Interesting Reading: 6/16
The Joy of Less
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?em
"“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either."
--------
Can a Project Manager Survive without Windows?
http://pmtips.net/project-manager-survive-windows/#comment-2345
"My wife has been a Mac user for nearly two years now. She loves it – but she’s a photographer, among other things, so she’s a Photoshop pro and has found all things Photoshop have been much easier to perform on a Mac. I’m her tech support, and I can say that my job has definitely been much easier since she got her Macbook Pro. However, I was on the outside looking in and ‘winging it’ on everything until I was sort of forced into the world of Mac in March of this year.
My Windows Vista laptop blew through its third hard drive in just over a year (meaning, of course that it was no out of warranty!). My wife went through her same speech again…”Why don’t you just get a Mac?” Frustrated with my Gateway and all things Windows and knowing that I still have my backup HP laptop running Windows XP as a crutch, I decided to “just do it.” I must say I haven’t looked back yet.
...The backlash from my colleagues was immediate. “How can you PM with a Mac?” “What about running MS Project?” “How can you survive?” And my favorite one from my 19 yr-old son (becauseI had been a Windows lifer), “It’s sort of like turning an atheist to Christianity!”
--------
OpenProj
http://openproj.org/openproj
"OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions. The OpenProj solution has been download more than 1,250,000 times in the few months since launch and is being used in over 142 countries. A free download of OpenProj is Click to enlarge in a new windowavailable here and is distributed under the CPAL license. OpenProj is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. It even opens existing Microsoft or Primavera files. OpenProj shares the industry's most advanced scheduling engine with Project-ON-Demand and provides Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more. There is literally no time or effort involved in switching to OpenProj, and your teams can manage projects on any platform for free. Projity worked closely with leaders in the commercial and open source industries in preparation for the release of OpenProj. It is a welcome addition, not only for project management users, but also for users in all software segments. Microsoft Project retails for $999.99, is installed on 7% of all Office desktops and drives over $1 billion in revenue for Microsoft. OpenProj fills an important gap in the desktop market, as a key component in the Office family of products now has a replacement available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj was also selected for inclusion with Star Office suite boxes in Europe. The OpenProj solution has been translated into French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Galician, Persian, Russian, Korean and Chinese. We are looking for further documentation and translation assistance. If you are interested contact us."
--------
Olympus E-P1 'digital Pen' - in depth preview + samples
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0906/09061601olympusep1.asp?from=rss#Pin_Hole
"After a carefully constructed teaser campaign Olympus has officially launched the E-P1, its first Micro Four Thirds camera and the worst kept secret in the photography industry, thanks to a deluge of leaked information ahead of launch. It's a compact mirrorless interchangeable lens camera that mimics the styling of the company's Pen range that was popular in the 1960s and 70s. The camera is built around an image-stabilized 12 megapixel sensor and incorporates a 3.0" LCD. The E-P1 is available with a 14-42mm kit lens that retracts into its barrel when not in use, much like the lens of a compact camera. Check out the news story, lots of images and our full hands-on preview after the link."
Comment: While this is being pushed as a retro camera for style mavens, there is a lot of interesting aspects to this. Micro Four Thirds, interchangeable lenses, multiple aspects ratios (including square). This is being introduced in honor of the ground breaking Olympus Pen camera. This camera is in the same camp as the Ricoh Gx 200, but has the advantage, to my mind, of a fixed lens (one that does not retract). Takes HD Movies too!
--------
Opera "Reinvents the Web" with Unite, Makes Every Computer a Server
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/opera_reinvents_the_web_with_unite_makes_every_com.php
"Opera has been buzzing up our inboxes lately with rather vague press releases on how it planned to "reinvent the web."
Well, we've just received concrete confirmation of exactly what that means. Their new product, Opera Unite, "turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers."
Opera Unite aims to make hosting and sharing data as simple as navigating around the Internet. It purports to give users greater control of their data while still allowing for easy sharing of files and information between all web-enabled devices. The Unite services are based on open web standards to permit developers to design cutting-edge applications with ease. Opera even claims that creating a full-service application will now be as easy as coding a web page.
Unite is now available in the Opera 10 desktop browser from Opera Labs, and services run directly in the browser. Directions for setup are also available at that page."
--------
Cloud computing and open source face-off
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=543
Cloud computing remains one of the big topics in software this year despite considerable and ongoing concerns over lock-in, lack of control, and security. The siren song of ease-of-development, reduced costs, highly elastic scalability, and next-generation architectures has many in IT and in the Web community carefully weighing the benefits and risks.
Along the way, open source has become a key enabler for cloud computing by providing both cheap inputs (as in free) as well as rich capabilities to providers of cloud services. The writing, however, is beginning to appear on the wall: the cloud computing industry will use open source as leverage for a new generation of proprietary platforms-as-a-service, very much like the established Web 2.0 services in the consumer space have used open source platforms to capture and create lock-in around data.
