Musings on the Human Condition

There are several types of internet connections . Briefly they are as follows, in order of increasing speed/bandwidth. (Bits per second is abbreviated as bps. Kilo, Mega, and Giga represent one thousand, one million, and one billion respectively.) Analog (up to 56 Kbps) Satellite (less than 1 Mbps) DSL (up to 8 Mbps) Cable (up to 20 Mbps) Tier (T1 through T5, with 64 Kbps per channel, cumulatively up to 1 Gbps) Optical (1 Gbps+) Internet2 (100 Gbps) Most homes use either Cable (e.g. Comcast) or Optical (e.g. Verizon FiOS).

I discuss below five easy-to-recognize smells that point to some serious dysfunction within your project team. Often the dysfunction can be traced to a specific person who is poisoning the team. Most likely it's a team member who is defensive and doesn't wish to ask for help or be called out when s/he makes a mistake. But it can also be a stakeholder who is too overbearing and/or disengaged. Either way, these smells are merely symptoms (like an incessant cough that finally causes you to seek a doctor's professional opinion). Don't make the mistake of interpreting symptoms as problems. Fixing the symptom without ferreting out and addressing the underlying malady will only make the problem worse. (Analogous to taking cough syrup when what you really need is an x-ray to identify pneumonia.) So, here's my list of top five smells I use to identify a dysfunctional project. You can't remember the last time you saw two team members huddled over the same comput...

It's disappointing that the O'Reilly book Web 2.0 Architectures: What Entrepreneurs and Information Architects Need to Know  ( Nickull , Hinchcliffe , Governor ) hasn't received more attention and acclaim. It should have. Too many developers today dive headfirst into programming without first appreciating the 10,000 foot view and a sense of how we got here. As the saying goes:  if you don't know where you came from, then you don't know where you're going. For example, how many developers know that Microsoft's introduction of the XMLHTTPRequest (XHR) object to its Internet Explorer browser is what led to the revolution called AJAX (ignited by Google Maps) , that underlies Web 2.0? Google has also been behind much of the NoSQL innovations that are now fueling Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn and other Internet giants. Awareness about how major innovations took place in the past is important because it enables the early identification of opportunities for futur...

Figure 1 | Raspberry Pi Introduction First, let me clarify that this blog is about the $35 Model B (512 MB RAM, 2 USB ports, and an Ethernet port), not its cheaper cousin, the $25 Model A (256 MB RAM, 1 USB port, no Ethernet port). To learn more, see the FAQ . The FAQ is short and informative. I recommend reading it even if you don't have questions. Take 1 My first goal was to get my Raspberry Pi up and running. The first thing I needed was power. So, I hooked up a cable/adapter combination to connect the USB A port on my laptop (5 V, 500-900 mA) to the USB Micro B port on my Raspberry Pi. Doing so caused the red LED on my Pi to turn on (see figure 1). So, I figured I had a good power source established. (As it turns out, learning about USB standards is one of the many educational side-effects of trying to setup a Pi device of your own. There are some finer points about whether the power source is providing the Pi with sufficient power, relative to the required 3.3 v...

See the original interactive version here This site seems to compress the image. So, you can view the original I created here . XebiaLabs' Periodic Table of DevOps Tools v2