What happened to RAD?

For those of us who hate TLAs, RAD stands for Rapid Application Development. It is the idea that you have the tools necessary for you to quickly solve a business problem and not worrying too much about technology. From my limited experience, that was the promise of Powerbuilder and Visual Basic. Then architecture changed or my experience increased but we had to worry about thin client, web services, scalability, concurrency and design templates.

So here is the deal, I am trying to create a small contact management application. I have decided there is nothing out there which helps me do what I need to do. Apart from all the information about people, I wanted to track who I talked to last and make sure I would share that information with only a few people. I wanted to enter very private information and was not comfortable putting the information on-line and I was quite interested in using this to coordinate my email accounts and my social accounts. I might even get to do the last part before I stop working on it :). I honestly tried to find something that would let me do most of the job with no efforts but could not find anything that could just about make it. Being available off-line was an important criteria for me.

Anyway, so I look at my options:

I was quite attracted by a web application and looked at Google Gears to allow off-line access but it still seemed a bit limited. Admittedly I would love to come up with a project I could just start using Ruby on Rails but it never quite working out.

So I look at the 2 languages I know the most Java and .NET (C# really). I look at the frameworks, the tools already there. Depress myself by considering I should be using a database a realized the persistence framework require us to spend much maintenance time; too be honest the Entity Framework which promised to do most of that wok for me graphically was not up to par (still is not in my opinion). I was attracted by the C# option because I could use a SQL Server database and synchronize it automatically with a local database. I could not find anything that promised to be easy in java land; anything I could find required learning a lot of new things.

So trash the database idea, let's go to XML. After all, how many contacts will I have. No more than 200 I am sure, so performance is not really that big of an issue. I figured I can always put the file in a source control and synchronize them that way. The xml could be coming from a web service instead of a local file and then I am all set. Anyway, that decision made, I need to think about the UI. Java is famously difficult and not very pretty (it is looking better but still tough to have to code most things). There are quite a few framework but I don't really know many of them. On the other hand, .NET UI are pretty solid, but they don't give you any useful/pretty components with the basic package. I was not going to buy components for playing around with a contact application. The redeeming factor was a free grid WPF component from XCeed, but now I have to learn WPF. I suppose I may as well try to stay up to date and learn that also, but boy, that looks cumbersome and complicated. If you are not really doing complex graphics and streaming video, do you care? The separation of concerns between developers and graphic designers is great, much more like a web application. But as usual I need to be able to handle both myself, in short the application will not be looking very artistic. Again I fnid myself wishing I could do graphics, I just don't have the time to learn how to make basic application graphics (if there is such a thing).

So man, isn't there anything out there that will let you create an application that does not look so bad and does not take months to write? Even with all the simplifications I can take, it is still quite a lot of work. I am not doing anything weird, you would think that would already be available through minimal effort. Show a list you can search with the ability to add new elements through mouse and keyboard is every application task. Why does it take so much effort? Maybe it just takes money to buy the components. I cannot even put the application as an open source application because of the XCeed grid license terms won't allow me to. Isn't there anything out there which would let me worry about solving my business problem without coding for hundreds of hours? Actually I finally found a free grid I could use within the WPFToolkit. Also found a series of libraries C4FDevKit which have a lot of nice stuff in it. Thinking about using the library for updating vista contacts and updating the contacts on my phone using the Bluetooth library. Windows is finally getting some good open source projects to help build projects without starting from scratch every time.

In the same vein, I came across an article about Situated Software which I though was pretty interesting in terms of complexity of software. After spending all those years trying to write software for re-usability, connectivity and all kind of other -y words, it seems there is still a need for writing a mom-pop software that does little and maybe not for that long that does not require weeks of architecture work before you can start solving the issue. I am not sure web applications are always the right answer but I think once we solve the off-line issue (web application or not) we will see a new set of focused applications that solve very specific issues. I have an issue with the current Google gears web applications because I need to take the application offline before I can unplug. I am afraid I don't always have that much foresight. If only those local storage could be in an xml format and then I can have my own local application combining all that specialize functionality into what my own personal suite of applications which solves my own personal needs and I am a happy camper.

