Synesthesia

Notes on stuff

QuickLinks - Category Archive

Reinventing Radio

Tom Coates has posted the slides from Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software - the presentation given by him, Matt Webb, Paul Hammond and Matt Biddulph at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference

Connecting People With Content

Shawn Callahan points to his own white paper Using Content To Create Connections Among People [PDF] that advocates (in a style accessible to the non-techie) the use of blogs, feeds and aggregators as a more flexible solution (compared with a grand “knowledge repository”) to sharing knowledge within a company and between a company and its [...]

Appliances as small pieces loosely joined

Fascinating series of posts by Leslie Michael Orchard applying the principles of "small pieces loosely joined" to computing hardware and appliances.

A life where Tivo has always existed

A life where TiVo has always existed is a great example of how subsequent generations take for granted technology that was new and strange not long ago. [via The Shifted Librarian]

The perfectionist definition of good enough

This one from Curt Rosengren seemed worth a mention - The perfectionist definition of "good enough" - it's a pattern I've seen in a few high-performing coaching clients too.

Managing Product Development

Clarke Ching points to a great article by Johanna Rothman on writing - especially the importance of knowing if you are an extravert!

A Travel Guide To Collaboration

Great article on the why of business collaboration from CIO.com. [via Tris Hussey]

Hints for revising

Some excellent hints for revising your writing from Brian Marick [via Clarke Ching]

SAP management blogs

Even SAP have blogs now.

Patterns of Blog Posts

Amy Gahran has started documenting patterns of blog posts. 3 of 7 posted so far. I think this a type 2!

Blogging your bliss

Blogging your bliss – Lesley Orchard gets it.

The physics of high heels

Integrating blog and wiki

I've started collecting my ideas about integrating blog and wiki at WikiBlogIntegration. Note to self to review what "Ton":http://www.zylstra.org/blog/ is "up to":http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/001390.html ...

What is The Plural of Wiki?

I’ve added a “second wiki”:http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/wiki/ for no particularly good reason other than I saw how the anonymous author of Weblog Tools Collection had “integrated”:http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress-12-wiki-integration/ [bliki]ErfurtWiki[/bliki] into WordPress and decided I wanted one too! This one is just for me – a different sort of publishing space without the time-bound nature of the blog but closely [...]

Tv tropes

TV Tropes Wiki

Collaborative Note-taking

Steph Booth gives a really clear explanation of Taking Collaborative Notes at BlogTalk [via Chocolate and Vodka]

WordPress Modifications

Lots of “WordPress Modifications”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/archives/2004/07/07/wordpress-modifications/fulltext/ from “Shelley”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/

Unwritten Entries

Added a wiki page to capture ideas that aren’t yet ready to be articles [wiki]UnwrittenEntries[/wiki]

RSS sidebar

Added sidebar lists of Wiki Changes and deli.icio.us links using “CG-Feedread”:http://www.chait.net/index.php?p=85 Minor tweak to suppress feed titles see [wiki]BlogFeedReader[/wiki]

The Reality of Running Away from Stuff

When movie chase scenes get it wrong – “The Reality of Running Away from Stuff”:http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/idris/Movie_Reviews/Reality_of_Running_Away.html [via "BoingBoing":http://www.boingboing.net/]

Sources

Added sidebar link for my “blogroll”:http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/sources.php and “my del.icio.us linklist”:http://del.icio.us/synesthesia

Wish-of-the-Month Club

Leslie Orchard is “automating”:wishlist.http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2004/06/16/wishofthemonthclub1 the process of buying himself things from his Amazon wishlist

A guide to Theory of Constraints

“A Guide to Implementing the Theory of Constraints (TOC)”:http://www.dbrmfg.co.nz/Preface.htm [via "Frank Patrick":http://www.focusedperformance.com/blogger.html]

GPS Drawing Gallery

“GPS Drawing Gallery”:http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery.htm [via "The Obvious?":http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog/2004/06/staggering_.html]

Keeping Your Options Open

“Extreme Programming and the Economics of Flexibility”:http://www.favaro.net/john/home/publications/xpecon.pdf [PDF] via “Agile Business Coach”:http://abc.truemesh.com/

Knowledge Management in the Real World

“Knowledge Management in the Real World”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/001946.php

Ming on Dreaming

Ming on “Dreaming”:http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/__show_article/_a000010-001280/

Broadcatching Roundup

Interesting roundup of “broadcatching”:http://www.corante.com/importance/archives/004274.html#more – the impact of web technologies such as RSS(Really Simple Syndication) on broadcasting

Da Vinci Notebooks

Day-by-day Da Vinci - read the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci's Notebooks by RSS, one at a time. (Matt Webb via LibrarianInBlack)

TheyWorkForYou

Public beta of a new site that let's you find out your MP's voting record, what he/she has said in various debates etc.

