete with a couple of scripts to automate the process).

Cached DNS Entries

Every time you browse to a web page, your PC has to request the IP Address for that web site from your default DNS server, and then caches them locally on your machine for a while to speed up future access to that web site—even in a private browsing session.

You can see these for yourself by opening up a command prompt and typing in ipconfig /displaydns to see the full list of cached DNS entries, then open up a new private browsing session and go to a site you don't normally access. If you re-run the command again, you'll see that it's been added to the DNS caching, telling anybody with access to your machine that you've been watching the PowerPuff Girls. Cleaning the cache is easy, just type in ipconfig /flushdns to wipe everything.

Worse: Flash Cookies

The secret tracking information doesn't stop with simple DNS entries, which don't really tell anybody much about what exactly you were looking at—but the hidden Flash cookies will tell a whole different story.
You can see these entries by heading into the %appdata%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects directory, and once you are done panicking, you can simply delete them all to get rid of them—for now.

Clear Flash Cookies in Firefox

Luckily Firefox's great extension support makes it really simple to get rid of those awful Flash cookies with the previously mentioned Objection extension. You'll have to download the development release and use an about:config hack to make it compatible with the latest versions of Firefox, but once you've done that, installed the extension, and rebooted Firefox, you should be able to head into the settings to make short work of those Flash cookies.

The Settings tab gives you an option to automatically remove the Local Shared Objects on browser open or close, the File details tab will allow you to take a look through all of the local cookies already stored, and the Flash player settings tab gives you access to a bunch of options, including telling Flash to never store information.

Run CCleaner After Browsing

When it comes to cleaning up all of the extra traces that applications leave behind, nothing quite equals using CCleaner to get rid of all those little bits that really shouldn't be there anymore, regardless of which browser you are using. Just make sure to open up CCleaner and look for Adobe Flash Player in the Applications tab, and keep that box checked.

Once you've made sure that your CCleaner settings are perfect, you can create a shortcut to run CCleaner silently with a simple double-click on an icon, or even assign a hotkey for quick junk removal. If you are using Windows 7 or Vista, you'll probably notice that there's a UAC prompt every time you run the shortcut-you can create shortcuts that bypass UAC, or just disable it entirely instead. If you are even more paranoid, you can set up CCleaner to run on a schedule, automatically.

Create a Batch File to Clean Everything

Your best bet is to create a simple batch file to run after your browsing session, to make sure your browser cache, Flash cookie cache, and DNS entries are cleaned out. You could get fancy and create an AutoHotkey script to do the same thing, but a batch file should do the trick for regular people. Just create a new plain text file and save it as a .bat file (e.g., browserclean.bat), then add the following to the file, noting that the /AUTO switch tells CCleaner to run silently.

"C:\Program Files\CCleaner\CCleaner.exe" /AUTO
ipconfig /flushdns

Once you've created the file and saved it into some useful location, you can create a shortcut on your desktop, quick launch bar, or pin it to your start menu.

Create an AutoHotkey Script to Automatically Clean Everything

If your geek skills are a little more advanced, you can simply create a script that opens up your browser in private browsing mode, and then waits until you've closed the last window to run CCleaner and flush the DNS cache. Just create a new AutoHotkey script and paste in the following script, modifying the paths for your own install locations.

Run, C:\path\to\chrome.exe –incognito
WinWait, – Google Chrome
WinWaitClose ; Wait for Google Chrome to close
Run, C:\path\to\ccleaner.exe /AUTO
Run, cmd /c "ipconfig /flushdns"
MsgBox, Browsing Session is Cleaned.

The first line in the script will launch Google Chrome using incognito mode—you could use Firefox instead, but you'll need to install the Private Browsing Command Line Flag extension and use the -private argument. The WinWait lines tell AutoHotkey to wait until the browser session has closed (you can change out "Google Chrome" for "Mozilla Firefox" if you need to), and then the script continues by running your cleaner utilities.

So what's your take? Will you take the extra steps to keep your privacy intact, or is wiping the history enough for you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The How-To Geek uses Google Chrome incognito mode as an excellent cache-free web development tool. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.

[Humor] Enterprise Architecture Made Easy

2009-11-03T23:52:00Z

Enterprise Architecture Made Easy

via: Geek and Poke

Add me on Twitter! Come follow my daily antics, links, tips and more @rajneeshgarg on Twitter!
AdvertisementCode Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

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Configure Google Apps For Your Domain

2009-10-28T16:58:00Z

There’s always lots of interest in posts about Google Apps, a lesser-known way to put Google services behind your domain name. This morning at Lifehacker I ran down some of the most important Google Apps settings, and how to do things like map multiple domains to one account, create users and groups, and configure your catch-all domain email address. Here’s more on how to Trick Out Google Apps for Your Domain.

