From the monthly archives:

July 2006

“The Long Tail” Ad Nauseum

by Pete Abilla July 31, 2006

Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s new book The Long Tail is hot. It is a provocative and innovative book that attempts to show an economics that the web has created, where the sales of “non-hits” can cumulatively be larger than the sales of hot selling items. While his ideas are germane to many areas of [...]

8 comments continue reading

M. Night Shyamalan: Lady in the Water

by Pete Abilla July 26, 2006

First off, I love M. Night Shyamalan movies. I love his storytelling, cinematography, his great sense of timing, and his knack for putting things together when you least expect it and not typically how you expected it; his movies are fun to watch and can be quite moving. The Lady in the Water was good. [...]

1 comment continue reading

Scrum at Yahoo!

by Pete Abilla July 25, 2006

The New York Times published an article comparing Yahoo! and Google’s products and their development times. It was an interesting read. In that article, the Ash Patel, Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!, mentioned Scrum as a method used to reduce development time: Meanwhile, Yahoo says it is now trying to emulate Google’s faster method of [...]

2 comments continue reading

Focus on the Customer

by Pete Abilla July 24, 2006

Jeff Bezos, during a pre-peak meeting once said to a small group of us that there will be many, many winners on the internet. He said that some follow the close-follower mentality and those companies focus on the competition. He continued to say that Amazon has and always will be customer obsessed. He vowed that [...]

12 comments continue reading

6 Things I’ve Learned from Alexaholic

by Pete Abilla July 20, 2006

Continuing what I began a while ago on the Things I learned from Google Trends, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned from Alexa Traffic data. I stopped at 6 search items, because I wasn’t creative enough this morning to think of more, but I’m sure you’ll be able to think of other interesting traffic [...]

2 comments continue reading

Software Development: Agile, Team Size and Dynamics

by Pete Abilla July 19, 2006

I’ve long ranted about Amazon’s 2-Pizza Team, which is defined as the following: a team where the team size is no larger than 2 pizzas can feed. Amazon realized early on that in order to cut software development time, the solution was *NOT* to put more people on the project. What is required is a [...]

4 comments continue reading

Fun Mashup: HotCaptcha

by Pete Abilla July 18, 2006

What is a Captcha? Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Alan Turing (1950) is one of the Artificial Intelligence researchers who proposed a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. CAPTCHA’s are basically a challenge test to tell between a robot and a human. They [...]

1 comment continue reading

Ajax Toolkit Buffet: OpenLaszlo

by Pete Abilla July 17, 2006

Okay, there are many toolkits available now for Ajax applications. If you’re the brave type, you’ll develop in straight javascript, which is a pain and can get messy. I’m not brave, so I’ve decided to play with several toolkits available. For a good run-down on the toolkits curnocopia, turn to Max Kiesler — he gives [...]

0 comments continue reading

The Guerrilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy

by Pete Abilla July 17, 2006

Continuing the series on the 33 Strategies of War, I’ll be summarizing the 2nd Strategy: The Guerilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy. Greene begins by stating that often the biggest contributor to failure in strategy is our past — our previous successes and failures.  He recommends venturing forth into new ground: Sometimes you must force yourself to strike out [...]

0 comments continue reading

1 of 212