OpenOffice

Tim Bray on OpenOffice

Why an MBA May Not Be Worth It

Fortune.com – Why an MBA May Not Be Worth It

FreeMind

FreeMind – free Java-based mind mapping software

oopm

OpenOffice are starting on a project management tool [via Clarke Ching]

Diseconomies of Scale

From “Management By Baseball”:http://cmdr-scott.blogspot.com/ a piece on the “Diseconomies of Scale”:http://cmdr-scott.blogspot.com/2004/05/new-york-mets-confrontthe-diseconomies.html [via "Jack Vinson":http://jackvinson.com/archives/2004/06/02/diseconomies_of_scale.html]

The Art of Getting Things Done

Xkey

Xkey 2.0 USB key drive with a 32-bit processor inside

Showerstar

Showerstar – pointless but amusing

Blockbuster Conspiracy

Oligopoly Watch on the economic pressures that are creating endless boring “Blockbuster” movies

Broadband killed the TV star

Shirky: Nomic World

"Shirky: Nomic World: By the players, for the players":http://shirky.com/writings/nomic.html - drawing parallels between Nomic online games (where the rules can change) and real life societies [via "Adina Levin":http://alevin.com/weblog/archives/001406.html#001406]

introducing informal education

infed . What is informal education, where does it happen and how does it fit in? [via Psybertron]

Rss2Outlook

RSS2Outlook – the beginnings of a tool that will have lots of uses. [via Contentious]

My Brilliant Failure: Wikis In Classrooms | Kairosnews

My Brilliant Failure: Wikis In Classrooms Heather James’ experiences using wiki as a teaching adjunct.

Social Origins of Good Ideas

“Social Origins of Good Ideas”:http://web.mit.edu/sorensen/www/SOGI.pdf (PDF) via “Phil Jones”:http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?HomePage in earlier “comment”:http://www.synesthesia.co.uk/blog/archives/2004/05/10/unpredictable-emergence-of-learning/#comment-148

overhaulin

This is very very funny, and deeply scary at the same time! (these people have nukes!)

Executing JavaScript on page load

Executing JavaScript on page load Elegant cross-browser method from Simon Willison

Textism: Tools: Textile

Textism: Tools: Textile Interactive tester for Textile

Conversational Blogging

Conversational Blogging Dina Mehta writes her blog as if it was spoken and contrasts Ming’s similar view with Dave Pollard.

Make Your Partner Look Good

Make Your Partner Look Good Applying the lessons of improv comedy to business change.

eggbaconchipsandbeans

In celebration of the greasy spoon

Setting Clear Priorities

Advice by Esther Derby on how to focus on what's important

The Trap of Overwhelming Demands

In this excerpt from the new book A Bias for Action, Heike Bruch and the late Sumantra Ghoshal look at a work hazard that managers often confront.

WikidPad

WikidPad - wiki notebook/outliner for windows

The KJ-technique

Good summary of this group process for establishing priorities

Juggling Boosts Brain Power

A new study shows learning how to juggle can actually change the structure of the brain in adults and increase areas involved in thought and processing.

Watching Alone

Watching Alone: Social Capital and Public Service Broadcasting - a report by economist Martin Brookes sponsored by BBC and The Work Foundation

Managing for Serendipity

...or why we should lay off 'best practice' in KM. PDF of 2003 paper by Dave Snowden

Butterfly Moments and Bricolage

Tony Goodson on how indulging in 'tinkering about' somehow primes him for 'Butterfly Moments' that change his world.

Ten Pitfalls Keeping You From Your Career Goals

'common pitfalls that can keep you you from reaching your perfect new job.'

Hire talent and passion over skill and experience

The importance of looking beyond skills and competencies in recruitment.

Can absence make a team grow stronger

Can absence make a team grow stronger? Erik van Bekkum comments on HBR article about teams that work better from a distance.

Virtual Audio Cable

Virtual Audio Cable is a Windows multimedia driver allowing you to transfer audio (wave) streams from one application to another.

User-friendly feeds

Mark Pilgrim is doing interesting things with Atom feeds and XSL to make feeds look good in a browser...

DNS Stuff

DNS Stuff: DNS tools, WHOIS, tracert, ping, and other network tools.