Mini planets

2009-11-04T00:26:47Z

Shared by Phil
Photoshop? Really sweet lenses? How do they do it?

Replace "watch.swf" with "warp.swf" in YouTube and see the results

2009-11-04T00:21:33Z

Shared by sami
funny

Comments

Decisions With Incomplete Knowledge

2009-10-27T08:00:01Z

Yesterday I made dozens of decisions, on topics as varied as Dilbert licensing, landscape design, marketing, and investing. In all cases I was operating with incomplete information, which is typical. As a practical matter, most decisions happen without the benefit of all the data you would like.

It made me reflect on all of the little rules one develops over the years for handling decisions without the benefit of sufficient data. You always start with the easy questions, such as...

What do the experts say you should do?
How much experience do the experts have with this question?
Does the expert have a conflict of interest?
What's the worst thing that could happen?
How easy is it to switch course if you choose wrong?
What information can you find on the Internet?
Who has made this choice before? Were they satisfied?
If I delay, will I learn something more that is useful?
Is there a way to do a limited test?
Does the decision make logical and mathematical sense?
Do the experts make this choice with their own money?
What do the well-informed people in my situation usually do?
What does the competing vendor say about this vendor?
Have I seen all of the alternatives?

Those are the questions with relatively clear or quantitative answers. It's the next category of questions that intrigue me, because they involve pattern recognition, and I can't always tell whether I am being influenced by fear and bias, or keen intuition informed by my experience. The questions in this category look like this...

Does this situation follow a pattern I've seen in scams?
Is someone giving answers that seem intentionally vague?
Is information conspicuously missing?
Is someone trying to rush me?
Could someone unscrupulous easily take advantage of me?
Have I regretted this sort of decision before?
How do I imagine other people will react to this decision?
If the expert is so smart, why isn't he rich?

What questions would you add to the list?

Don’t Miss These 5 Things About Google Wave!

2009-11-03T08:00:27Z

A few nights ago as I was playing on the wave, I learned how to embed video, MP3s, websites and many other very fun things that would make any self proclaimed geek super excited.

Then, my dear friend, Fernando Fonseca @fjfonseca, invited me to wave with him where he taught me that I was doing it all the hard way. I found out that Fernando spent two full days learning all the shortcuts and I was so impressed with his knowledge that I asked him to write this guest post so we can all learn together.

Thank you, Fernando, for being so gracious and taking the time to write this great post. I hope everyone on Twitter follows you after reading this. You are a wealth of information.

Keep in mind that in order for these links to work, you have to be logged into the wave.

Google’s much talked about Google Wave is here and every day new people are receiving their much sought after invite. Now that you are a part of the Wave here are five things you absolutely can’t miss:

1. Read the Extensions Gallery Wave and install all of the Extensions. (Except the Extensions installer unless you are a über geek developer).

2. Add the following contacts that will never talk to you but are worth having around:

• easypublic@appspot.com – Every time time you add easy public to any wave that wave becomes public.

• aunt-rosie@appspot.com – This is the Robot that allows you to speak with people from all over the world even if they don’t speak English. It translates everything you write into the chosen target language.

• wavegroupy@appspot.com – This one allows you to aggregate your public wave into a group or groups (up to 3). A list of already existing groups on the Wave can be found by clicking here.

• wikifier@appspot.com – Having an argument about something on a wave? With Wikifier around you can add instant Wikipedia Power to your discussion.

3. Find people near you or from that dream land you always wanted to live in. Just add yourself to the “Where is everyone from? The Mapping Way” wave and add yourself to the map (or just snoop around).

4. Add Sound and Video to your wave and share it with others.

To add video to a wave is as easy as getting the YouTube link and paste it. As soon as you do a little yellow lamp icon will appear and you have the option to Embed Video. Voilá!

To add music to your wave you can do this in two different ways:

• Use the Mp3 Player Gadget: Just click on the Gadget icon (that’s the green jigsaw puzzle) and paste the following code: http://www.waverz.com/waveplayer/My_MP3_URL (where My_MP3_URL is where your MP3 file is hosted) Looking for MP3 that you can use? The Internet Archive has a huge collection of free music. Go and explore!

• If you want to play some track or set that is hosted on Soundcloud just use this gadget: http://wave-projects.googlecode.com/hg/gadgets/wave-soundcloud-player.xml

5. Invite up to 6 friends to a wave and have a video conference with them. If you installed all the Extensions you will have available one that goes by the name of “Video Chat Experience” . Take a seat, wait for the others to do the same and start the communication experience. Hope this helps in some way to get you started on the wave. If you need help you can find find me lounging on this Public Wave that I have setup. I’ve also set up this Newbie Wave to help out new wavers.

