« September 2004 | Main | November 2004 »
Seemingly never ending, Oracle's proposed takeover of PeopleSoft looks like it is going ahead. The anti-trust authorities in Europe have no objections, so now it is time to just work out the price. Get it over with, already. I think everyone is completly sick of this slow-moving train wreck.
Went to the UVA-Duke football game in Durham this past weekend. Although the score was a lopsided, the game was pretty competitive for the first three and a half quarters and a great way to spend the afternoon.
One thing I did note at the game was how slow the concession lines were. The culprit was the annoying Palm based system that the Duke concession stands were using to ring up orders. They had some modified Palms with bar code readers and they zapped the code of the thing that was ordered to tally up the price. You would think such a solid academic school would be able to get people who could add - it would make the lines go a whole lot quicker.
It seems that balanced scorecards are hard to implement. Speaking from personal experience, I can say this is true: it is hard enough to come up with successful strategies and coming up with ways to measure the interim steps on the path to that strategy is fiendishly challenging. Nicely quantifiable, non-financial, forward looking metrics to progress are difficult to construct. I wonder whether it would be a good idea to actually modify the strategies to suit the metrics that you are most comfortable collecting and measuring?
In one of my recent projects, I had to write an installer to deploy a web application. I tried the installer project built into Visual Studio, but it was not very flexible so I started looking around for another solution.
I remembered hearing some buzz a while ago that Microsoft had released an installer tool as an open source project. After a little searching, I came across Wix on Source Forge.
Wix stands for Windows Installer XML, which is pretty descriptive of what it is: a mapping of XML to the Windows Installer database. Although it is somewhat primitive, it has a very flexible command-line-n-text-file system that works well for simple installers. Definitely worth a look if you are building installers. Now if I can only get it better integrated with the rest of my Visual Studio project...
Dan Brooks has an interesting OpEd piece in the NYT (registration required) about the conflicting visions of the world presented by our two candidates for president: the Bush world view of independence and the Kerry view of interdependence. These views extend to almost every level of belief and policy. What would be more interesting is to analyze the ways in which the candidates go against that grain, especially on social issues.
Anyway, I liked the piece because it is a break from all of the highly charged polemics on both sides. That is getting very tiresome. Can't we all just get along? ;-)
This is good news for anyone in the market for a LCD monitor.