How many Google machines

Tristan Louis has worked out how many computers Google has by reverse-engineering their IPO

XP on a Large Project

Keith Ray points to document by Thoughtworks

Situated Software

Commentary by MonkeyX on Clay Shirky's 'Situated Software' essay

The Emergence of CI

George Por offers an online experiment to explore the factors contributing to the growth of collective intelligence

Weblog Scenarios

Dale Pike identifies seven useful scenarios for weblogs in a professional knowledge context

Riding the White Moment

Article from Psychology Today looking at the thought processes that stimulate creativity.

From pirate dwarves to ninja elves…

Tom Coates has found a new way of categorising people - the dwarf/elf and pirate/ninja axes...

Supporting enterprise KM with weblogs

Notes and slides from Michael Angeles' presentation to Computers in Libraries conference about 'Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap'

Disruptive Incrementalism

Sometimes a cosmetic change can be the innovation that makes a product catch fire.

Instant Messages in Knowledge-Making

Spike Hall adds Instant Messaging to his structured process for knowledge workers...

PHP and MySQL: How to collect referrer data

Tracking entry referrers with PHP in MT

Personal Intellectual Capital

Jay Cross says 'Ultimately, you're responsible for the life you lead. It's up to you to learn what you need to succeed. That makes you responsible for your own knowledge management, learning architecture, instructional design and evaluation.'

Foiling Cross Site Attacks

Useful article [PDF] on defending PHP sites from Cross-Site Request Forgeries and Cross-Site Scripting attacks

Value-Driven Intranet Design

Within most corporations, taking ownership of an intranet is an unglamorous, exhausting, and thankless job for a new intranet manager. Many corporate intranets lack thoughtful, focused, and disciplined design and are often extremely large and unwieldy. Fixing these intranets can seem an impossible and futile task.

Managing the Complexity of Content Management

Content management systems suck. Or so you would think from the strife heard from analysts and practitioners alike.

MTCodeBeautifier

MTCodeBeautifier is a plugin for Movable Type that provides syntax highlighting and code beautification (indenting, etc.) on input for a variety of programming languages.

I’m sorry, has your brain broken?

Self-taught scientist Steve Grand built his own intelligent android. Now he's seeking intelligent life among the newsreaders, television producers and yoghurt advertisers who label things as 'science'

Exploring Footers

This article explores the ways you can position footers using web standards, although the same techniques may be used to vertically position other elements.

SimpleCode

Perl script to turn ordinary markup into entity-coded XHTML markup

CSS Validator Changes the Rules

The W3C�s CSS validation service has changed the way it interprets CSS authoring practices. Many sites that were designed valid no longer validate.

When Word-to-XML Conversions Get Nasty

Mike Gross, Chief Technology Officer at Data Conversion Laboratory, Inc., reveals the five ways your conversion engine can get broken when converting MS Word documents to XML.

Project Rhythms

“Project Rhythms”:http://www.jrothman.com/weblog/archive/2004_02_01_mpdarchive.html#107581894680764235

Definition lists – misused or misunderstood?

What are definition lists? When are they appropriate? And how to style them to look like tables, image galleries, calendar of events and more.

Bloxpert

Bloxpert is a formatting plugin designed to overcome the limitations of Movable Type's "convert breaks" option.

Bullfighter

Stripping The Bull Out Of Business. A consulting jargon fighter from Deloitte

abbr-cadabra

Fixing <abbr> in IE without code

Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See

Pat Holt says 'Like many editorial consultants, I've been concerned about the amount of time I've been spending on easy fixes that the author shouldn't have to pay for.'

Finding grid coordinates from UK Postcode

With no guarantees to its accuracy, here you can download a list of UK postcode area codes and their grid coordinates.

Persistent Login Cookie Best Practice

Persistent login cookies are the cookies that are stored with your browser when you click the �remember me� button on the login form [...] The following recipe for persistent cookies requires no crypto more powerful than a good random number generator.

Minimizing Flickering CSS Background Images in IE6

Internet Explorer 6 for Windows is a sore spot for many users of CSS. Besides its countless rendering problems, it has the annoying habit of causing background-image styled elements to flicker when moused over. This article will cover a few things I've found that will eliminate that flicker.

Technology Predictor Success Matrix

Tim Bray: This is the first in a series of essays on a simple but important question: Which new technologies will make it, and which will fail?

Klein Bottle Hats

Perfect for people with zero-volume heads!

cmsWiki

Welcome to a Wiki Workgroup on Content Management Systems!

CMS Wiki

CMS Wiki is a knowledge base for Content Management Systems.

Integrating javascript into stylesheets

“Integrating javascript into stylesheets”:http://milov.nl/2389

Styling in IE

Internet Explorer for Windows does not support the element that should be used on web pages for proper markup of abbreviations. Marek Prokop has a client-side way of fixing this.

Making meaning

Denham Grey explains how we come to share meaning and the relation between meaning, understanding, ontology and knowledge.

Web Developer extension for Firebird

The Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.

Rake

A simple ruby build program with capabilities similar to make

Faux Columns

A simple way to make CSS columns appear equal in length, regardless of the content that they contain.

Integrated Quicklinks Tutorial

A brief tutorial for MoveableType on combining regular weblog entries with quicklinks (basically, entries from two blogs each using a different template) into one column.

People, Process, and Predicting Project Success

Great people, people with sufficient functional skills and domain expertise can trump process, good or bad. Good process, process appropriate for the context, will help those people. But great people can overcome bad process to deliver a good product.

Mandala – Art Psychotherapy

Mandalas are circular designs that can be used in meditation or used as a way for personal growth and spiritual enrichment. The language of mandala is symbolic. The colors and the images in your mandala will reflect your inner self. There is no rule that you have to use certain kinds of color or certain types of material to create your mandala.

IP Address Locator

Enter an IP address to find its location - Lookup Country Region City etc

New pub entertainment

If you had your Christmas party in the local pub and found the jukebox had an unusually high level of choice, you were probably in one of the first boozers to have the world's most advanced music system....

OpenOffice.org XML Essentials

OpenOffice.org XML Essentials�Using OpenOffice.org�s XML Data Format is a book in progress written by J. David Eisenberg for O�Reilly & Associates and submitted to an open review process. The content is currently licensed under a Creative Commons License. The result of this work will be freely available on the World Wide Web under the Free Software Foundation�s GNU Free Documentation License.

Systems Thinking links

Some useful links from OnePine, a UK librarian...

MTpaginate extension

“MTpaginate extension”:http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/MTPaginate.htm

Visualizing Blogs

Using Treemap to visualise blogs

OpenGIS Documents

“OpenGIS Documents”:http://www.opengis.org/specs/?page=specs

Parsing RSS in ASP

Gathering News Headline Feeds using ASP

Magpie RSS Parser

XML-based RSS parser in PHP

Selecting a Lifecycle

Useful summary from Johanna Rothman on choosing a project lifecycle

Action research and evaluation on line

Online course in Action Research

The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia

PDF of paper by V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbard

GetXML Plugin for Movable Type

Movable Type plugin implements a set of template tags for retrieving data in XML format and displaying the data on your MT-generated pages

Location Plugin for Movable Type

Does what it says on the can!

Blogger’s block, collapsing facets and the number 150

Joi Ito blames his 'blogger's block' on a growing awareness of his audience

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959, provides a detailed description and analysis of process and meaning in mundane interaction

Which comes first, technology or social norms?

Joi Ito asks the question...

Vapor

Vapor: a persistent Object-Repository for Ruby

Ruby-ODBC

ODBC Binding for Ruby

Playing the Live Jazz of Project Management

Ths similarities between project management and playing improvisational jazz [PDF file]

RubyUnit

Unit testing framework for Ruby

Ruby/Mock 1.0

Mock objects for RubyUnit

Ruby Garden

Ruby wiki...

<rubyXML>

Programming Ruby

Extracted from the book "Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide"

Ruby Users’ Guide

...get you started at invoking and using ruby

REXML

REXML is an XML processor for the language Ruby

Writing Efficient CSS

Learn some 'secrets' of efficient CSS coding, enabling you to pare that style sheet right down to the bare bones...

Executive Dashboards

Boxes and Arrows article by Alex Kirtland on putting together 'Executive Dashboards'

Advanced CSS Ornamentation

Literary Moose writes: 'This article is focused on techniques exploring the potential for web page decoration. To this end, I advocate the widespread use of generated content � in my opinion the strongest and most precise tool for controlling the display where the accessible, semantic, and pure markup leaves little room for maneuverability. The most advanced techniques rely on the browser's ability to apply generated content in the form of pseudo-elements, then to apply generated content for an arbitrary element, and finally to control its flow and positioning.'

Selectutorial: CSS selectors

Selectors are one of the most important aspects of CSS as they are used to "select" elements on an HTML page so that they can be styled. Find out more about selectors including the structure of rules, the document tree, types of selectors and their uses. There is also a step-by-step tutorial showing how selectors are used in the process of building a 3-column layout.

Demystifying Innovation

(PDF) A model that makes the process of recognizing and measuring innovativeness a bit easier and less subjective. The study starts by defining innovation as a robust creative process that turns out a very distinct output with significant impact on the market.

Integrating SCRUM and User-centred Design

Notes on a possible lifecycle to combine these two approaches...

CSS Design: Going to Print

One of the wonderful things about CSS is that it allows authors to create media-specific styles for a single document.

Wifi comes to UK Trains

“Wifi comes to UK Trains”:http://www.gnermobileoffice.co.uk/GNERMobileOffice/ [via Julian Bond]

The Big Bluejack Heist at Waterloo

It was just another ordinary day at Waterloo station...

What’s Your Google Number?

Google�s greatest application as an �HR tool� is not in the corporation � it is out among the free agents, consultants and entrepreneurs who live and work by reputation and experience. It is here where �Google numbers� become very important.

Neurobiological basis of romantic love

In new studies, scientists are discovering the neurobiological underpinnings of romantic love.

URI Parsing in XSLT

some named templates, which recursively call themselves to process the URI piece-by-piece

Sliding Doors of CSS

new way of doing tabbed nav in CSS

Jesse’s Bookmarklets Site

Bookmarklets are free tools to help with repetitive or otherwise impossible tasks in your web browser

Marriage is made in hell

American writer Laura Kipnis has provoked a storm in the US with a new book attacking marriage. Here, she explains why monogamy turns nice people into petty dictators and household tyrants

Does Your Career Meet Your Personal Needs?

Career Activism

No Margin for Error

Gotchas with CSS margin collapse

MySQL Gotchas

It's not a bug - it's a gotcha. A "gotcha" is a feature or function which works as advertised - but not as expected.

Integrating weblog aggregation data with enterprise data

A useful idea, no implementation yet...

Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities

Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools.

How Do Scrum and CCPM Compare?

Hal Macomber posts comparison of the two methods by Clarke Ching

MT Wiki

Wiki for users of Moveable Type

Questions Matter

Denham Grey on the importance of questions

Artima.com Interviews

Loads of useful stuff on programming

Building a living glossary

Building a living glossary - Denham Grey

The Document Triangle

The interdependence of the structure, information and presentation dimensions

Yet another blockquotes script

Dunstan Orchard improves Simon Willison's script by handling non-URL citations

Blockquote Citations

Paul Hammond shows how to insert a source link in blockquotes

Boyd & Military Strategy

Collection of papers by John Boyd (of OODA fame)

The Solutions Focus

Website about solution-focused coaching

Mentoring for Change

Lots of coaching-related articles at home page for Mike Munro-Turner's coaching and mentoring practice

Project Portfolio Links

Frank Patrick has collected a whole bunch of useful links on Project Portfolio Management

Knowledge Worker Spaces

Lilia categorises knowledge work as 'a system of activity in three interrelated spaces': Idea Space, People Space, I Space

Cothrel on Communities

Joseph Cothrel says ' the many want to talk to the few, but the few only want to talk among themselves. I think that's one thing that blogs manage very nicely, enabling interaction at a very high level among the few, without shutting out the ability of the many to read and even comment.'

Frames Around Arnold

George Lakoff on the frames of reference that were used in the media coverage of Arnold Schwartzenegger's election victory.

Enterprise Architecture

Martin Fowler says 'As it turns out, I can get pretty cynical about enterprise architecture. This cynicism comes from what seems to be the common life-cycle of enterprise architecture initiatives. Usually they begin in a blaze of glory and attention as the IT group launches a major initiative that will be bring synergy, reuse, and all the other benefits that can come by breaking down the stovepipes of application islands (and other suitable analogies). Two or three years later, not much has been done and the enterprise architecture group isn't getting their phone calls returned. A year or two after that and the initiative quietly dies, but soon enough another one starts and the boom and bust cycle begins again.'

Combining KM and IT

Dave Pollard thinks 'that for pragmatic reasons KM should be organizationally part of IT, rather than a separate department or a part of HR or Sales & Marketing'

Doing things with words

Anne Galloway is Doing Things With Words 'But mostly I like thinking about the relationships between words, contexts and who we can - and cannot - be.'

Faceted Movable Type

*Pixelcharmer explains how to build a faceted classification scheme in MT

The Top 10 Ways Software Projects are Different

James Bullock explains for non-software project managers...

Four Quick Stories of Lean

Here are four useful illustrations of Lean Joe Ely has come across in the past week.

Headcloud

HeadCloud is a Napster-style service, where people connect to a central hub, send a list of the thoughts they want to share, and search the database of other people's thoughts to see who they want to connect to. It's called HeadCloud after the original vision - being able to walk down the street and see little clouds above people's heads that showed what they were thinking.

Category Details - QuickLinks

put stuff here about this category