Zen and Management

For a while I have been looking into different life philosophies such as Daoism (not the religion), Buddhism and Zen. Zen is my favorite because it can be integrated in every aspect of life. You do not have to live the world and isolate yourself, Zen can be in everything you do.
Also, I am always trying to figure out how to get better at whatever I do. So at the moment, I am reading up on management (amongst other things). On of the books I came across was the hands off manager, I wanted to have a few words about the book.

Reading this book really felt like reading one of those little Zen books I am fond of. The similarities are quite incredible. The book is based on interviews and discussions with a successful business man. Maybe Zen masters are everywhere, even in the cold business world. In a way, it is nice. It just proves it is possible to be successful in business and be nice to your workforce. Anyway, back to the book. First, it starts with: you need to know yourself. the book goes on about why you might not be and how to get there. I am not really a Zen student, so it is tough for me to comment. But it seems the whole idea is to find yourself. That seems to be the key to most endeavors. Any book about self fulfillment, happiness all start with knowing who you are. The book does not go as far as saying you need to be happy in order to be able to manage, but according to what I could find, if you truly find yourself, you should be. The deal is how can you expect to truly direct people if you cannot even direct yourself.

The second part (I am really over simplifying it) is how you need to trust your people to make the right decisions, that includes giving them enough room to make their own mistakes. I believe that is key. I left a place before because I felt there was no room there for me to make my own decisions and have the chance to make mistakes. And to be honest I did make a few since then. I probably have a lot more to make, what is important I believe is to learn from them, not fear them. We sometimes progress a lot faster from the mistakes we make than the chances we did not take. The book gives you the choice between being a stressful  micro-manager and a more relaxed hands-off manager. It takes courage to let go and trust other people. It figures you need to be understanding and trusting yourself before you can trust other people.

I really liked the approach of the book, I believe that is the only way I want to be a manager. If I have to worry everyday whether the job is getting done or live in an environment where I cannot trust the people around me, that's just not worth it. It might sound a bit touchy feely, but it is not. It is important to understand that not everyone might be suited for the job at hand and finding the right person for the job is totally the first and most important thing to do. Once you have found the right person, there is just so much to do together. Anyway, I was a bit nervous the first time I had to manage, but as  it turns out, even I had something to contribute. By giving them enough room, you are also giving them enough room to teach you, that is the best part.

What is wrong with developers?

It is so hard to fight clichés. The ones that have been hurting me personally are:

• Developers cannot/should not manage
• Developers should not drive features of a product

Of course, like anything else, there are good reasons and bad reasons for what those are. An efficient developer in my opinion should focus on one task at a time and avoid all distractions like the plague. Anything which does not fit this requirements affects productivity and quality. It is not that simple of course, but not a bad generalization.

I think the main issue with developers being promoted to management is two fold. First they should really want to and not being pushed into it because that is the only way for their career to progress (meaning to get a decent pay raise). Second, this represents a big mental shift and some people are just not very good at adapting to new situations. I would not say developers are worse at it than any other label you can put on people. Two very important skills a developer would bring would be analytical skill and strong organizational skills. Those are needed and I would say required. A manager to me is someone who brings order into Chaos so his/her team can achieve their goals as best and as efficiently as possible. Of course you need more than that, but those are in themselves hard skills to learn.

The other one is that developers should not be driving requirements. I understand the stereotype of technology for the sake of it and bla bla bla. But I have met lots of developers with strong usability skills, user empathy and good ideas. I am all for analysis of the market and creating features that people want and would bring the money and all. I am sold on it, I agree it is tough to be heads down into a product and not have time to check the market and all. A product manager role is, in my opinion, welcome and  required. But I also find that a bit of input from technical people on usability and  ingenuity would not hurt either. Some of the best differentiators in my industry came from developers. Of course not everybody is creative same as not every product manager is a good one. I have had to live through some seriously bad ideas in my time. A good way to build a product should be a combination of market drivers and a free for all approach from all sides of the spectrum of people participating in the product. I fear otherwise we are only creating bland products with no real differentiator. Because let's face it, your competitors have access to the same market researches. Yes, there is a trick in knowing which ones to attack first and potentially how to attack them (although I have seen product managers decide their job stop at the what and don't bother with the how), but in the long term, when replying to an RFP, everyone will be able to say yes to most things. There is a need to go beyond a purely reactive approach to building those products.

