Project

then Project Gutenberg has something for you. I'm starting to wonder how anyone can ever keep up with all that is available. Maybe just starting with the "Top 100" would be enough.

A bit slow, but an interesting on-line mapping application by the EPA.

MPUG (Microsoft Project Users Group) changed their identity last month to MPA - The Official Industry Association of Microsoft Office Project. I'm not sure exactly why they changed the name, but MPA does roll off the tongue better. They say:

"The MPUG team is delighted to announce that we have been working hard over the past several months to enhance membership benefits and position the MPUG brand to better reflect our identity as a professional association."

Regardless of the latter item, it IS a good place to visit and if you are not too proud to join any club that would accept you, you might want to consider membership.

If you are reading this with Firefox take a minute or two to disable Javascript at least until you read this warning from Mozilla.

Here is how:

Junko Yoshida has an article in EETimes covering vertical vs. horizontal integration. It is a question of control vs. economy of scale and proponents of the vertical approach claim that vertical integration allows them to be more responsive to customer requirements and allows them to differentiate their products. In parallel with these discussions and prognostications, Intel continues with its new "Platform" strategy which, in my opinion, tries to turn what has been a horizontal business for many years into one which almost walks upright.

There are some interesting parallels for Project Management where a PMO is a horizontal model and embedded Project/Program/Platform management is the vertical model. How do PM tools and processes support these different models? Lots to think about...

Well, now there is no need to leave. If you are like me and always want a window seat in the airplane so you can look down at the world then googlesightseeing.com is the site for you. Selected aerial photographs from Google's mapping application.

For those reading my entries on TOC and wondering what it is I am talking about, here is one of the more useful references on the Theory of Constraints. I think it does a great job of laying out the principles, thoughts and history behind it. The author does at times get carried away with jargon and uses phrases like "verbalizing intuition" for example. But if you like hot talk like:

The reductionist/local optima approach is well represented; firstly by the family of material requirements planning (mrp), manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) and enterprise-wide planning (EPR). Secondly, it is represented by “reversions” from more systemic but nevertheless transitional approaches. The reversions are World Class Manufacturing and Lean Production.

The transitional class is composed of the Ford Production System and the Toyota Production System. Both methodologies are mass production systems and while both are paced or synchronized to the slowest step in the line, safety is distributed evenly throughout the system. The advancement of the Toyota system over the Ford system is that although safety is spread throughout both, the Toyota system seeks to substantially reduce it by increased quality throughout the process.

I keep losing track of these things so I'm going to just put all the links here:

Project 2003 Object Model

Project 2003 XML Schema

Building a Project Server PDS Extension with dot net.

PDS Reference download

I used to have a link to the code for the "Export Timescaled Data to Excel" add-in, but I can't find it right now.

[Update: Here it is Download Timescaled Data Source Code]

Any of these links lead you to the MSDN documentation. I suggest you browse around the other topics while you are there.

I like comics the way I like chocolate. They should be dark, rich and a little bitter. Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man fits the description (alternative is to access through Slate here - without commentary though). I have completely lost touch with him, but I know Shannon from when he was just starting out. I can recall sitting with Shannon and Alex one morning at Cafe Roma in Berkeley and sketching out a comic, the punchline of which only made sense to architecture students who had not slept in days. It is good to see that he has made it work for him. I notice that his new book has just appeared on Amazon too! Buy it through this link and he gets $0.40.

(Note to Shannon: Your website is excruciatingly slow! But your May 6 George Lucas Rant made it all worthwhile.)

but I just bumped into Mike Walsh's Sharepoint Blog from Finland. If you are interested in Sharepoint it is definitely worth a look. Personally I like the folboat story better than the Sharepoint stuff, but that is just me.

Need a minute or so of humor? Try this. Well, at least I thought it was funny.

That fish story reminded me that I tried putting one of these on in my living room. I nearly died trying to take it back off. I got stuck at this point:

To save people the trouble (and to remind myself to try this technique out next time) here is a great step-by-step guide for removing a zip-less wetsuit from Eliossub.

Just discovered from my referrer log that Yahoo has a setting to only search for information with a "Creative Commons" license. For example this search brings up my main page. I'm not sure if this makes me want to be more careful about what rights I claim or not.

There are a number of autonomous vehicles entered in DARPA's "Grand Challenge" race:

"The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge will be held on October 8, 2005 in the desert Southwest. The team that develops an autonomous ground vehicle that finishes the designated route most quickly within 10 hours will receive $2 million. The route will be no more than 175 miles over desert terrain featuring natural and man-made obstacles. The exact route will not be revealed until two hours before the event begins."

