The Christian Paradox

Saw these two links over the past couple of days and thought they were thought provoking when taken together: The Christian Paradox from Harper's and Mercenary Sniper in Iraq on iFilm.

I remember when I was in Europe 10 years ago and I'd ask locals what they thought of Americans the consistent response was that we were hypocritical. They've got a point..

Give JIRA a look

If you need a bug tracking tool (or other issue tracking, such as small scale project management), give JIRA a try.

I rarely find software that meets some of what I consider to be important non-functional requirements:

It is web based software, yet trivial to install. To me this indicates that the developers got it right--they are correctly leveraging the abstraction layers provided by platforms such as the operating system, the jvm, rdbms servers, application servers, etc. This gives me confidence in their understanding of application architecture.

It has a clean, good looking, intuitive interface. This not only makes the software easy for me to use, but easy to sell to others in my organization--thus increasing its likelyhood of use. This is important so a shared application can benefit from the Network Effect.

It is customizable. So I can add fields to issues quickly and easily.

Finally, it is powerful. It's loaded with enough features that it provides that critical mass of functionality to do the job for most software shops.

Moving my stale, old blog to blogger

I'm kind of slow.. It took me a while to realize that Google's running Blogger now. I was never really happy with jroller, so I figure I'll give this a try.. I guess there was nothing wrong with jroller, but I have become fond of google's doings recently. I'd like to see how stuff like blogger, desktop search/toolbar, gmail, etc., can converge into something greater than the sum of its parts (maybe). And since the consumer (reader), if there are any, doesn't care where things are hosted--I might as well do it for me.