I suppose the conclusion is that not all developers live in their own bubbles. No more than anyone else. Provide training, perspective, enough room to fail here and there and we will surprise you. What works is collaboration of disciplines anyway, include your technical people in some of those decisions. They will understand why they are doing things a lot better (that can only help) and might give your product that edge that will make it stand out from the competition.

Contact and Document Management

I have been involved in creating a search application for a while. The application was hinging on also becoming a document management system while it enabled users to collaborate on the documents in order to create intelligence based on the raw data contained in the documents. The application did not really make it that far, but after I had taken a step back and thought about what I had been doing for a while. I came to the conclusion that at the basis of all information gathering and collaboration is good contact management.

• We needed some security of course, that is the easiest one of all, but you need to make sure every one is well identified. So that is the mostly easy part. Of course combine this with groups and roles and the like and you are covered. It is of course not as easy as that, but everyone can do at least that much, so it is not that hard.
• What comes next is that not everyone creates data with the same skill and quality of content as everyone else. You must identify who you experts are and what their field of expertise is. Of course one of the issue it that this will change over time. If you have just recruited a new assistant and he is creating documents reflecting his training in a given field, you would want to give priority to the more senior and experienced resources when searching data on that field. You could even go further and privilege any efforts made when several experienced resources collaborate together.
• Of course this seem to apply only at a company level where that information is well known and understood. It seems a bit more difficult to achieve this at the Internet level. We have lots of information about one single document, and potentially about a site as well. I believe we could also collect information about the documents a single person has written and what the subjects are. I believe we collect a list of keywords for each document and who references those documents (for Google anyway). Those keywords could be cross referenced (or not) with fields of expertise.
• The next stage would be to combine that with user feedback. Present them with a top list of expertise they declare themselves to be cognizant about and then have them rate articles, and by extension the authors of those articles. The last stage, or at least the last one I can think of, would be to include social information. I suppose I mean for you to be able to generate a graph of trusted sources for specific subjects. It would be great to be able to be able to use that information for future searches and being able to visualize it as well as customize it. Based on previous document feedback, we could already build such a graph already, but being able to customize it would increase its efficiency. I could define an author I have heard of, without knowing whether there are any articles written by that person. But we could also recommend other authors who have recommended him and are recommended by her.
• The other thing that would be great, would be to be automatically notified when a preferred author has published, but only if the web site is actually related to my interests. If I publish a new picture in Flickr or if I publish a new entry in my blog about the latest coding practice, they do not speak to the same interest and to be honest my photographic skills and not really worth keeping track of.

This is probably too complex to ever be understood by everyone or not many people will actually bother setting all those filters. There must be a compromise here somewhere. 

Just a quick one on search

I was reading this article and I have to say my first reaction was why can't you just ask the user. Of course few paragraphs later, there was the line indicating they use trained individual who evaluate the results returned.

But how can you train someone to think like me and look for the things I am looking for? Of course I am not that special and probably fall right in the middle of the bell curve of regular person. But I'd still like to think I am not exactly learning what everyone else is, or even not learning it the same way everyone else is.

One easy way would be to check which position within the results I selected to look at and which ones I actually reported as being relevant to my search. This could be implemented already without much changes to the current Google results, then again maybe they are already doing that, well the first part anyway.
Is there a way for me to disqualify pages/sites from search results already?  From this question comes the obvious next point. It would be nice to be able to exclude the places I have already been to. Or maybe not put them on top of my search results. Been there, done that type of approach, probably don’t want to do it again for a while. It is a bit counter productive for me to have to scroll through all those places I have already been to. We could at least flag those pages as recently visited, that would help me with the issue of, I think I have already read this, why could I not remember this based on the obscure hyperlink I clicked on.