Don’t be a stranger! Come by and visit. Or add me to your contacts: quarter.bit [at] googlewave.com

Guest Post Author: Fernando Fonseca

Figuring out what your company is all about

2009-11-01T21:51:31Z

What is your company about?

Recently I got inspired by Kathy Sierra, whose blog Creating Passionate Users and Head First series of books revolutionized developer education. She kept saying the same thing again and again: help your users be awesome.

Kathy taught me that if you can’t explain your mission in the form, “We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,” you are not going to have passionate users. What’s your tagline? Can you fit it into that template?

It took us nine years, but we finally worked out what Fog Creek Software is all about, which I’ll tell you in a moment, but first, some backstory.

In the early days, we were all about making a great place to be a software developer in New York City.

Yep, that was all there was to it. Almost every software job in the city was terrible. You had a choice of which kind of terrible. Want to wear a suit and work long hours under crummy conditions? Take a job at a bank. Want to report to a manic-depressive creative who demands that you stretch HTML in ways that would have you put to death, in certain countries? Take a job at a media company. Want to work 24/7 in a basement with water pipes dripping on your head and get paid in worthless stock options? Take your pick of the revenue-free dotcom startups.

Why New York, then? There are lots of great product companies where software developers are treated very well in Redmond, Washington. But I was sick of trying to live in lesser cities. Sure, the Seattle area is beautiful, and green, and clean, and possesses great coffee, and I understand that there are even a couple of grocery stores open late now. But I’m staying in New York, because it’s the greatest city in the world.

I gave up the search, and decided to start a company with my buddy Michael Pryor. Making a nice place to work was our primary objective. We had private offices, flew first class, worked 40 hour weeks, and bought people lunch, Aeron chairs, and top of the line computers. We shared our ingenious formula with the world:

The tagline was “building the company where the best software developers want to work.” It was, to say the least, awkward. It didn’t make for a good elevator pitch. It didn’t really have the right format. “Abercrombie and Fitch: building the apparel store where the hottest teenagers will want to work.” Who cares? Not the hot teenagers, I’ll tell you that.

Anyway we accomplished that goal. Cross it off the list. What’s next? We needed a new mission statement.

And it has to be something of the form, “We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING.”

Bells went off. Everything we’ve done successfully has one thing in common: It’s all about helping software developers be awesome at making software.

That includes Joel on Software, Stack Overflow, all the books I’ve been writing, the conferences like DevDays and Business of Software, the Jobs Board and Stack Overflow Careers.

It includes our flagship product, FogBugz, which is all about giving developers tools that gently guide them from good to great. It’s the software implementation of the philosophy I’ve been writing about for a decade, lacking only one thing: the feature to replace exceptions with return values, while adding Hungarian prefixes to all variable names. THAT IS A JOKE, PEEPLE. Put DOWN the bazooka.

Helping you make more awesome software is why I write endlessly about what we’re doing at Fog Creek, despite the fact that people accuse me of shilling. I’m not writing to promote our products. You don’t have to buy our products to get the benefit of reading about my experience designing them and building them and selling them. I’m writing to share some of my experiences in case they can help you make better software.

Our focus on helping developers explains why one of our early products, CityDesk, flopped: it had nothing to do with software developers. And it explains why another of our products, Fog Creek Copilot, only found a market in the niche of software developers doing tech support.

So, here you go, the new tagline: “We help the world’s best developers make better software.”

Going through this exercise made it easy to figure out what belongs in future versions of FogBugz and what doesn’t. In particular, we’re adding source control and code review features to FogBugz, using Mercurial, the best open-source distributed version control system. Everything that helps developers make better software belongs in FogBugz: project planning, project management, bug tracking, and customer service.

It took almost ten years, but I think we finally got the mission for the next ten nailed.

Optional Advertainment: If you’ve got a moment, check out this 4½ minute trailer for Make Better Software, a new video training series we’ve been working on for more than a year. It’s the video edition of Joel on Software and fits perfectly with our agenda of helping developers make great software.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

What is DMZ ?

2009-11-03T01:24:00Z

What is DMZ ?

The name DMZ comes from the military term, Demilitarized Zone, we only wanted to have it’s proper TLA (Three Letter Acronym) so it would sound cooler. In the military, the DMZ is a pretty dangerous place to be. Best case you have guns pointing at you from both sides, worst case they’re shooting you to smithereens.

On a network, we create a DMZ to locate components that will interact with users or machines that are in an untrusted zone. Why ? Because the risk that these components are compromised is much bigger and if they would be in our trusted (internal) network, the havoc when it happened would be immense. The DMZ gives us control over the traffic that is allowed to and from the boxes, from both sides.

via DMZ dos and dont's

via nileshbabu.posterous.com

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