But the one which interests me most is not some overgrown hummer, it is this little guy. By using a motorcycle rather than a 4 wheel platform it gives up inherent stability in exchange for a narrow profile. You can see more about the project here.

you can look at this (slightly wierd) interactive diagram to see how things relate to each other in a Centrino notebook. The architecture is similar for a desktop pc. Centrino merely indicates that a specific set of processor, chipset (including ICH) and wireless network are present and certified to work together. Note that in real computers there are not red and blue pipes (veins and arteries?) connecting things together.

Donald Wynes new (well since Mid-August) blog is called 48ideas and is worth a look for his thoughts on Project management and related topics. I think he is selling himself short about the 48 ideas though. From what I can see it will be impossible to put the cork back in the bottle. Keep at it Donald.

Bill Raymond that is. Bill is a Microsoft Project MVP who works for Pcubed. He has started a blog here and states that:

"You will get thoughts on using the Microsoft Office Project platform, updates on news and upcoming events and the occasional restaurant recommendation."

Bill Raymond of PCubed has gotten back in the saddle with a new site after letting his old blog go dormant (search this site for "Everyone Loves Raymond" for a link to it) and it is good to see him back. Bill starts out with a video covering some of the features of Project 2007. I have a few articles about the new Project 2007 features here, but never dreamed of video.

Great to see you writing again Bill!

The Yahoo Pipes site is flush with geeks trying to check it out, and is currently closed "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!" says the site with an oblique reference to the bloglines plumber. however, being closed has never been a barrier to speculation, so here goes.

1. The capabilities of Pipes (being able to easily grab, filter, sort and generally tie a bunch of stuff together) will boost the importance of RSS. No new site should be built without taking it into consideration
2. The ability of end-users to work with RSS data in a powerful but fairly simple (I think it is still arcane for a vast majority of computer users) will lead to some interesting and probably valuable services.
3. The same lowering of the technological bar will create a new generation of SPLOGs (Spam blogs)
4. The same lowering of the technological bar will create simple mis-uses of other people's content. This will be difficult to sort out. The point here and above isn't that this is something new, but that it will become easier to do and thus more people will do it.
5. There is nothing better to talk about since the Astronaut jokes have run their course.
6. Pipes, like Unix pipes, or Grep or any other command line tool are acquired tastes and as such will be the domain of a fairly small percentage of users. They are quite important to developers though.
7. Publishers (even people like me who are giving their content away) need to be concerned about how their data is being used. This gives rise to the need for a way to track-down what you have published so you know where it is ending up. Without this sort of feedback it is hard to improve. Perhaps some embedded ID that can be passed along with the feed would help with this. Sure sploggers can strip it out, but everyone else should be happy to pass it along as better content is better for everyone.
8. I forget what 8 was for.
9. Trusting the source may get harder. When things are mashed, it is harder to tell what is giving off the bad smell. The embedded ID would be a method to help determine TRUST.
10. Like I said, EVERYONE is talking about it:

• Yahoo! pipes: Unlocking the data wev, by Jeremy Zawodney - Yahoo.
• Remixing the Web with Yahoo! Pipes by Ed Ho, one of the amazing Pipes developers
• Pipes! by Bradley Horowitz
• Yahoo Pipes - The Internet is a Series of Them by Pete Cashmore
• Yahoo Pipes by Glenn Slaven
• Review: Yahoo! Pipes by Matt Cutts of Google
• Yahoo Pipes on Gadgetopia
• Pipes: Remixing the Web by Jonathon Trevor, another of the kick-ass Pipes developers
• Yahoo! Pipes remixes the syndicated web by Niall Kennedy
• Yahoo Pipes by Anil Dash
• cat rss | ... by Ryan Kennedy of Y! Mail API fame
• yahoo pipes…rss splicing and more… by Don Loeb of Feedburner
• Yahoo! Pipes by Avi Bryant of DabbleDB
• Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixer by Richard MacManus
• Yahoo! Launches Pipes by Nik on TechCrunch
• Yahoo! Pipes: “a milestone in the history of the internet” by Chad Dickerson of the Yahoo! Developer Network
• Pipes! by Pasha Sadri, the man behind Pipes
• Yahoo Pipes becomes belle of the RSS ball by Larry Dignan of ZDNet
• The WOW starts now: Yahoo! Pipes by Garvin Hicking
• Pipes on the Internet: Yahoo Pipes by Ajit K
• Online Visual Programming with Yahoo! Pipes by Heritage Tech