As soon as I started thinking about how to collect what I think relevant is, I quickly started wondering about what relevant really means. What is a relevant result? Is it something that gives me exactly the information I was looking for or is it something that also gives me the ability to find something I did not think about but opens my understanding of the searched topic? Every time my mind wonders in that direction, I think about ‘people who bought this book also bought…’. Which of course is not as relevant as people who loved this book also read those ones when looking for a similar topic.

The other thought that came to my mind was, when I am googling, I am trying to learn about something 80% of the time and then I am probably trying to entertain myself. Can the search engine differentiate between one mode and the other? Should I be fed similar results depending on that search mode? Personally I am more interested in hard core articles (with lots of texts) full of information when learning and I need lots of images and moving pictures when entertaining myself.  You can tell I just like text by looking at this blog, I might need to add more picture if I ever want someone else to look at it and get something out of it. I almost want different modes, the casual lots of pictures showing in the results mode and the hard core facts one. And I should be able to choose every time based on the type of search I am currently conducting.Then again, not everyone learns the same way, it is a bit of a conundrum. Some people like to learn by looking at pictures. Is there ever the hope a search engine could understand the difference?
Here comes the basic point again: it will never happen unless we collect information from the user and usage of the system. And of course, I would not agree to it unless I could review the information collected. I would even go as far as saying I would turn the collection off is there is no way for me to be able to control the information itself. Anyway, I have some crazy probably never going to happen kind of ideas about what searching should really be. It cannot remain a cookie cutter approach for much longer, it will need to include personalization and preferences. It is only a matter of time.

Thoughts on education

I have a young child, so education is now an important topic for me to think about. Education is one of the important topics in the book ‘The world is flat’. Great book by the way. In there the author makes comparison between the intensity of Asian students as opposed to a typical American student. It also talks about the decline in investments in science and technology and how this might affect the US market in terms of innovation and its capability to adapt to a world market.

In some ways I feel I have been there, maybe not as much as I think it goes in some Asian countries (India and China). I have been in a highly competitive system where you work and sleep school work and you are being evaluated on a daily basis against everyone else doing the same thing. I suppose I should first explain I was never a brilliant student, I was always average. Within the top branch maybe but never much more than that. I have come to realize since then that it has a lot to do with my character (no comment). I did a French engineering degree which is not understood really outside of France.My parents put me in a city’s school, as opposed to my home town one, when I was sixteen because I was showing aptitude for school work and it would increase my chances of getting a good job. Since then, working in school was my entire life, or felt like it. Going on vacation was a way to forget things I was going to have to learn again. I was quite lucky, this only lasted 6-7 years. A quite short time compared to students in India who start at 11 and never stop of course. I majored in Math and always fancied myself to become a teacher until I realized most people in my class were not listening and as I never wanted to force people to have to listen to me, I pretty much gave up. I got into computers instead.
So I learnt lots of math and really enjoyed that part. I did a Master in England and the math level there was so low, we were studying things I did when I was 16. All the French students from my school got A without going to the class. We just read the material to understand the slightly different notations.
Since then I worked as a developer, then a manager and never used any of it ever again. I feel all I learned was the ability to be focused, work long hours and analyze a problem logically. This in itself is not so bad, but not worth all those long hours learning things I don’t remember and will probably never use again.

So with that background, sorry for the long one, I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the system. I wished we had more practical studies, how to buy a car, how to buy a house, manage your budget… Of course this will not create tomorrow’s minds but it would have been really relevant and helpful. Also, we always worked on theory and never quite applied any of the things we did. Even with math, there are so many applications for almost everything, we could have had nice projects to put everything in context. I always hated statistical lessons until later on I found out they are everywhere. We could have had analyzed results from questionnaire and find the patterns but no. Always bland theory. For my master I did neural networks, it would have been great to study that instead. But the school system seems to want to force the theory on you never telling you how it is applied. No wonder nobody wants to study science anymore. We do so much chemistry and only play with tubes and flames once or twice, what is up with that?

