b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Thursday, September 15, 2005
Picture the Process
Australian process guru and ontological coach David Buchan has begun using flickr and, as is usual with David, has begun to brainstorm specifics on how it can be a tool for improving the way we work. This would not have been an interesting conversation a month ago, but with Yahoo! buying flickr a stable future seems much more likely for the online photo service. I like Davids three points at the end, addressing what are likely to be common objections to his idea.Using photos to job memories
Shawn Callahan extols the virtues of using photos to remember what has happened on a project.
Remember the last time you sat down to flick through a photo album and see the photo of Uncle Johnnie (substitute your own relatives here) building the sand castle with little Katie and you instantly recollect the story of how Johnnie got incredibility drunk that night and fell into the bonfire. The next morning he vowed to be a tea totaller. The same story recollecting effect can be created in your organisation with each each project you undertake.I really like this idea and agree that flickr is a good solution. If you're reluctant to start a photo archive today it may be because you are thinking...
- I don't have time to categorise everything so that I can find it again - well, flickr uses tags which are quick and sorts by date using the information from the digital camera itself. Photos of a project ar relevant to the people that were on it. They will remember the categories/stories themselves. For others it really doesn't matter so there is no need to invest the time
- I don't have time to take good photos or I'm not a good photographer - who cares? You want to capture the moment as it was, not as you thought it should be portrayed.
- The rest of the world will see us or the client will wonder why we are taking photos rather than doing work - injecting some humanity into work is always a good thing. And the rest of the world? Perhaps you will inspire them.
Terry Frazier at 12:25 PM
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Zimbra PIM: The Chandler Killer?
The Flash demo of Zimbra is quite interesting, but then demos always are. After years of hype the Chandler project of the Open Source Applications Foundation still languishes at release 0.5. Can AJAX, eXtreme Programming, and other techno buzztrends overtake the open source uber-PIM and deliver a challenger to Outlook in our lifetime?
Calendaring seems to be the barrier. E-mail and search are pretty standard. But calendaring, and sharing calendars, is a real bear when the Outlook-driven corporate world is involved. Im not at all sure iCal is up to the challenge, but we have yet to see a truly robust iCal app. [Link via Judith Meskill]
Zimbra is open source, AJAX-enabled email, calendaring, and collaboration
What I like about Zimbra is its open sourceness (natch) and its intelligent approach to information presentation as applied to email and calendaring. Think Gmail but with tight integration with a web-based calendar, and with a lot of neat little information integration bells and whistles â like generating a contextual menu from a phone number in an email with an option to place a VoIP call. AJAX is no mere hot buzzword here but is well applied such that mousing over bits of data can generate tooltip-style boxes with related information, such that rolling over a date will pop up any items on your calendar for that day, e.g. Also slick, it understands relative terms like tomorrow or next Tuesday and will popover relevant calendar details for those terms. Whats exciting about this is that it eliminates a sizeable portion of the need to keep switching back and forth between panes, interfaces or applications to access information youve always felt should be available to you from right where you are.
Terry Frazier at 9:37 AM
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Saturday, September 10, 2005
terrywfrazier@gmail.com
I have added a gmail and google talk account to my ever-growing list internet communications addresses (I think it's up to a dozen now.) The number of comm points is getting silly. Thank goodness for Trillian, the all-in-one chat client for Windoze. Otherwise managing all these things would be even more difficult than it is.I've had a jabber account for a year or so, terrywfrazier@jabber.org, but the public Jabber network has never achieved the reach or stability that the bigger services like AIM and Y! have. I hope google talk will bring both. We'll see.
Terry Frazier at 8:22 PM
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Saturday, May 14, 2005
New b.cognosco Wiki
I know nothing about how this is going to work, but I just installed a new wiki over at wiki.terryfrazier.com. I used mediawiki, the same wiki that runs Wikipedia. Seemed like a good choice.But this is still really, really geeky. I mean, try searching Google for "wikimedia admin" and you get pages telling you to run sql queries to set user rights and such. My manhood is pretty much assured, I don't need shit like that. Just give me some text file to edit or something I don't have to think about too hard. It's not like sql queries are human-readable. But I think I can probably do it through the cPanel interface that my host provides.
It's like everything else - those things that are self-evident to geeks and don't seem to need explanation aren't, and they do. But I did this for the fun of it and to learn something about it. So I'll learn as I go and see what happens. Drop over there make a page or two, put in a comment, or something...
Terry Frazier at 5:41 PM
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