simondelliott

Fixed my White Screen of Death

Wooo yeah !!!!!
I fixed the white scren of death that I was getting on the blog. read about my troubles in full and boring detail on the wordpress forums http://wordpress.org/support/topic/278684?replies=22#post-1113755

A list of some blogs I like to read

Some one asked me what blogs I read. It’s a bit like asking what your favorite films are (of which there are thousands, but I cannot think of one)

To answer the question, generally speaking, Try and get to the source of good thinking or good writing for example I would rather read Kent Beck’s thoughts about integration and development than IBM’s or Microsoft’s, simply because he was the inventor of so many modern practices.

A lot of people will recommend reading blogs by people such as Seth Goddin, Guy Kawasaki, John Medina. I find these too ego centric and way too American for my taste. However Clay Shirky is an exception, and is well worth a read (try and find the “hear comes everybody” video).

Avoid the blogs that have reactive commentary, it is often dull and uninspiring. The Cap Gemini and Gartner blogs fit into this category.

Here are some good links

Kent Beck
Software design and general development guru

http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/

Core 77
often show cases good student design (furniture and stuff), can take itself a little too seriously sometimes

http://www.core77.com/blog/news/inhabitat_fathers_day_green_gift_guide_13702.asp

Martin Fowler
Software design Goliath
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/

Fail Blog
Very very funny
http://failblog.org/

Wired UK
Editorial and commentary about all sorts of technology stuff
http://www.wired.co.uk/

Community Spark
Often insightful but mostly common sense about online communities
http://www.communityspark.com

Oreily
Fountain of all technical knowledge
http://radar.oreilly.com/

Charlie Booker
Writer of Nathan Barley and Screen wipe, very funny and quite angry man

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker

A good video on RDFA – semantic web

How to understand collaboration tools quickly

Too many cooks spoil the broth, but many hands make light work,

If you are a natural leader, using a tool that can allow lots and lots of people to work on the same thing at the same time could be a really good recipe for success.

If you have not used collaboration tools before, the quick start is working out how to make google doc work for you and your team.

This is what to do.
Make the next document you make a google doc

Go to http://docs.google.com

Signup and that nonsense,

Then write your document (its just like a simplified version of word)

Then instead of mailing the document to you team, use the “share” button instead.

See how your team get on with this,

After you have the hang of one collaboration tool, you will get really into the whole thing, and the tools are pretty much all the same kind of thing.

Is it just me or does it look lik ethe bing man having a wee?

Top 10 companies that I would like to buy

Over the past year I have been keeping tabs companies that I have come across that I feel are really going places.
Here is my top ten list. To get on the list the company has to have a neat way of working or a great product. The company has to have a buisness model that will do well from the downturn and be in a position to benefit from acquisition or investment.

1. Sulake – the inventors of Habbo Hotel, and in my mind a great example of how to commercialize virtual worlds
2. emoderation – simply put … a great service. This company will police your online brand and protect it from damaging comments, contributors and content. This is precicly the kind of service that will grow and grow.
3. Intuit – a really simple online CRM system. This is the future of CRM within companies.
4. splash up – Faux Labs – this is to photoshop what google doc is to word. It is a great product and it works pretty well
5. ravelry – These guys are genius. They have jumped on to the expanding Knitting market and really made an awsome community product. There is alot that can be learned from how they have managed to scheive such a great product.
6. zoho – AdventNet – an online suite of applications including databases, CRM and many more standard corporate tools.
7. Madgex – awsome stuff on identity
8. Animoto – a leading innovation based company that is making some crazy little applications. Again its not their product that is as important as how they managed to make it.
9. Playfish – It took along time for me to decide to put this one into my top ten, It was only when I found myself and my son playing one of their games that I realized the power of their business model.
10. DimDim – a straight forward web conferencing solution