snazzy bookmarklet for css

Just caught wind of the XRAY bookmarklet - allows you to see the box model for any element on the page.
Slick!

DeepZoom meets Death and Taxes

Had to pass along this link to a Silverlight DeepZoom rendition of the where tax dollars are going - very cool.

Website SEO grader

Check out http://feeds.downloadsquad.com/~r/weblogsinc/downloadsquad/~3/189293946/  for a link to WebSite Grader. 

Website Grader reviews your site, taking into account traffic, social sites, Google Page Rank, Alexa rankings, inbound links etc... and comes up with a score out of 100.

This is a nice report to let you know how you are doing and makes some solid suggestions on how to improve.

IBM: $5B for Cognos

Interesting moves this year:

SAP AG bought Business Objects AS for $7B

Oracle bought Hyperion for $3.3B

Now IBM has announced a $5 billion in cash deal to purchase Cognos.

 

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/I/IBM_COGNOS?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2007-11-12-11-31-57

Wow - see the history of the code, in Visual Studio

A new feature is available with Visual Studio 2008 when working with Team System.

 

Jeff Atwood blogs the ability to see the different versions of the code in visual studio include the check in comments.  Wow!

LOLCatz has LOLCodez nowzz

If you haven't yet seen Lolcats (lolcats.com) or icanhascheezburger.com, consider yourself lucky that your brain has not been infected (don't visit those url's!).

If you're not so lucky (or infected so badly you can't admit your addiction), a new programming language has been developed by analyzing lolcats speak: LOLCode.net.  LOLCode.NET utilizes the .NET Runtime and can even be debugged in Visual Studio.

You always wanted to write the following code and have it run, right?

IM IN YR LOOP
VISIBLE COUNTER
I HAS A DIFFERENCE
LOL DIFFERENCE R COUNTER NERF MINIMUM
IZ MINIMUM UP DIFFERENCE LIEK MAXIMUM OVAR 2
YARLY
VISIBLE "Half way there" NOWAI
I HAS A NEXT COUNTER TIEMZD NEXTCOUNTER!!2
KTHX
[....]

Comic from xcd:  http://www.xkcd.com/262/

Evidence based scheduling

FogBugz (lead by famous blogger Joel Spolsky) just released version 6.0.  With it they are making waves due to the inclusion of evidence based scheduling.

Evidence based scheduling tracks developer estimates per feature against actual time spent (including interruption time) to determine estimate accuracy and plot a distribution curve of likelihood of shipping software on time. 

My question is:  how can we leverage this type of mechanism at a  company that does many, many small projects?  Are the projects similar enough that this would help?  Could each project be treated as a sprint (or sprints) in an overall continued effort?

Read this post for an overview of evidence based scheduling:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

Read some reactions to the feature:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/29.html