On the other hand, what we really need is to open the mind and encourage a thirst for learning. I am not sure anyone knows what will be needed for the next generation. It would be easier to teach them the thirst to learn and let them decide what they need. I don’t believe we can do that by having young mind sit from 8:00am to 5:00pm all day from 10 years old until 25 and more. There is no time left for contemplation, reflection. Only when the mind relaxes and sleeps can it organize/analyze all the information forced down during the day. My friends have slightly older children and they have no time left to themselves. As soon as school is done, here comes the sport activities and they are always going left and right. Probably to compensate the kids having to sit down all day and making sure they get to move around as well. Kids are meant to play, this is how they learn. I am not sure doing it earlier and earlier is also the way to go. Kids who learn to read at 3 do not necessarily enjoy reading, and to a large extend read, as much as those who learnt at their own pace around 4 or 5.

Here is one on my favorite talk, related to education:

I was also rather inspired by:

Both of them seem to suggest to me that the way forward might not be for us to cram information, as fast and as quickly as we can, into our kids. We might just kill their ability to dream and think outside the box. We need to make sure we give them room, sooner rather than later, to search for themselves what the world is all about. I am not for total deregulation of course, there should be some curriculum we make sure every child has. But we also need to make sure there is enough time and opportunity left for the child to find its own interests and way to look at the world.

Are we too busy?

I am not the first one, and probably not the last, to comment on how busy our lives are. I don't see mine getting any quieter either. Some of the reasons I can identify are:

• The line between work and life is getting blurred more and more everyday. You are expected to travel over the week end and not think about it twice. When I was living in France, and that was a while back, it seemed easier then to separate them. There you don't have to feel guilty about 2 weeks vacation and I don't believe I have ever heard of a meeting taking place on a Saturday. Then again, it was a while back. Maybe if I was a better manager, there would not be any issues for me to go away for a long while. There are lots of methods out there to help you be more efficient, GTD being one of my favorite. Most of the ones I like mention that family time is important and if you do work extra hours, it seems you do not really do that much during that time. I even got emails on well-being to advice me on how to do well with the family; I believe they come from the health care provider to make sure we don't get sick so they can make their numbers.


• With the advance of new technologies, mainly the internet and all, we have so much information at our fingertips that we are becoming attached to it all. It is very hard now to unplug. I know quite a few people that have done to the darkside and have an iphone or a blackberry and cannot go anywhere without checking their toy at least every five minutes. There is just too much information for us to process. It is difficult, we have ways to filter the information coming to us but then we would also be restricting our knowledge of the world around us. I might know what I need to know today but who can say for sure what I need to know about tomorrow? There are only so many RSS feeds you can regularly check without it completely consuming your entire day. We are all empowered now, we can push information to more people than ever possible, but how do you choose what to read? What is a reliable source? How do you find it amongst all this huge mass of information?


• Seems to me in this age of outsourcing, where there are probably hundreds of people who can do your job for a lot less, where we can differentiate ourselves would be in innovation and original ideas. But you need empty space to get there, it is not possible to think while you are being busy. A wise person once told me it is not possible to rush innovation or creative thinking, you just need to let it happen. Where do we find the time to let it happen? Even my long commute is filled with podcasts and news so I can be aware of what is happening around me and learn about the things that might help me in my career. I am aware of them, but I rarely have the time to analyze them and try to create my own opinions. Then again, the more opinions I have, the less I might be inclined to access new ideas.


• I have to say the flow of information is making me worried about my son. I am sure I will be ok, after all I only have so many years before I can enjoy a retirement filled with physical activities and contemplation (all those things I do not have time for right now). But what about our children, the school programs are barely adequate for the world of today, they have no idea what to teach our kids for the world they will have to face. How do you teach innovation and creativity? Classes seem to be taking more and more of our kids time, they play even less than we used to. I fear for their sanity. What will years of study and no play, aggravated by constant competition and pressure for result about things he will probably never use, do to their mind? Will they be forced to conform to ideas that will no longer be relevant? I suppose education is a whole new subject I will probably feel like talking about later. As a last ironical thought, I cannot help smile at those TV programs that claim to empower you to go and play outside while hoping you will agree with them and keep watching because they promote appropriate behavior.

