Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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Monday, September 29, 2008
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
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Saturday, September 27, 2008
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Friday, September 26, 2008
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Thursday, September 25, 2008
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Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have…It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it. ?-Steve Jobs
How Insurance Has Become a Well-Spring of Green Innovation, Mindy S. Lubber
An short but interesting entry on some innovations coming from the insurance industry [that can be seen] as being 'green'. An interesting quote:
While the specter of more extreme weather events ... has convinced some insurers to pull the plug on providing coverage in vulnerable areas, many others are seizing the moment by developing new products and services that will reduce losses for both customers and themselves.
Some interesting links in the entry: From Risk to Opportunity: Insurer Responses to Climate Change, 'Pay-as-you-drive' insurance catching on, Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance, Report: Insurance Initiatives Tackling Climate Change Reach New High
The difference between corporate and business unit innovation, Jeffrey Phillips
Jeffrey discusses how innovation is different from a corporate level vs. the business unit level. An interesting quote that I think sums up most of his point:
There should be an easy answer to this - a corporate team focused on longer term disruptions that are suggested by the business units that simply don't have the time or bandwidth to focus on what's next, and a corporate team that provides trends and strategy insights to business unit teams to extend their visibility. A corporate team can provide resources and funding to assist the business units with their mid and longer term innovation needs and take on the creation of new markets or "blue oceans". What the business units often struggle with is the knowledge that they need to innovate, but simply don't have the people, time or resources to innovate consistently. That seems like an obvious answer - so why isn't this being engaged more effectively?
Innovation in a strategic vacuum - not exactly a recipe for success, The Innovator's Sweet Spot
A short entry on the need to have a strategy for innovations to fit into. An interesting quote:
... The whole experience served to remind me how difficult it is to create meaningful innovation in a strategic vacuum. It can work but only if the company has a single decision maker in charge of the business who can decide if the innovation is what he or she wants. Otherwise, it is very easy to go around in ever decreasing circles, eventually disappearing in a puff of obsolescence.
Will financial meltdown slow IT innovation?, Bill Snyder
A blog entry about how the current crisis in the financial sector will effect the spending of money and direction of projects in the short term. An interesting quote:
... So expect those companies to invest in advanced cloud computing as a way to scale on an as-needed basis, she says. Major firms are already planning $1 billion and $2 billion cloud initiatives ...
Interesting link in the entry: How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown
Lessons on Innovation from Richard Bransson, Daniel Lock
A quick entry about some lessons learned form Richard Bransson and company. Some of the lessons that Daniel mentions are:
- Innovation is purposeful and systematic
- Is simple and focused
- Starts small and builds up, adjusting along the way
- Aims at being the best. Not so much the biggest but aim for being the best in the field.
Another good link on Daniel's site: Thoughts on Innovation
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Other stuff
- GPS Spoofing, Schneier on Security
- Building a custom thread pool (series, part 3): incorporating work stealing queues, Joe Duffy
- Normalization for databases is like Dependency Injection for code, Mladen Prajdic
- Back To Basics: Algorithms and Going Back To Virtual School, Scott Hanselman
- Microsoft/Cray Press Release and DHTML Behaviors Archive, Microsoft Downloads
- The Best Media Converter that All In One Multimedia Application, bspcn
- Standardizing the Devices Profile for Web Services and VSX: How I Extent VS and VSX: Debugger Extensibility, Jeffery Schlimmer
- Encrypted File Systems, Miguel de Icaza
- Did you know... How to create an Object ID to keep track of your objects? - #314, Sara Ford
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Tuesday, September 16, 2008
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Monday, September 15, 2008
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Sunday, September 14, 2008
My motivational quote for today:
"... it's what you do and not what you say, if your not part of the future then get out of the way." - Peaceful World, John Mellencamp
Other stuff
- Running VisualSVN Server for Subversion Source Control, Rick Strahl
- The Two ALT.NET Criterion, Dave Laribee
- WCF And Large Amounts Of Data, Davy Brion
- Use INFER.EXE to Create XML Schemas, Eric White
- On being stateful, Joe Duffy
- Delaying Decisions, Steven Smith
- Book Review: The Productive Programmer, Jim Holmes
- Writing a .NET Security Exploit PoC, IKVM.Net
- Practicing CI or TDD does not make you agile, Matt Berther
- Modelling: Can Microsoft succeed where others have failed?, Tim Anderson
Web stuff
Debugging stuff
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- Dew Drop - September 14, 2008 and Dew Drop - September 13, 2008, Alvin Ashcraft
- LINKBLOG for September 13, 2008 and LINKBLOG for September 12, 2008, Arjan Zuidhof
- Link Listing - September 12, 2008, Christopher Steen
- Weekly Link Post 59, Rhonda Tipton
- Afternoon Coffee 174, Harry Pierson
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Not tech related.
This past month has been REALLY busy - my project that I've been working on for the past 5 or 6 months moves to production this week ... maybe more on that after the release ... and the Safeco buyout from Liberty Mutual is due to close any day now, which I'm sure will bring a fresh round of changes and opportunities at work.
Besides working more hours and days than usual, I'm trying to train for the Seattle Marathon - funny it is sponsored by Amica (Rhode Island) and not Safeco (Seattle, WA). My long run this week will be 12 miles ... which is going to be hard. The three weekly maintenance runs are getting a little easier (Wed, Thur, Fri) - but by the Fri run my pace is slower than Wed's pace.
My list of things I want to do when I get free time or weekends back is growing - (I'm now building a backlog ;-) ... more on that later.
