tools-and-technology

This question has me pondering the broader values behind open source: openness to inspection, openness to revision and improvement, working together in a commons, not in a doctrinaire centralized system but rather in an informally organized (if at all), decentralized coming together based upon common interest. That’s not to say there aren’t rules. Scientific research has traditionally been open source. I recommend James Burke’s Connections for some wonderful perspectives on this subject....

This morning I was going through a working group’s internal documents about best practices, procedures, etc. for coordinating communications between all of the group’s members, who are scattered worldwide. At one point, on the topic of email netiquette, there was a recommendation to follow the rules of a rather emphatic post, “How to correctly quote e-mails and news posts,” which is “[p]artly written by Tom Sommer.” I think it was the “correctly” part that got me going here on this blog post....

So I’ve been playing with OmniFocus alpha to see if it can work for me as a personal productivity/task manager, but as I noted before, the system lacks a way to prioritize tasks. It seems rather obvious to me that you want to identify the important must-do items before you start filling in your day. I could spend all day answering the phone, reading and writing emails, catching up on my feeds, having meetings, doing conference calls … and not getting done the things that need to get done....

The open source path can be a delightful and cost-effective way to go for a web-based project. However, if you don’t understand the primary dos and don’ts of open source, a “free” open source website can quickly become a costly and difficult bear to manage. As open source software becomes more popular and more relevant to the needs of non-tech-minded people and organizations, we thought we’d offer some basic background on how to use – and not to use – open source for a web platform....

The story goes like this: A couple hundred years ago, Scottish chemist Joseph Black was approached by some Scotch distillers. With the explosion of coal power, they wanted to know exactly what techniques they should use to replace their wood-burning distilling processes with coal-fired methods. Black did some experimentation and developed for them the appropriate method. But his calculations reportedly inspired some new ideas in his colleague, James Watt, who took Black’s ideas of “latent heat” and used them in the development of a new steam engine....