By far the best presentation I’ve see about the subject. Mary Poppendieck walks us through development of management theories and what the contemporary view about learning organization’s are – and what are the implications for software development.
See it here.
Just started to read Implementation patters and so far have been thoroughly impressed. Here is, finally, a book that describes what programming is about and has practical examples about how those values realize themselves in reality.
My dear friend, Mikael Gueck, wrote about his impressions about the book here.
Just upgraded my laptop and noticed that virtual printer – also known as cups-pdf – did not work. Luckily others had already fixed the issue and produced neat installer for Leopard.
I’m a firm believer in corporate blogging – or rather blogging within the corporation, and also reaching outside and communicating with different communities.
Our university’s IT-department is a great example of an organisation that could benefit tremendously from widely adopted culture of blogging and sharing of information. We employ a great group of intelligent and competent people, but from time to time it is hard or impossible to know what happens in other parts of the organisation and whether someone has already solved the challenges one is currently facing.
Do you have experiences and ideas on how to implement and start organisational blogging practices?
How to overcome management’s fears of exposing internal secrets or dark sides about the culture to public?
How to quantify benefits of blogging throughout the organisation?
Tim Bray wrote well about experiences at Sun:
1) It’s helped improve Sun’s image. Three years ago we were seen as a big faceless lawyer-bound monolith; now the world sees that this is in fact an unruly tribe of people, many of them really bright, maniacally focused on the tech and biz of IT.
2) Executives love being able to get their message out without having to route it through a journalist’s or analyst’s filtering function.
3) We keep hearing anecdotal stories from salespeople about being able to get in front of some prospect, or route around some obstacle, because of something someone read on one of the blogs.
4) We listen better. Like Bill Joy said, “Wherever you work, most of the smart people are somewhere else.” If I’m a smart person in Cleveland or Shanghai or Warsaw or Lima and I get a bright idea about something Sun should be doing, or notice with horror that Sun is doing something stupid, there’s no obvious way for an individual to talk to a big California computer company. On the other hand, if I’m reading some Sun blogger who writes about what I care about and I know the first.last@sun.com rule, it’s the work of minutes to fire off an email. I get these all the time and I bet there are a hundred or two a month, in aggregate across the bloggers.
5) The morale-boost has been tremendous. Right at the moment, less than 10% of the workforce are actually committed bloggers to the extent of posting once a week or more; but the uplift from knowing that if you have something to say, it’s OK with the company for you to just go and say it to the world, that’s huge. Ask anyone who works here.
For me, personally, blogging is about getting through the marketing to the core ideas and to really understand what things mean. It is frustrating to read Sun Microsystem’s marketing material, but it is a pleasure and joy to read engineers’ blogpostings. To see and feel the excitement people have about their work, to really understand where they are going with technology – that is priceless!
Sure it requires courage – since it forces organisations to face the reality. Slick marketing and hordes of yes-men does not protect you.
And Jonathan Schwartz tells it with an anecdote:
” I was in Nashville earlier in the week speaking at a big government
conference, and had a chance to spend a little time with General James
Cartwright – who told me he maintains an (internal only) blog.
Think about that, a four star general, the individual with singular
responsibility for US space operations, nuclear weapons, command and
control, and that’s only a partial job description – maintains a blog.
Why? ‘It flattens the org.’ ‘Are comments open?’ ‘Yes.’
That’s courage. “
For some time I’ve been bugged by the inability to just print to PDF in OS X. It is rather cumbersome to always select ‘Save as PDF’ from the print menu, rather than just press enter when you have your PDF-printer selected. And rather than cough up money for professional Acrobat-product I wanted something simple.
Through Google I found Cups-PDF, which was released also as a nice package for OS X.
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/22/cups-pdf-for-os-x-make-a-pdf-printer/
http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx
http://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~vrbehr/cups-pdf/
However I noticed a small problem, when printing pages from Firefox. Filenames for documents where the title of the HTML-page, and that meant some of the documents where overwritten if title of the pages happened to be the same.
I sent a quick email to the author, and lo behold – in few minutes got a reply that there already is a switch available in the software for these situations.
Below is the reply from Volker Christian Behr:
for this, there is already an option provided in cups-pdf.conf:
set the option “Label” to 1:Label 1
Then all filenames will be prepended by a unique number (the job-ID).
Alternatively, if you prefer a different kind of labeling, e.g. a
timestamp, you can easily do this via a postprocessing script. CUPS-PDF
offers an interface to scripts to be run after the conversion. These
scripts will receive the filename of the PDF as first and the username
of the printing user as second argument and they will be called with the
printing user’s privileges.So set “PostProcessing” to your script’s full path:
PostProcessing /usr/local/bin/my_label_script
And write a small bash-Script like this:
—cut here—
#!/bin/bash
FILENAME=`basename $1`
DIRNAME=`dirname $`
DATE=`date +”%Y-%m-%d–%H-%M-%S”`mv $1 $DIRNAME”/”$DATE”_”$FILENAME
—cut here—
(make sure it is executable by any user who is going to use the PDF
printer!)This will label any output in the following way:
/var/spool/cups-pdf/username/file.pdf
will become
/var/spool/cups-pdf/username/2007-09-02–12-07-15_file.pdfOf course you can adapt this any way you like
Happy PDFing,
Volker Behr
Configuration naturally resides in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf
This is why I love open source.
