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Short Story Dispenser Kiosks
When my dad and his wife visited last month, they came across a cool thing. A printed short story or poem dispenser. You pick genre and length and it prints out a poem or short story on thermal paper (like cash register receipts). Below are some pictures. From the website above, it appears that the…
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Starting Requires Continuing
It is easier to start something than to maintain, or continue, that something.
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Open Source Concerns
https://future.com/securing-the-software-supply-chain/ Open Source is a great way to quickly develop applications and services for IT departments. The software supply chain refers to the process of writing and building software, including all of the open source that goes into it. Open source isn’t without risks. The risks around using software you don’t know is not hard…
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Amazon Books Make on Demand Virtual Tour
This is impressive. A 9 minute tour of one of the Amazon MOD (make on demand) sites. It is all about books, so I presume the “make” refers to future. Imagine a 3D print shop at this scale. Everything is barcoded and you can see that each book is different coming down the line.
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My book is on sale!
Folks, I did a thing and it is now available for sale from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine bookstores. The I.T. Leader’s Handbook is a book for current and aspiring IT leaders. From the back cover: Is your IT department working harder than ever and still falling behind? Does the organization have unreasonable…
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The Unsinkable Maddie Stone, Google’s Bug-Hunting Badass | WIRED
“There was such a clear, direct impact,” Stone says of her Android-focused work. “I find these potentially harmful apps, I flag the malware, and the defense we develop propagates to 2.8 billion devices. It was just such a massive, tangible impact that most people don’t get in their jobs.” The Unsinkable Maddie Stone, Google’s Bug-Hunting…
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IT: Application Logging
If your IT shop does software development, Application Logging is useful for several things:
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People! Vibrate!
From the always brilliant xkcd: Folks, unless you have a compelling reason otherwise, set your phone to vibrate. Especially those of you with watches that vibrate when something happens.
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Square Root Of Change
Back in the early 1990s, I was working in IT at a multi-billion dollar manufacturing company. Ours was a small part of IT, separate from the mother ship. Responsible for about 2000 employees in our area, we had implemented several large projects over a two-year span; all bringing changes to the employees. I was a…
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The Fake Image/Video Arms Race Continues
It is not always easy to tell the difference between real and fake photographs. But the pressure to get it right has never been more urgent as the amount of false political content online continues to rise. On Tuesday, Jigsaw, a company that develops cutting-edge tech and is owned by Google’s parent, unveiled a free…
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Ghosting job applicants
An acquaintance of mine, who wants to stay anonymous for obvious reasons, provided me the data for the above chart. The data came from their last job hunting experience. While a successful job search — after all, they got offers — there is something very disturbing that I would like to point out.
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Helping People Understand Data
We are flooded with data and we don’t understand most of it. While the below HBR tip of the day has specifics about communicating outside the company, I think that the basic concept — helping people understand the data — is a fundamental part of being a Business Analyst. The standard mantra you hear is…
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xkcd: Unreachable State – been there, done that…
As a developer, I was so tempted to put messages like this in the parts of the code that should never execute. I did a couple of times, although never this clever. I’m not up on the latest programming languages, but I imagine that it is still possible to have these places of despair. These…
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Medical Product Outsourcing – An article I wrote back in 2005
This article was published back in the June 2005 edition of Medical Product Outsourcing magazine. As the article title says, it covers how a company’s IT infrastructure can help with its medical device design process.
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A software developer and a software tester walk into a bar…
A software developer and a software tester walk into their newly opened bar. The tester orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. The developer says, “See? It all worked. I told you everything was fine.” First real customer walks in and asks where the…
