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Process as Liberator of Creativity

August 15th, 2006

Look, process gets a bad name in industry today. Nobody wants to have to live within a stifling bureaucracy. What I find about a well-designed process is that it makes exchange easy but leaves room for creativity.

For example, a software development process (even an Agile one) includes both development and configuration management/version control/build. Building code is not creative. Oh sure, you could make it creative but there is little reason to. What you find instead that the ability to rapidly deploy code and data in a safe, repeatable manner has greater value than the ability to have a creative license. Why not focus your creative energy in producing great software and leave the grungy parts to the process?

A canvas may be limiting but thousands of great artists have worked within the bounds and limitations to awesome success.

Seth Godin has this to say about it.

Dave Winer’s OPML editor

August 15th, 2006

Dave Winer’s website, www.opml.org, has a free editor.

You’ll find it looks a heck of a lot like Manila and Frontier — what a surprise since Dave wrote those too!

This is a great little tool just for Outlining.

It may even be good for Blogging.

Time will tell

Podcasting – it’s just a great idea

July 24th, 2006

Ok, I think I’ve become a podcasting addict.

I can’t believe the number of sites I’m listening to. It has basically renewed my interest in radio.

I was considering getting into myself, using odeo but I have been disappointed in odeo. I have tried several recordings only to find that they don’t appear in the odeo account.  The user interface is pretty unusual as well. Your milage may vary. I’m looking for alternatives.

autohotkey is great

July 24th, 2006

I’ve started using autohotkey on Windows/XP to automate things on my desktop.  I was inspired by a posting my Jon Udell where he described a distraction free desktop.

 So, I set my desktop background to black and my Windows XP toolbar to auto-hide.

Next, I setup some key bindings in autohotkey to :

1) hide current window

2) hide all others

3) hide/show desktop toggle

As suggested in Jon’s article.

I have to say this has been really easy.

The programming language is the same as in AutoIt, which I have used to automate backup processes. This makes learning autohotkey less painful since you are not learning a one-shot language.

 

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