How Projects Really Work

This cartoon explains it all when dealing with project management. You can create your own at www.projectcartoon.com as well. I agree with everything except "How the programmer wrote it". :)

Web Development Pie

I spotted this pie chart in an Ajax presentation on Ajaxian.com, and it is so true for us web developers.

Lunch Anyone?

So, today a colleague of mine got a Spam email about a "new controversial restaurant" coming to town. Well, it sparked my curiosity, so I asked him to forward the email to me. Here is the spam message... Oh, by the way, it is a real place.. I checked it out, and next time I'm in Arizona, I think I'm going to stop by there. It's kinda like Hooter's meets the Hospital? ;)

"I've heard that this was a hoax, but it's got to be real because no one's deranged enough to make this up. It's called the Heart Attack Grill! "Patients" who finish a Triple Bypass Burger are pushed in wheelchairs to their cars by Naughty Nurse waitresses. Their slogan is "Taste Worth Dying For". They serve a Quadruple Bypass Burger with 8,000 calories!"

End of the World!

With all the turmoil going on recently in the US financial markets, it started making me think about the end of the world again... No, not literally, but about a Flash video I remember from my childhood (well, at least from a few years ago). This is an "oldie but a goodie".

Stranger Loops

I know a few weeks ago, I posted an article called "Strange Loops", but a friend of mine recently sent me a link to a Flickr photo that just really said alot about loops. The photo is titled "Spaghetti Code":

Nice.

Polishing the Chrome

Yep, Google released an IE killer today: Google Chrome Web Browser. According to many tech blogs I've been reading and some of the early stats coming in, it looks like more IE7/IE8 users are making the switch from IE to Google Chrome.

So, I've downloaded it, and had a few guinea pigs download it too. So far, so VERY GOOD. The browser is far faster than either Firefox or IE when starting up or loading a web page. There are some other pretty cool features too like being able to drag tabs from one window to another; creating "applications" from web pages, and much more.

Now, in the past (10 years) I have remained very faithful to Internet Explorer. Yes, I tried Firefox for a while when it came out, and I regularly open my pages in Firefox when I'm doing web development. But, I can clearly say that I have found a new default web browser: Google Chrome.

If you don't believe me, download it and try it out for yourself....

Google (temporarily) shutdown my KTUL Weather Gadget

About a year and a half ago I created a Google Gadget that basically runs a slideshow of the KTUL weather images such as doppler radar, forecast, temps, etc. Well, I had sent a link to a few friends of mine, and published it in the Google Gadget directory (http://www.google.com/ig/directory?url=willgillen.googlepages.com/ktul-doppler8000.xml) This is one of those gadgets that you can pretty much add to any Google based service (such as the Google IG homepage, GoogleApps, Blogger, etc.) But, I hadn't expected many people to use it...

Well, today I noticed that it was showing an error on my Google IG homepage. So, I decided to investigate. Well, the reason it had an error was because Google had replaced my gadget with a warning that said something to the effect of "This page has exceeded its bandwidth [sic]" Well, I looked up the limited stats on the Gadget in the directory, and as it turns out, there are now about 1,200 users of the weather gadget! Wow.

So, I'm putting some Google Analytics on it for a while to see if that is true. If so, I may just turn over the gadget source to KTUL and have them host it so it can actually stay running. I can't afford to actually buy web-space for this, but I want to keep it running. If that turns out to be the case it'll probably come up with a message in the near future that says something like: "This gadget has moved to KTUL.com Please go there to install the latest version."