What kind of conclusions we can draw after all this? I am not sure I meant to have any, those are all ramblings after all. If nothing else, I think we need to schedule some time to slow down, some time to figure out who we are. Without knowing who you are, there is little that can be achieved. We need to connect with the world around us and with each other. We need to make sure we do not use technology in such a way that we isolate ourselves from the world while we fool ourselves into thinking we are connected. For instance, I know there might be lots of goods things about virtual worlds, but until they add your face in real time, I would rather bet on video conferencing.

My wish list for Google Search

My current belief is that for us to truly gather information, we need to understand the source of the information. The easiest thing we could do today is to record the author of articles, web pages, blog entries...
We have lots of ways of doing that, tracking the keywords, owner of the blog, signature at the end of the page. Yet what surprises me is that the information is not displayed in a search result page.

It would be nice if we could see the author, have a way to review other articles from that author ordered by relevance to your current search. If you could use something similar to the Social Graph API to access other resources by that author. Obviously you probably want to limit those to the ones the author is comfortable exposing as public web sites (if there is such a thing as a private one still). I suppose you would also want to have references to web site the author contributes to without necessarily owning the sites.

Of course we all know how evil Google is, it is tracking so much information about us without telling us about it. That data is used to know who you are, what you are interested in and use that information to narrow your search result items to what might be more relevant to you. I believe the problem lies in the fact that this information is hidden from you and that there is little you can do to influence how the data is being used. I know you can view the history and you can remove items but there is a difference between removing a history item and deciding not to use it for future searches. If users could truly own their data and influence its content, I believe the privacy issue would be less of a problem. Nobody wants a system that gathers data about you, to help you of course, but does not expose how that data is used and barely exposes what the data is. When you make a search, I want to have an explain option where I will be able to see how my previous searches/wanderings have influenced the results for this page. It would be especially important then to have the option of saying don't use that one, this is not me really. Then I might be ok to have the information used to also deliver some targeted material. I need to know what the benefits to me are before I feel comfortable it being used by someone else. This does not mean Google needs to expose the algorithm used to deliver the results, only how my information is influencing the results presented to me.

Let's say the user now has a way to set those preferences, we could take the approach a step further. I would want to use something similar to Stumble Upon where I can rate authors and articles in the context of my original search. This would allow dynamically adding more intelligence about the document itself but also customize my search results based on previously approved authors and articles. On the top of that you can then cross reference results and ranking from other users 'similar to you' or from other previous 'similar' searches and maybe give more relevant results. Probably something not too far of the Stumble Upon toolbar which can rate the results based on your preferences.

For the more advanced user, you can start adding a social aspect to this and add the ability to register some of your friends and when you look for something your friends already found, you could have some additional information equivalent to your friends' recommendations. But by then that is probably a little complicated and too cumbersome to really be useful. I might have people I trust in my circles, but I probably do not trust them in all aspects of my interests. If we have to think that much before deciding how to influence my searches, no-one will go through the effort.

So to summarize:

• Start displaying the authors of the information and give access to their work


• Show the user how the data gathered influences the search results


• Allow the user to enter preferences for sources of information


• Ignore everything else I added

Contacts, what about contacts?

I have so much to say about this, I will probably split it into multiple posts.

I have been looking for a while, there is nothing I can find out there (meaning free on the web) I can find that satisfies my requirements for contact management. I suppose the problem might be in the requirements themselves, but we have so many applications already available, project management, to do lists, blogs, calendars, web sites. It just seem like a big hole in the breath of applications currently available.

I tried Airset for a while, it was ok if a bit slow to my liking. But mainly it is just a list of contacts and addresses. What else to expect you might say, is that not what contact management is? Well, that is a necessary start for sure. Here are the weird ideas I came up with.

