Interesting Blogs

• David Weinberger's JOHO blog has a wide-ranging collection of interesting thoughts, observations, and links to articles, books, and other blogs. Weinberger is the author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, as well as a coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, both of which I highly recommend.
• Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs website/blog is a continuing discussion of ideas in his new book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

• ConceptDraw is a software company based in Odessa that has developed an excellent software package to create "mind maps" and other kinds of technical diagrams and drawings. One of the company's newest products is ConceptDraw Presenter, which can be used as an alternative to Powerpoint. It's modestly priced, and it runs on Windows and Mac platforms.
• Requisite Inc.'s requirements management product. Java, OO, and structured analysis aren't going to help much if you don't know the requirements of the system you're building. Requisite has an inexpensive, document-centric, Windows-based product for documenting, baselining, tracking, and managing requirements. Requisite has now been acquired by Rational Software Corp, and I've updated the URL link to reflect that.
• iThink, definitely one of the coolest system dynamics modeling tools around, and the one that I use for a lot of my modeling work. Runs on both Windows and Mac platforms.

• David Pogue, technology columnist for the New York Times, former columnist for Macworld magazine, and author of numerous computer books. He's got a terrific web page, with a collection of "song spoofs" that I found hilarious — e.g., a rendition of Steve Jobs doing "Don't cry for me, Cupertino."
• Lawrence Lessig, one of the most knowledgeable and gifted spokesmen on the legal aspects of the Internet today. I have to credit Ken Orr for alerting me to the fact that Professor Lessig has a website of his own, which contains copies of several of the papers and speeches that he has given in recent years. Lessig is perhaps best known as the author Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace; it certainly dispelled most of my naive beliefs that the Internet is still a wild wooly frontier where anyone can do just about anything they please. It's also worth noting that Lessig was one of the government experts in the Microsoft anti-trust case.
• James Bach: the guy convinced me that "good enough" software was an important concept five or six years ago, and one of the most passionate and eloquent critics of the "process police" who tend to take ideas like the Software Engineering Institute's CMM to ridiculous extremes. Bach is a member of the Cutter Technology Council, and is definitely one of the most innovative thinkers in the area of risk-based testing today. He heads up his own consulting firm.
• Rob Thomsett: Probably the most articulate and eloquent spokesman on project management and "aligning IT with the business" issues anywhere in the world today. A man with penetrating insights into why most IT departments don't achieve what they set out to do, and what's required in order to succeed, Rob is also one of the very best conference speakers I've ever seen. He has written several books, one of which (Third Wave Project Management) is listed in the cool books section of this site.
• Ken Orr: one of the wise old gurus of the computing profession, Ken is the originator of a systems development methodology (the Warnier-Orr method) that is still being used enthusiastically after nearly 30 years. He's also an expert on data-warehousing, data mining, Internet-based collaboration tools, and a variety of other topics; and he's a member of the Cutter Technology Council. Ken is a gifted speaker at many computer conferences, having learned his skills from Oscar Wilde (yes, he really is that old!); he claims that he can talk for an hour on any subject, but when asked recently to talk about the Queen, he replied (as Wilde originally did), "The Queen, sir, is not a Subject."
• Jim Highsmith: a proponent of "adaptive" software development and "extreme programming," Jim is the author of Adaptive Software Development, which is listed as one of the "featured books" elsewhere on this site; he's also a member of the Cutter Technology Council.
• The Yourdon kids: people often ask me what the next generation of Yourdons is up to. Are they involved in the computer field?  No, thank goodness, one Yourdon is more than enough to screw up an entire industry for several generations. But the younger Yourdons are writers, just like their Dad: Jennifer co-authored Time Bomb 2000 with me a few years ago, and was the lead author for The Y2K Financial Survival Guide. David has written, recorded, and produced half a dozen albums of his own music; his latest album, Detectives, is available from Dutch Courage Records. And Jamie has just finished a Master's degree in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona; you can see pictures of him playing soccer in high school in the photo section of my site. Unless I manage to convince them to create their own websites to publish their work, you'll have to wait until they win their first Pulitzer Prize to see everything they've done.
• Luke Hohmann: A savvy observer of the project management scene, and author of some excellent articles on project management in recent issues of the Cutter IT Journal. Luke is also the author of one of my favorite new "peopleware" books, Journey of the Software Professional. You can find it in the "general computing" section of the cool books section of this site.
• Tom DeMarco: A good friend, a gifted author, a brilliant software engineer, and one of the very few consultants who will really "tell it like it is" when he visits your organization or your software project. Tom's site is combined with several of his colleages — Tim Lister, James and Suzanne Robertson, John Palmer, and Peter Hruschka — of the Atlantic Systems Guild. Tom is also one of the members of the Cutter Technology Council, and his latest book is a collection of short stories entitled Lieutenant America and Miss Apple Pie.
• Christine Comaford: A respected consultant and writer in the software field, Christine Comaford's new website has a number of interesting sections. The part that I'm most interested in following is the "best practices" section, which is related to the Defense Department's best-practice initiative described below.
• Capers Jones, chairman of Software Productivity Research, one of the world's leading experts on software metrics and related issues. Capers is a keynote speaker at many major international conferences; don't miss a chance to hear him speak. Also a prolific author; two of his books are listed on my cool books page.
• Paul Strassmann, probably the most informed and influential guru in the U.S. today on the subject of information economics and advice to senior executives on how to achieve effective use of information technology.
• George Schussel, an expert on database technology, downsizing, and future developments in computer technology.
• Gerald Weinberg: prolific author of books on software quality, systems analysis, and various aspects of the "human" side of systems development.

