Apparently my new work computer with it's NVIDIA 8800 GTS GPU is 'ready to die'. Great.

I was going to write a post about Spolsky's latest (Don't hide or disable menu items). I'm unashamedly a big Joel Spolsky fan (I have the books, I dream of running a company like his, blah blah blah). However I didn't agree with his post (Spolsky says you should always leave menu items enabled and use error messages if they are clicked at an inappropriate time).

Some other guy wrote a good retort to Spolsky:http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/515/disabled-menus-are-usable (hence my need not to write a long post).

Personally I prefer to disable and also to change to tooltip. It should also note I'm not a fan of enhanced or 'super' tooltips in either thin or fat clients. Just plain old tooltips will do fine.

Money Quote:

“When programmers aren’t emotionally mature enough to separate approval from arousal, working with a person of the opposite gender can bring up sexual feelings that are not in the best interest of the team.”

(Perhaps they snuggled too closely on their Pairon Chair).

But this one made me metaphorically vomit in the back of my throat:

“With XP, I work to become worthy of respect and offer respect to others. I’m content to do my best and strive always to improve. I hold values I’m proud of and act in harmony with those values.”

“I have seen people applying XP bring renewed hope to their software development and their lives. You know enough to get started. I encourage you to start right now. Think about your values. Make conscious choices to live in harmony with them.”

Read on for a longer analysis of some XP 'techniques': http://www.yosefk.com/blog/extreme-programming-explained.html

Xobni announced their LinkedIn support today. Very nice. I spend a lot of time in Outlook (groan) and I've always loved these kind of enhancements which assist my productivity. Inside Microsoft there are always lots of extremely useful add-ins but they rarely seem to emerge from research/incubation/stealth.

Xobni is free during beta so there is no excuse for not checking it out.

I'm guessing this the type of feature which has been in Visual Studio for years - but I only discovered it on the weekend. There is something purely delightful when one discovers a feature in software.

Control - Tab lets you alternate between your open 'documents' in Visual Studio. I love the 'clean' appearance of the modal dialog and believe it to be far superior to Vista's.

I've been testing out Live Mesh for a few weeks now. I'll avoid any discussion of specific features as I'm guessing it's mostly NDA'd. It is hard to describe what it is in a single sentence. But to be honest I think that's OK since it is a developer beta.

I started out using Mesh for some basic file storage (on a few meg). With that experience being successful I've now moved on to syncing hundred of megabytes of files with the Mesh.

I'm also starting to see some interesting possibilities with the Mesh framework - beyond the super basic files/RDP scenarios showcased in the original demo.  Once I get some other projects out of the way I might try my hand at a Mesh enabled application.

I enjoyed this presentation (30 minutes) and you probably will as well. Find 1/2 hour, it's worth it.

OK. It's mid-night here. My better half is awake and watching a dog grooming competition on Animal Planet. When did dog groomers get their own TV show? WTF. It seems now that every profession has their own TV show except mine (an no The IT Crowd does count - but maybe JPod does). To matters worse too many of my friends have TV show professions. My wife doesn't have a show for her profession - but it does feature often in bizarre Law & Order plotlines (which is a good second best).

I've been following the 2020 Summit from afar and I've been generally impressed by the depth and breadth of the topics. It's this type of policy debate which will allow Australia to survive in the 21st century. I'm a little concerned that the depth of the debate for the technology industry seems a bit shallow (ie. the usual broadband and education noise). Australia is well positioned to become the technical hub of the Asian time zone if we, as a nation, play our cards right. I'm sure that over the next few days more info from the Summit sessions will be reported and hopefully there will be some good proposals for the tech sector.

Rudd is proving ever the successful technocrat. He seems keen to undertake a transformation of Australian society and he might just be the person to achieve it. However it is unclear to me exactly what transformation it will be. Sure - the obvious stuff is apparent: Republic, Indigenous Reconciliation, Environmental Sustainability etc. There seems to be a tremendous energy in Australia right now: it appears that this is our time to truly define our nation (unlike previous attempts when occurred under the protective wing of our colonial mistress).