• Privacy is a big one, how can I share my contacts with family and friends and not with the rest of the world? At the moment, anything you put on-line can be used to know you better, sell you more targeted stuff and that leaves out the fact that you are putting other people's information on-line. Small little fact they might not be happy about if they understood all the implications.


• I would like to start being able to enter some facts about all my contacts. My memory is awful and I need all the help I can get. I suppose I could treat my contacts as sales opportunity and use salesforce.com but I am pretty sure this is not what I had in mind.


• I want to be able to rate my contacts, there are people I really like I would want to be able to make sure I don't forget to stay in touch. I want something to tell me: 'Hey you really like that guy! You have not talked to him for a while, invite him over for a beer or go and have lunch with him'.


• If I am going to rate my contacts, I probably want the ability to share some information but not all. It needs to be tailored to whom, what type of people they are, family, close friends, etc. Also probably depends on the type of comments. I don't really want to tell some of my friends that other guy does not really like them.


• Of course you want to start linking your friends together, potentially this is a way of sharing information. you could say A is a close friend of mine and a good friend of B. So anything I say about A should probably be shared with B. I would also want to rate the relationship of course. A is a very good friend of mine, so it B but they don't really like each other. So I shouldn't probably share my observations. I can see how it could lead to a dashboard of gossips your friends could participate in to help you know your people better. Oh my god, did I just talked myself into micro-blogging?


• Now, I really want to add the social graph aspect to it. I want my contact management system to understand flickr Facebook, My Space and blogger and potentially alert me when there are changes. Not sure how much though, I still need to be sold on micro-blogging. I want to be able to search about my friends and learn anything I can about them from the web as well. The Google graph API might be a good place to start there.


• Of course this is really personal information, I want access to this information everywhere, on-line (maybe, but only with long term guarantees the data is mine), in outlook, gmail, ipod, mobile phone and regular home phone (yes I have one of those).


• Once you have that, of course this is only the beginning. This would be the base for everything else I do. Birthdays and contact points can go to my calendars. Schedules with people I work with and projects we need to work on together. I can assign competencies to people and when I have an question, I can go and see their blogs. I want to be able to define trusted source of information (whether a real contact of mine or not) for specific topics. Don't ask me anything about gardening and especially don't trust anything I might volunteer in that area.


• I especially like the application for search, wouldn't it be nice if my search results were sorted based on the articles published by people you trust in those areas. Not sure that is ever going to happen. Would I ever be confortable entrusting Google with that much information about myself and my contacts.

I suppose this is why I am still waiting for the right tool, nothing I have looked at comes close to this at this point. If there is one, please make sure to point it out.
Anyway, that is it for now.

And so it starts

I suppose any self-respecting blog should stay the reason for its existence. Wouldn't it be easy for us if it was that simple to find out about our own lives.
Anyway, I feel we are in the middle of big technological changes that will impact our lives in the not so far future. It already has of course, I am writing a blog that will probably never be read but then I can. I am now putting my thoughts out there in the ether hoping it will help me figure out some of those crazy ideas going through my head.

I suppose the major point of this specific technology is that you never know if it might benefit someone and you may as well post it for all to see in case it does.
I cannot stop being amazed how easy it is to be heard those days. No need to think about writing a book, convince someone it is worth reading and that they might make money in the process. I can just in 10 minutes or less start a page that will be made available to so many people. Of course they would have to be able to find it, find your content interesting enough in less than 1 minute (and that might be optimistic) for them to come back and read more.

Fat chance comes to mind. It is said any self respecting geek should have a blog to advertise himself/herself and share his/her views to the world.
Ouch, as a reader I am not sure I would qualify myself for either. That is also discounting the fact that it is dangerous to post and be liked. You only need to read about what happened to Kathy Sierra and suddenly it does not seem like a good idea anymore. Here was someone who had something to say, I really miss her blog. She forced me to take a step back and look at what I was doing and realize software is not built for your own pleasure (although I still think it should be an essential component).

Anyway, I have a few things to talk about, some experiences to share. Hopefully someone might even find it interesting and we will see where it goes.

Thanks for reading all the way to the last line :).