A Simple Guide To Setting Goals

Good entry on goal setting -- something I'm not very good at.

I’ve finally realized that I need to put together a 5-year plan to continue my personal development and reach goals. I’ve found your post, Think About Your Life Goals , and it’s started me in the right direction, but left a lot of open questions. To start, I really don’t know what questions I should ask myself to get to the items I really want (if I even know what I really want in the first place). Is there some sort of personal plan worksheet that you know of that would cover the complete realm of development? I feel that I would be more successful if I could easily view my goals and track my progress within one main document.

http://zenhabits.net/2007/06/a-simple-guide-to-setting-and-achieving-your-life-goals/

Human Civilization 400000 Years Old?

Human civilization could be 400000 years old.

Our earliest ancestors gave up hunter-gathering and took to a settled life up to 400,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to controversial research.

The accepted timescale of Man’s evolution is being challenged by a German archaeologist who claims to have found evidence that Homo erectus — mankind’s early ancestor, who migrated from Africa to Asia and Europe — began living in settled communities long before the accepted time of 10,000 years ago.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1980396.ece

Terraforming Mars and Venus

How to terraform Mars and Venus

As distinguished from previous proposals for large-scale planetary engineering projects employing passive, explosive, orbital mechanical or biological agents to terraform various planets of the Solar System, the present paper offers an alternative means: Machine self-replicating systems (SRS). Terraforming via SRS involves the deposition of a small "seed" unit near the surface of the body to be altered, which then self-replicates into a giant factory complex capable of undertaking permanent modification of the target environment. SRS terraforming methods are suggested for Mars and Venus.

http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/TerraformSRS1983.htm

Shift Happens

Cool...

 

http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834/

Asshole Driven Development

Forget Test Driven Development, XP, or Agile, I'm a fan of Asshole Driven Development. And guess who the Asshole is.

Asshole Driven development (ADD) - Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

Cognitive Dissonance development (CDD) - In any organization where there are two or more divergent beliefs on how software should be made. The tension between those beliefs, as it’s fought out in various meetings and individual decisions by players on both sides, defines the project more than any individual belief itself.

Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) - The driving force behind most individual efforts is to make sure than when the shit hits the fan, they are not to blame.

Development By Denial (DBD) - Everybody pretends there is a method for what’s being done, and that things are going ok, when in reality, things are a mess and the process is on the floor. The worse things get, the more people depend on their denial of what’s really happening, or their isolation in their own small part of the project, to survive.

Get Me Promoted Methodology (GMPM) - People write code and design things to increase their visibility, satisfy their boss’s whims, and accelerate their path to a raise or the corner office no matter how far outside of stated goals their efforts go. This includes allowing disasters to happen so people can be heroes, writing hacks that look great in the short term but crumble after the individual has moved on, and focusing more on the surface of work than its value.

 

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2007/asshole-driven-development/

Top 5 Amarok Tips

If you're an Amarok user, you'll dig this...

A part of the KDE suite of applications, Amarok has been around for a while. It continues to be one of the most widely used audio players in Linux, partly in thanks to the fact that it's included in many distros. It was originally developed as a means to replace and outperform XMMS, and oddly enough it was those goals that made me first give it a try. Despite the fact that I've been using Amarok for a few years now, I continue to stumble on features I didn't know existed, and also easier ways of handling simple tasks.

In this short article, I will be relaying a few of my favorite features of Amarok that you just may not know about. I have to mention that depending on your distro or method or installation, some features may not be automatically available to you. Also, some of these features are more obvious than others, but might be largely ignored for those lacking investigative motivation ;-)

 

http://techgage.com/article/top_five_amarok_tips

Mandriva: No Deal Microsoft

Excellent...

Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft.

Rumors on the Web have hinted that we might be next on the list. So we would like to clarify our position.

At Mandriva, we believe working in heterogeneous environments is essential to our customers. So, interoperability between the Windows and Linux world is important and must be dealt with, and anything that helps this interoperability is a good thing.

We also believe the best way to deal with interoperability is open standards, such as ODF which we support strongly and we are ready to cooperate with everyone on these topics.

As far as IP is concerned, we are, to say the least, not great fans of software patents and of the current patent system, which we consider as counter productive for the industry as a whole.

We also believe what we see, and up to now, there has been absolutely no hard evidence from any of the FUD propagators that Linux and open source applications are in breach of any patents. So we think that, as in any democracy, people are innocent unless proven guilty and we can continue working in good faith.

So we don’t believe it is necessary for us to get protection from Microsoft to do our job or to pay protection money to anyone.

We plan to keep developing and distributing innovative and exciting products and making them available to the largest number in the true spirit of open source.

François Bancilhon

 

http://corp.mandriva.com/webteam/2007/06/19/we-will-not-go-to-canossa/