Update: Initial Summit Report is available [PDF]

I'm not a huge Cringely fan (although I really liked his TV stuff). I did enjoy his recent article: The Truth About IT Consultants. The checklist for then lies spoken by consultants (at the bottom of article) is awesome. Fortunately I interact with the 'Type A' consultant (as Cringely calls them) more than the others. However I've experience my fair share of the B's and C's.

Worth the read: 11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft.

For a few days I ran the Blue Screen of Death Screensaver which you can download from Microsoft TechNet. Yes that's right it's available from Microsoft website (who says we don't have a sense of humour). The screensaver works as advertised: it displays a BSOD at the appropriate juncture. However it kept freaking out my coworkers. Each time the screensaver turned on people would freak out and express sympathy for my poor machine. In the end it became too disruptive.

Try it out for a few days and see how it goes in your work environment.

I saw the Mac Book Air today at the Apple Store. Seriously disappointed. Keyboard felt weird, the scroll pad area seemed 'too big' and the machine's performance was sluggish at best.

Disclaimer: I'm an Apple shareholder (and yes I bought before the shares crashed).

I've been spending some building a little project lately (not directly CRM related). My goal was to try out a bunch of technologies instead of going for the classic web page + database architectural pattern. Some of the technologies explored were:

• Amazon's SimpleDB. Hash table in the sky. Good docs and samples made this a breeze.
• Amazon's S3. It will be interesting to see the optimal pattern (and price) between storage in SimpleDB vs S3.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service. You don't hear a lot about this (which is surprising). If you need to broker connections between disparate infrastructures then this service is for you.
• Ruby on Rails. Urgh. I started with an open mind and almost wanted to become convert. I generally like the 37-signals stuff (although lately it's been loosing some of it's shine in my eyes). After hitting limitation after limitation I gave up. Now I'm downright frightened by 37 Signals given their paternal relationship and reliance on RoR. This technology was the biggest disappointment.
• ASP.NET with Framework 3.5. This was the easiest in IMHO. The only thing lacking is an RTM of Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects.
• Generics in Framework 3.5. Generics are one of those things you think you fully understand until you need to use them. It's a nice implementation but it feels like this will need C# 3.0 to really 'shine'.
• LINQ over objects, XML and SQL. I was surprised at the quality of the documentation here. LINQ is actually pretty easy to learn but we (Microsoft) don't make it easy. MSDN was filled with out of date documentation and poorly explained samples. However I'm a convert and I can see myself using this in most future projects. LINQ over my customer objects was particularly powerful especially when combined with backend storage on SimpleDB and S3.
• Carnegie Mellon's ReCAPTCHA. This is a great component which lets your users help with book digitization while proving they are human.
• Windows Live ID Web Authentication. My app doesn't really need a user database but I wanted some rudimentary auth to help slow down spammers. Having danced with Passport before I was fearing a long night with a cup of espresso and some nasty looking COM objects. This wasn't the case! The dev.live.com people have done a great job of opening up WLID to the masses. I had my auth up and running in minutes. I was tempted to add Windows Live Alerts - but you need to email them to set up your account (ie. too much trouble).
• Free Text Box. I'd seen this project around and wanted to give it a go. It's free for personal use (so I won't be distributing my little project - unless I cough up $200). I found a few rough edges but you can't complain when something is free.

I discovered this interesting site: Subvert and Profit. They essentially pay people to increase the rank of stories on Digg and StumpleUpon. Here's how it works:

1. You pay Subvert and Profit some $$ to pimp your story on Digg
2. Subvert and Profit then tells it's members to Digg your story.
3. Members get paid for Digging the story and naturally Subvert and Profit take a cut.
4. Your story on Digg is now on the home page. You now get a bunch of legitimate hits. Given the massive reach of a site like Digg this can give your website campaign a serious boost.

Subvert and Profit is nothing more than the 21st century 'rent a crowd'. Like all forms of broad advertising it still needs to be backed up with the fundamentals (call to action, value proposition etc etc).

I'm fascinated by this crowdsourcing approach as I am with other services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.