Could Amazon spare the box? Could they give the option? Would the books be too much at risk? Is it impractical for FedEx or UPS?
November 30, 2011
November 4, 2011
In need of a metric amazon.com!
Amazon.com needs a “metric” feature like weather.com (their toggle is at the very top right by the sign in link). That way I could see book dimensions and weight in metric. What about being able to see prices in the currency of your choice?
Shutterfly – Human reviewer
Shutterfly has some pretty nifty online software to put together picture books. They now (November 2011) have tutorials to help people design better looking books. But as options become almost overwhelming I think it would be of value to some people to have their work reviewed by a professional graphics art designer. A bit like WordPress with their “Request Feedback” option 
.
Object Oriented Sofware Development
First, strive to understand polymorphism; then favor composition over inheritance.
October 4, 2011
Movies at the pump
Considering the (short) time it takes to download a movie from my computer to my iPod, I am thinking that there could be an opportunity to download movies at the pump. Pumps at Sam’s Club have a nice screen and already display information on products and services. The solution would have to include a way to deactivate the movie after 3 or 5 days (or get the blu-ray sent to your home for a reduced price). But no more going back to drop the movie (with Blockbuster) and no more waiting at the computer for a download. Of course I have to plan a trip to the gas station, but it’s not any worse than the movie distributor at Kroger! Maybe a good option when on a trip with the kids and you’ve already played several times the movies you took with you! There could be a wireless connection between the pump and the car system / iPod / iPhone.
Could Kroger and RedBox or Sam’s and Netflix put in place a multichannel integration approach? When I swipe my card I am offered a list of movies (suggestions list or wish list), the same I would find on either web site.
August 2, 2011
Intuit CEO Brad Smith at Startup Lesson Learned
Short but enlightening presentation on how things work at Intuit on Justin.tv.
June 1, 2011
Testing Excel workbooks
In Gerald Weinberg’s classification, the “pattern 0″ organization is known as the “oblivious” culture (“We don’t even know that we’re performing a process”). One tool that comes to my mind when thinking about that culture is Microsoft Excel.
How many people using Excel think of their formulas as automation requiring testing?
Let’s say you have a formula like =a1*b1+c1 but really what you meant was =a1*(b1+c1). This is obviously simplistic, but it highlights two needs:
Did I understand correctly what needed to be automated?
Do I have a good mastery of the mathematical (and excel) tools?
The latter being, in my opinion, easier to improve than the former. And the difficulty can be compounded by the fact that if I am developing this model for myself then, most likely, nobody else is going to look at it.
Why not “unit testing” for Excel?
This doesn’t seem to be a topic often covered in Excel classes, even though it should be addressed from the beginners course and at each other level from there on.
Codematic Ltd. seems to have thought about that.
http://www.codematic.net/excel-development/excel-dev-general/excel-testing.htm
Intuit – TurboTax
It would be great if TurboTax offered a way to transfer parent tax information into relevant web sites when children are applying for college, instead of retyping everything!
Amazon Kindle
As I am getting to appreciate more and more my Kindle, I would like a slicker looking version, with higher-end looking material for the casing; it should enhance the feeling too.
May 27, 2011
PDF toolkit
Not afraid of the command line?
Then Pdftk is worth your time. I needed to rotate the pages of a document I had scanned. I downloaded Pdftk, installed it and run the command I needed from the command line (what I needed happened to be one of their examples!). It can be easily used from Groovy or any other programming language.
It can be found at: http://www.pdflabs.com/
