Coding Horror: Software Engineering: Dead?

control is ultimately illusory on software development projects. If you want to move your project forward, the only reliable way to do that is to cultivate a deep sense of software craftsmanship and professionalism around it.
via codinghorror.com

I recently completed a book via Safari Books Online on Software Engineering. It was an eye opener for me, not so much in what it taught about development as an engineering discipline, but for what it gave me in terms of fodder for debunking a lot of these 80's and 90's prinicples. As a true believer in agile development, I like to read books and articles that challenge my belief system. Usually I come away with a stronger understanding of a concept and a reinforcement of my own ideals. Jeff provides a nice piece on his website codinghorror.com that brought several points into focus for me. Hope you find it useful as well.

Kill Dead Apps via Shortcut

Here is a little bit of magic for killing stalled applications without having to first open task manager. This works for a lot of apps that won't die even after issuing a three finger salute in Vista or XP. Simply:

  1. Right click on your desktop and choose New > Shortcut to create a desktop shortcut
  2. A "Create Shortcut" dialog will appear. In the "Type the location of the item:" field, type the following:
C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe /f /fi "status eq not responding"

 Click the next button to name your shortcut and click Finish to save it to the desktop. Now, simply double-clicking this icon will kill any "Not-responding" applications.

Conversion Room: How to convert clicks into profit - download free Google how-to guide

Insights for Search, Conversion Tracking, Conversion Optimiser, Google Analytics and Website Optimiser.
via conversionroom.blogspot.com

Nice PDF download that talks about Google website optimization suite. Something to look into for worksite web.

Making an Expanding Code Box

via diggingintowordpress.com

Need little jQuery snippet to create dynamic expanding text boxes on your website.

1000th Twitter Post

Today, I sent off my 1000th Twitter Update. I have only been a member of Twitter since the beginning of this year, so it feels like a big deal. I joined Twitter initially to see what the fuss was all about. I quickly found a small number of folks to follow who I have learned an awful lot from in a few short months. I hope some (or most) of my tweets returned that favor. I have tried not to tweet anything too controversial, or personal. I hope the links I shared were useful and that my small band of followers (now over 260) enjoyed what I had to share. Or at least found it somewhat amusing.

I notice there are a lot of folks with huge follower numbers who don't say much. I find this to be the most amusing aspect of Twitter. I don't feel like the last one picked for basketball in gym class just because I don't have 10,000 followers. I also don't feel the need to prospect followers by following everyone I come across. I have a great deal of respect for the folks I follow and for the folks who follow me. We are a small but high quality group of folks sharing cool stuff we happen to find. I won't turn away more followers, but won't be disappointed if I am not a rock star. As a group, our signal to noise ratio is excellent. Let's make some more noise and make the next 6 months even more productive!

Thanks for listening and here's to the next 1000. -Chris

A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

via smashingmagazine.com

Great articles and tutorials on using Google analytics courtesy of Smashing Magazine - a great goto site for web designers.

Rebooting the RSS cloud (Scripting News)

In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step. That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought, but now with "realtime" as the Next Big Thing, it's time to reboot all that lovely stuff.
via scripting.com

Its somewhat amazing to me that Dave Winer was not at the Realtime CrunchUp (either he was snubbed by the TechCrunch folks, or he chose not to go). Either way, Dave has always added value to this conversation and I wanted to make sure I grabbed this content for myself for later (and also to foster conversation on the real time web here). This is hopefully the start of a conversation that Dave has posted as I know he probably has a lot more depth on this subject than many of the experts I have heard talking about this subject in the last week or so.