Creating Google Custom Search Engines: »Tired of searching for cheesecake recipes and getting nothing but pinup calendars? Google has a little-known feature that lets you design your own search engines that will search only the sites you want. Bernard Farrell introduces us to this useful capability and shows how to set one up.« Nettes Tutorial, daher ausdrucken! [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service: O'Reilly Network]

Technorati-Tags: Google

http://www.schockwellenreiter.de/xml/rss.xml

http://www.schockwellenreiter.de/2007/09/07.html#schnerSuchenmitGoogle

Here are the results of the voting on [MS]OOXML: Disapproved.

The official word is not yet released, but I have seen the results. UK disapproved, as did Ireland. So did Canada. So did the Czech Republic and Korea. Malaysia abstained (which is unexplained, since it was reported the technical committee voted No with Comments). Oddly, I don't see Hungary on the list.

The 11 new P signups, Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Malta, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela, all voted to approve or approve with comments, except for Ecuador, which disapproved, and Trinidad and Tobago which abstained. What about the O members? Almost to a man, they voted to approve. What an amazing coincidence.

Microsoft is telling it in their press release that 74% of all qualified votes approved: 'The results show that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of all qualified votes, stated their support for ratification of Open XML.'

That is downright silly. If that were true, it would have been approved, not disapproved. All you need for approval is any number greater than 66.6% and not too many no votes. This press release is a masterpiece, no doubt about it. I'll show you the real figures.

Update as of 11:54 AM: Here's official word in a press release from ISO. Here's the opening paragraph:

A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.

http://www.groklaw.net/backend/GrokLaw.rdf

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070904082606181

Von Ronald Hartwig, Maren Mäuselein, Christian Jansen und mir (Matthias Müller-Prove) gibt es einen Beitrag zur Mensch und Computer in Weimar.
Abstract: Usability Engineering kommt in länger bestehenden und sehr großen Projekten nur dann zum Zuge, wenn man sich an die Gegebenheiten der Projekte in Bezug auf das gewählte Prozessmodell anpasst und die Möglichkeiten in Zusammenarbeit mit den beteiligten Entwicklern auslotet.
Dieser Beitrag beschreibt zwei sich ergänzende Projekte im Umfeld von OpenOffice.org und einer Inhouse-ERP-Software, deren Benutzungsschnittstellen in einem gemeinsamen Vorhaben optimiert werden sollen.
Weiter zum kompletten Artikel...

http://blogs.sun.com/mprove/feed/entries/rss

http://blogs.sun.com/mprove/entry/inhouse_und_open_source_projekte

Ja, mach nur einen Plan
 Sei nur ein großes Licht!
 Und mach dann noch 'nen zweiten Plan
 Geh' n tun sie beide nicht.

To be more accurate, only plans don’t work. I read Dushan Wegner’s interesting thought on why a plan in unnecessary. It comes of as a rebel post, but it does have very good points, at least it did stimulate my thoughts on it. Plans cannot work without identifying the problem and without skills to solve it.

I think plans don’t work in three cases

• when they are used to justify slackness elsewhere
• when the plan is built using best practices without understanding their necessity
• when the plan does not acknowledge that people are important
• when the plan is used to predict

How many times have I tried to explain a manager that your plans cannot replace the skills of your team. Nor can they replace your process. This, I think, shoots from a deeper problem, calling people as resources. It is easy to replace a server, OS or a desktop; because they are resources which can be duplicated easily. People are not, it is never easy to replace a developer with another. Most of the plans I see assume that in case of attrition people can be replaced by just plugging in another one.

Another instance of abusing a plan is to make it elaborate only to justify the cost. The problem might not be as severe, and the solution might not be as elaborate, but the plan sure is. Problems get created to serve the plan.

I think the biggest problem with a plan that it assumes too many peripheral conditions, which are often out of our control. In a short term it is sometimes feasible to do so, but over a long term there are so many changes that the plan can be completely rooted off. It is necessary to keep the plan agile, by keeping the ends open on aspects that cannot be known in advance or that are prone to change. Sometimes backup plans work, but even they get susceptible to the changes. The best way is to keep an open mind about changing it as events happen.

A plan is useful, to convey to everyone involved what to expect from the team, and to express an idea. However, in my opinion, a fool-proof plan does not try to predict, rather it instills discipline in the team. It should not give decisions, it should guide the team on how to take decisions. And it should be built to be used by people instead of the plan using them as resources.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ifacethoughts/entries

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ifacethoughts/entries/~3/151161866/