Posts

Showing posts from July, 2010

OneNote is an extension of my brain

OneNote 2010 is a great product. I have been using OneNote daily for a couple years now. It has become my default repository for important information. - Tasks lists - Design before I build software solutions for work - Meeting notes - Class notes The great thing about OneNote is that it is a three dimensional space (notebooks, sections, pages) instead of a one dimensional space in a product like MS Word. Also, you spend much less time worry about formatting details, and more time getting your ideas and thoughts recorded. OneNote is almost an extension of my brain.  Now with OneNote online, I use one note to plan with friends and family. I like the rich client with offline synchronization which makes OneNote a more productive experience than Google Docs.  I am on the road and often have a slow internet connection, so with offline sync, a slow connection doesn’t slow me down.

Software Measurement - We Are Like Eskimos

I forget at times that Software Engineering is a young discipline. At times I am frustrated that it is not easier to measure good software and good software developers. The following gives some insightful perspective: -------------------- Measurement can progress from lower to higher scales as societies, organizations, and practices mature. An illuminating example: We can imagine, for example, that certain Eskimos might speak of temperature only as freezing or not freezing and, thereby, place it on a nominal scale. Others might try to express degrees of warmer and colder, perhaps in terms of some series of natural events, and thereby achieve an ordinal scale. As we all know, temperature became an interval scale with the development of thermometry, and, after thermodynamics had used the expansion ratio of gases to extrapolate to zero, it became a ratio scale." — S. Stevens, 1956 There is an important lesson here for software