“The iPhone could be in short supply across Belgium this Christmas, because thieves have stolen some 4000 units of the smartphone worth an estimated €2m (£1.7m/$2.9m).”
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/11/17/iphone_theft/
so if anyone needs a new iphone… Belgium is the place to be
Caffeine will affect search rankings in a very minor way, but is a nice architectural update.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/
Web CEO is a cracking tool for doing search engine optimisation analysis.
Good Content remains the single most important factor in search marketing. And will be forever.
There are a whole bunch of webmaster tools for different search engines. They help you identify problems with your content, deal with content issues, and upload xml sitemaps.
I’ve found Bing to be very poor. Trying to add Smarticles digital creative agency to it, I have a lag of 4 weeks compare to Yahoo and Google. I submitted a sitemap, and have followed best practice. Ask even found me by its self (pretty impressive, as I had forgotten about it). But Bing still Bing’s badly.
Sean Corfield has just made a really good post on Test Driven Development
“What the research team found was that the TDD teams produced code that was 60 to 90 percent better in terms of defect density than non-TDD teams. They also discovered that TDD teams took longer to complete their projects — 15 to 35 percent longer.”
He quotes a seemingly astonishingly useful article by Microsoft. Some of the conclusions are obvious, some are less so.
I remember one of those 90/10 statistics from university that 90% of the costs of code lie in maintenance. If we take the lower bound of 50% (the one in the article). Then it is always useful to use test-driven development. This is kind of geeky but the only trade-off is between the cost of fixing bugs versus the upfront 35% extra cost. In a normal situation, the time spent solving 90% of you bugs would be approximately 90% of your project budget. As 90% is greater than the 35%, I can see few situations in large software development where test driven development wouldn’t be the most rational approach.
“The research team believes that enforcing the use of assertions would not work well; rather, there needs to be a culture of using assertions in order to produce the desired results. Nagappan and his colleagues feel there is an urgent need to promote the use of assertions and plan to collaborate with academics to teach this practice in the classroom. Having the data makes this easier.”
That definitely implies that assertions fit the cost benefit test.
A really interesting section on outsourcing
“Does distributed development affect software quality? An empirical case study of Windows Vista [...] found that the differences were statistically negligible”
As it was about Vista and software quality there must have been a lot of fun issues to look at. The interesting thing for me was that the out-sourcing must keep organisational cohesion. People must feel comfortable and safe with it.
Sean Corfield also threw in a little segue in his comments to another article about war-rooms being used for development. University of Michigan.
Teams in the war room environments were more than twice as productive as similar teams at the same company working in traditional office settings
We at Smarticles are still in the process of building our war room, but it sounds like a really sensible way to go.
Just read about a company MFG that seems to have had some problems with ColdFusion. They spent $3Million and 2 years developing there new technology. Sounds like they could have done it better quicker and easier with Railo, and a few more Smarticles.
To be honest, I’m just cheap point scoring. They needed work to work on the application architecture, which just points to using the best developers, and trusting there advice.
Westartup is a social network that applies co-creation and crowd-sourcing principles to creating new businesses. The site allows young entrepreneurs to share their ideas with each other, give feedback, hammer out business models and fine-tune business plans. The site also pools together relevant content: practical, hands-on information for starting companies, recorded wisdom and experience from successful entrepreneurs.
Smarticles are starting phase2 of developing this popular site. Is there anything you would like to see please let us know.
If you get the chance please take a look at the Smarticles Creative Digital Agency
It would cheer me up
Joel