May 29, 2005

ITAC Community IT Heroes Awards

The Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) has announced a call for nominations for its Community IT Heroes Awards program.

Now in its fifth year, the program brings recognition to the work of individuals and groups across Canada who providing important volunteer contributions in the adoption and deployment of information technologies at the community level. Over 125 individuals have received the awards to date.

This year's awards place an emphasis on wireless information technologies and ITAC is actively looking for submissions concerning wireless technologies that are being used at a community level to solve community communications problems.

Nominations will be accepted until June 13, 2005.

More information and application forms are available at www.itac.ca.

Posted by songdawg at 09:08 AM | Technology

December 14, 2003

Business Processes and User Interface

Last Friday, I went to a SWIT (Significant Women in IT) lunch. What an amazing bunch of women. We met at Sorrento's and I had a great but short conversation with Adele about the connection (or lack of) between Business Process Modelling and User Interface. Sounds like something I want to look into. If you know of some good books or websites let me know.

Posted by songdawg at 10:48 AM | Comments (0) | Technology

December 03, 2003

Toby Tellier, MCSD

Pased my last exam towards my MCSD. All done. :)

Posted by songdawg at 06:23 PM | Comments (2) | Technology

November 24, 2003

Guy Kawasaki

I went to see Guy Kawasaki speak on Friday. The lunch was presented by the ICT Cluster in Edmonton. He gave two speeches: "Then and Now" and "Rules for Revolutionaries". Very entertaining and inspirational. Guy was the keynote speaker for the CNET WebBuilder conference I attended in 1998 - I still remembered about half the points he made - that's how much the speech struck me. Excellent speaker. You can buy his speeched for $0.99 from his site www.garage.com.

He was in town to see the Heritage Classic game.

Posted by songdawg at 09:17 AM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

November 21, 2003

Data Models

Went to the CIPS Data Model SIG last night to hear David C. Hay's presentation "Modeling Business Rules". Mr. Hay is the author of Data Model Patterns: Conventions of Thought.

What I understood from the presentation is that trying to capture business rules in data models can result in convoluted models which are difficult to read. And that business rules which are basically constraints cannot be shown in a data model. And since it is the business rules that change and it is the data model that should remain static, the business rules should be captured as data.

Here are some of the authors that he recommended:
The Business Rule Book: Classifying, Defining and Modeling Rules, Version 4.0
by Ronald G. Ross

Database Modeling With Microsoft Visio for Enterprise Architects
by Terry Halpin, Ken Evans, Pat Hallock, Bill Maclean
* This is a book on ORM

Posted by songdawg at 08:07 AM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

November 07, 2003

New recorder

I have been thinking of buying a new recorder. I use my Sony Minidisc mostly to record band rehearsals and email the mp3s but having to record line-in in realtime to donwload the sound file instead of digitally is getting old.

Here are the three best options so far:

Check out the very cool minidisk.org for more info on Minidiscs.

Posted by songdawg at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

November 05, 2003

misbehaving.net

I have been following a site for awhile now and highly recommend it to any women who are in working in the technology fields: www.misbehaving.net. It's one of the first sites I check out each morning.

Posted by songdawg at 04:21 PM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

Exam 70-300 tips

I am currently studying for my last MCSD exam. Just thought I would share a resource that I have been using: http://www.codeclinic.com/certification.htm. What I especially like about it is that it lists the published Microsoft exam objectives and provides a link to a relevant article.

Posted by songdawg at 04:18 PM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

November 01, 2003

Promised the Moon

Scientific American book review:

Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race
by Stephanie Nolen

Posted by songdawg at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

October 30, 2003

Tablet PC Lust

OK, I am shamelessly lusting after one of these.

Didjah get that subtle hint M? (wink wink knudge knudge)

Posted by songdawg at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

Are You a Scrum Master?

I first heard about it this new development methodology this morning in an email from the Edmonton Java User Groups:

Scrum. Xtreme Programming's next evolution?
Here's an excerpt from http://www.controlchaos.com

"A practitioner of Scrum describes it as a 'hyper-productivity technique.'... First used to describe hyper-productive development in 1987 by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, Scrum refers to the mechanism used in rugby for getting an out-of-play ball back into play.

Scrum generates productivity improvements by implementing a framework that empowers teams and thrives on change. A set of rules and corresponding terminology are used to reinforce such common sense techniques as small teams, daily status meetings, not interrupting people who are working, and a single source of work prioritization.

Scrum's two pillars are team empowerment and adaptability:

Team empowerment : Once teams are given work to do, they are responsible for figuring out how to do it. The team does the best it can during each increment. While a team works, their only interaction with management is to tell management what is getting in their way and needs to be removed to improve their productivity.

Adaptability : Scrum uses "punctuated equilibrium". The team maintains an equilibrium during each increment, insulated from outside disturbance. Increments are punctuated every thirty days so that the team and management can evaluate what should be done during the next increment; this decision is based on what the team has accomplished and what the environment dictates is the next most important thing to do.

Once Scrum is underway, teams and management find it easy to focus, every request is easily evaluated by, 'what's that got to do with delivering the code?'. "

Posted by songdawg at 07:48 AM | Comments (2) | Technology | TrackBack

October 22, 2003

Tree Swing Requirements

Sent to me from Prince and Eldridge. I don't know who the original author is...

Tree Swing requirements.jpg

Posted by songdawg at 10:16 AM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

September 18, 2003

Whidbey

For all my non-geek family and friends this post is all about boring computer stuff :) Go ahead and skip to the next message.

The next version of VB.NET called Whidbey is coming out in 2004. I just listened to the latest .NET Rocks show where Carl and Mark interviewed Amanda Silver (Program Manager for Visual Basic .NET team) and Paul Vick (Technical Lead in Visual Basic). They were announcing some of the new VB.NET features to expect including:


  • Edit and continue debugging
  • Support for generics
  • Overloaded operators
  • XML comments (compiled to Intellisense)
  • Plus 1000s of other improvements

Very interesting.

Posted by songdawg at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

September 10, 2003

Links

Very funny - ping pong a la matrix via Jon:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/stu/video/pingpong.htm

I still don't have my laptop, here are some links I would be saving on it if I did:

PHP usage on the web
http://www.php.net/usage.php

Web server usage:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/09/01/september_2003_web_server_survey.html

Great text editor:
http://www.textpad.com/

Free office suite that has gotten very good reviews:
http://www.openoffice.org/

Email I want to eventually check out:
http://www.pocomail.com/

Posted by songdawg at 03:18 PM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

August 18, 2003

Teoma.com

New rival search engine to google.com? Try it out: http://teoma.com/

Posted by songdawg at 07:22 AM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack

July 05, 2003

www.SongDawg.com

I just bought myself a new domain name: www.SongDawg.com. By tomorrow it will be set up so that if you type in www.SongDawg.com it will redirect you to this page.

Posted by songdawg at 08:26 AM | Comments (2) | Technology | TrackBack

June 12, 2003

.NET Rocks


I listen to a internet radio show on Microsoft .NET called .NET Rocks. I sent them kudos on their show last week. This week they read my email on the show - cool eh? They said it made their day, hearing them read it on the show made mine.

It's the show for the Week of June 9, 2003 - Chris Sells (Again!). They read out the email at 22:15. What a hoot!


Posted by songdawg at 07:14 AM | Comments (0) | Technology | TrackBack