The pictures from our Alaska cruise are currently out on SkyDrive at: Alaska Cruise - which we took early August on Celebrity's Infinity. The weather was half rainy half good, so all it all it was a great experience ... ate too much and drank too much - to the point of gaining 8 pounds in 7 days (all of which has come off now with the marathon training).
Oh yeah, and I've fallen behind on my blog reading ... lower in the priority queue right now, will be higher next week.
“If you’re going to do something that’s never been done before
- which is basically what innovation is - people are going to
misunderstand it just because it’s new.” - Jeff Bezos
The Paradox of Innovation, Mitch Ditkoff
This is a thought provoking entry about the paradox between 'systems and structure' and innovation. Makes you think a little about how many innovative environments evolve over time ... to something that isn't as innovative as it once was - seemingly due to the structure that has been put up to keep the 'innovative environment' going. An interesting quote from the entry:
Remember, there's a big difference between Six Sigma and Innovation. Six Sigma is about reducing variability. Innovation is about increasing it-- and that often means allowing the kind of "messiness" that process-mavens interpret as a problem needing to be fixed, rather than a pre-condition to breakthrough and the resulting commercialization of that breakthrough that most people refer to as "innovation."
Fostering Innovation: The need for cross pollination, oblanchard
An interesting entry on how people from different backgrounds and disciplines can create synergy. There are some interesting examples mentioned in the entry. An interesting quote from it:
Cross pollination doesn’t just introduce new ideas and methodologies into otherwise rigid systems, they transform them. In this transformation is the catalyst of any organization’s evolution, whether it is a marketing group, a product design group, or an entire corporation.
Innovation is not a brilliant idea, Dimarkin
This is a short entry on how 'innovation' is not just a simple brilliant idea, but a process that has four steps:
- Creating
- Advancing
- Refining
- Executing
An interesting quote from the entry:
Innovation is not a brilliant idea; innovation is a process. A brilliant idea becomes an innovation when it is turned into a product or system that produces significantly improved results.
5 Ways to Battle Creative Blocks, Raj Dash
Creative blocks ... we all get them sometime. This is a short entry on some things that might cause them and then 5 ways that might help you unblock them:
- Brainstorm
- Read for inspiration
- Read topic-specific articles
- Rewrite other work
- Make a journal entry
An interesting link in the entry: Practical Freelancing Tips to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
Can America Invent Its Way Back?, Michael Mandel
This is a three page article on the BusinessWeek site about "Innovation economics". I haven't read it all yet, but it looks good. Seems to be mostly about R&D though. An interesting quote from the article:
But innovation has fallen short of its promise in recent years. While some info tech corporations are still thriving, other sectors that were supposed to drive growth have faltered. Biotech companies have produced new drugs, but so far no real breakthroughs. And nanotechnology has been slow to generate commercial products.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Other stuff
- Did you know… There’s no command for Continuing the debugger - #312, Sara Ford
- 2600 Anthology is out, Dmitry Vostokov
- Visual C++ in Short: Unblock downloaded applications, Kenny Kerr
- Critical .NET Security Vulnerability, IKVM.Net
- The Weekly Source Code 33 - Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome, Scott Hanselman
- Design pattern – Inversion of control and Dependency injection, Shivprasad Koirala
- Are .net interfaces required, Chris Brandsma
- Get to the core of it… CoreInfo v1.0 from the Sysinternals team, Greg Duncan
- Closures, Eric White
- The ALT.NET Criterion, Glenn Block
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Thursday, September 11, 2008
Waiting for the coffee to kick in this morning ...
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Monday, September 08, 2008
Sunday, September 07, 2008
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Friday, September 05, 2008
Innovation Through Internal Promotion, Thiago
This is an entry summing up the points in a blog entry on the Innovating to Win site titled "Internal Promotion of Innovation". Short discussion of "pillars of internal promotion", which are:
- Selling Up
- Selling Outward
- Make it Personal
Why so little innovation?, Dave Winer
Dave points to a video on the Zdnet site: Silicon Valley's Judy Estrin warns we are running out of innovation, which is a conversation about some of the content in her new book: Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy
. A good quote that Dave picked out:
"She warns that we are living off of the innovation investments made in decades past and that is going to be a problem in the future."
Other links that discuss Judy's new book: The Easy Road To Incremental Innovation and Is innovation falling behind in the US?
How to Increase Your Odds of Getting a Big AHA!, Mitch Ditkoff
Mitch offers a look at some great creative legends of the past to offer tips on how you might be able to reach your breakthrough. A good quote:
It is sustained and focused effort towards a specific goal -- not luck, wishing, or caffeine -- that ultimately prepares the ground for creative insight.
This kind of effort does not always generate immediate results and sometimes leads people to conclude that it's just not in the cards for them.
Creating Innovation "pull", Jeffrey Phillips
This is a short entry in which Jeffrey discusses the push vs. pull approaches to innovation (as a means for growth). Interesting, it does seem that push might be more popular than pull these days. Interesting quote from entry:
So, in many companies, the strategy for encouraging innovation is what I'd call innovation "push" - the senior leadership will push innovation into the business. What I'd like to recommend, and what I think you'll find is common in most successful innovation firms, is what we call innovation "pull".
Pixar on Creativity (Find Good People, Ideas Will Come), Ben Casnocha
Ben links to a new article up on HBR by Ed Catmull: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Its a long one (7 pages) so I haven't read it all yet, but here is a good quote that Ben picked out of it:
A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people—it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I’ve asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there’s a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn’t disagree more with the studio executive. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs.
Another link to the HBR article: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity