For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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I’m going through my old email archives, and discovered a note from a project I ran to help a very large US property & casualty insurer to better retool their mainframe-oriented programmers (procedural using COBOL) to client-server paradigms (mostly Object-Oriented Programming using Java). It was an interesting project because the dirty secret was that some [...]

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Since I got so much grief from some of y’all for failing to mention the last one, here’s the news: a brand new MacUpdate Promo bundle is available. You get some great apps, plus the chance that they will unlock SoundStudio (probable), BannerZest (likely), and Parallels Desktop (possible but don’t hold your breath), all [...]

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I’ve been evaluating several technologies for a small web project I’m working. One of the things that I’ve seen lately are these popup windows that display on top of the original page, graying out the original and “floating” on top of it. There are several neat implementations of this for images but I needed to [...]

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Facing up to parallelism: Multicore means today’s HPC is tomorrow’s general purpose” by Martin Banks
The Register has an interesting article on the International Supercomputing Conference keynote speech by Burton Smith, who used to be Chief Scientist at Cray and now works at Microsoft. Smith believes that parallel computing, now the domain of mostly High Performance [...]

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Claudio Ciborra, who unfortunately died too early recently, left a rich quantity and breadth of writings on information systems from a sociological perspective. Here I look at one of thisClaudio Ciborra. 2002. “Design, Kairos and Affection“. From Managing as Designing: Position Papers [?], Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University.
… if speed is the main characteristic of [...]

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Hanseth, Ole and Braa, Kristin. 2001. “For the Treasure at the End of the Rainbow: Standardizing Corporate IT Infrastructure”. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 10:261–292.
Hanseth and Braa, both of the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, examined a desktop standards project done within Norsk Hydro. The company had grown substantially over a period [...]

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After recently finishing a gig with a company that has hit a spate of bad luck, both self-inflicted and environmental, I have taken to reading. And as always when I read, I like to meander aimlessly through the thoughts of disparate thinkers who have nothing in common except that they caught my fancy for the [...]

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In an attempt to thwart spammers, Google Mail has started using mobile phone numbers to provide customers with gmail invitations. This is an interesting development, one that has been predicted for at least since the miniaturizaion of mobile telephones. With number portability in the United States, this finally becomes a possibility for many corporations.
Mobile numbers [...]

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One the biggest problems facing outsourcing projects stems from the cost savings themselves. Most companies determine the size and level of a project or work by its cost. They don’t assign work based upon its strategic value or (following Dr. Jaques and Lord Brown) on a measure of complexity. They simply assign it based on cost. Let’s look at what this does for outsourcing work.

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