• Google News — Everyone knows about google; it has become such a fixture in the U.S. that the word is now used as a verb, e.g., "I was curious to know more about Quarks, so I googled it." But not everyone knows about the relatively new "google news" site — a "news page" of the top stories of the moment, consisting of headlines and links to key stories, culled from some 4,000 newspapers, magazines, and other sources. A colleague recently focused my attention on the usefulness of the search button on the google news page: it lets you search for recent articles about any person, place, or googleable phrase. Thus, if you're about to make a sales call on Joe Shmoe at Acme Widget Corp, you can do a google-news search on "Shmoe" or "Acme Widget" or any other relevant phrase, in order to see whether Mr. Shmoe has been enjoying a moment of fame in the hours and days immediately preceding your visit. Forewarned is forearmed ...
• Internet Storm Center, a site operated by the SANS Institute, which gathers more than 3,000,000 intrusion detection log entries every day, in order to provide an "early warning" indicator of "mass hacks" associated with viruses and worms. I'm indebted to my friend and colleague, James Bach, for bringing this site to my attention. If you've heard wild rumors of a new virus/worm that will render all Windows users impotent and feeble-minded (while leaving Mac users in their usual alert and virile state, of course), this is a good place to check, along with the Software Engineering Institute's CERT Coordination Center, and the website associated with whatever virus-protection software you have on your machine.
• Softwaredioxide.com is a fascinating website that brings together much of the best software engineering activity in India. It describes itself as "an industry initiative to meet the growing demands of the Software Engineering and Management community. It is a digital marketplace, a clearing house, an exchange, a repository of knowledge for building better software, faster and cheaper ... It is a complete ecosystem for the Software Engineering and Management domain." If nothing else, it provides ample evidence that the "state of the art" of software engineering is certainly equal to (if not — eek! — slightly better than!) the United States. There are a number of well-meaning Luddites in the U.S. who still believe that India is only capable of providing low-cost programmers, who know nothing about business and don't even speak English; to such people, it may come as a shock to learn that nearly half of the SEI-CMM level-4 and level-5 IT organizations in the world are located in India. Softwaredioxide.com provides at least one perspective on why this is true.
• Momentitos De La Vida, one of the two best restaurants in New Mexico, and the only one in the local area of Taos, where I live. Great atmosphere, great food, good wine. I'm not going to tell you exactly where it is, because then it will get too crowded, and I'll have to go to the local Taco Bell in town for dinner.
• The Omni-Vista people (see "software products" in the above section) have started a discussion group on requirements management and product planning.  It's hosted by Omni-VIsta CEO Dr. Alan Davis, author of several well-known books on the subject, as well as other members of the Omni-Vista staff. I visit the discussion periodically to see if anyone has posted anything particularly provocative or interesting, and we're hoping to coax some of the other requirements-management gurus and authors to stop by, too.
• SETI@home — The Search for ExtraTerrestial Intelligence project, coordinated by a server at UC Berkeley. If you're running a screen-saver on your computer, and if you're willing to donate your unused CPU cycles for one of science's most ambitious explorations, visit this site and download their client software (there are versions for Mac, Windows, etc). From time to time, the client software will ask you to connect to the Internet (assuming that you don't have a permanent connection) so that it can download a batch of data that was recorded by the radio observatory at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It will then take 10-20 hours of number-crunching (in the background, only when you're not using your computer for "real" work) to process the data, at which point the results will be uploaded back to the Berkeley site, and the next batch of raw data will be downloaded.
• The Cluetrain site — this is the website that goes along with The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the "featured books" that you can find elsewhere on this site. If you haven't had a chance to get the book yet, at least go visit the website.  As the authors put it, "A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarteróand getting smarter faster than most companies. ... These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. ... Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do."
• CEO Express: The Executive's Toolbox — a terrific page if you want links to every major newspaper, magazine and news source imaginable.
• Version Tracker — for those who have a Macintosh, and who need to know when updates and new versions have been released for Mac software products, shareware, and freeware. You can arrange to get a weekly email that summarizes the updates.
• If you have a computer, you obviously play solitaire whenever you need to break your concentration for a few minutes — don't deny it, everyone does it, even if they feel guilty about it. And if you have a Mac, you probably play Klondike ... in which case, you definitely need to know about the Klondike Home Page. I was mortified to learn that I was playing with a non-current version (the latest, as of this writing, is version 7.7.1), and having reached the level of 50,000 games with the old version, I have now upgraded. You'll be pleased to know that I'm now up to 58,203 games; but I'm slowing down now, because I know that when I reach 100,000 games, some creature from the Men in Black movies will pop out of another galaxy, and eat me for breakfast.
• Google — my favorite Internet search engine.
• MIT distribution site for PGP. Everyone needs a little privacy, right?
• NJ TIDE Directory of Travel Resources — a fabulous directory of air, rail, bus, and other transportation directories, schedules, and other resources.
• "Kearsey Temperament Sorter" personality assessment, used by some IT/MIS organizations to help identify compatible individuals to form teams, and also to have a better idea of which individuals are likely to be better suited to the various "roles" that need to be carried out within a software development team.
• The CMM Level 2 Focus Group's SEI resource center, an interesting collection of tutorials, references, and discussions about the Software Engineering Institute's capability maturity model.
• Off The Record: Brian McWilliams' collections of interviews with interesting figures in the computing industry, on various interesting and somewhat controversial topics.
• Richard Dué's home page, which contains a number of links to resources on object-oriented technology.
• Software Project Manager's Network: this is the home page of the US Defense Department's "Best Practices" Initiative, some of whose work has been associated with the Airlie Council's activities that I described in the July 1995 issue of my Application Development Strategies newsletter.