http://alethe.com Thu, 24 Apr 2008 01:49:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I enjoy listening to Bach’s Cello Sonatas when I’m coding, surfing the net, or writing.. The album is playing even now. The music has a magical quality and it took me a while to realize what that is. The answer is logic and simplicity. The same basic pattern is repeated ... http://alethe.com/2008/04/20/why-can%e2%80%99t-everything-be-simple/ I recently read an article in the New Yorker magazine about feature creep (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2007/05/28/070528ta_talk_surowiecki). It mentioned an interesting study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics. Aparently,  at least half of returned products are not broken or defective. People just couldn’t figure out how to use them.   So I pulled out ... http://alethe.com/2008/04/15/feature-creep/ I came across an article on standards called “Standards Confusion and Harmonization” in the July 2007 issue of the IEEE Computer Magazine. It offers some insight into the debate on having standards, “proponents of standards claim that having a bar to be hurdled is better than no bar at all,” ... http://alethe.com/2008/04/06/standards/ Recently I read an article in Enjoying Everyday Life magazine called “People Do What People See” by Dr. John Maxwell, and it really spoke to me. As parents, people often say to their children, “Do as I say, not as I do,” but it also happens in the workplace.   A manager ... http://alethe.com/2008/04/03/people-do-what-people-see/  The more I learn about agile methods, the more I like them. I watched a video presentation on agile estimation by Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software Part 1  Part 2  There's a lot of good information, but what I liked most is that agile makes it very hard to hide bad ... http://alethe.com/2008/03/28/agile-estimation/