The "people" approach can be different, but what they value on the workplace is actually the same, at least in my industry. We foster multi-country teams within the same project whenever possible. It helps you build a company culture that crosses through office locations and helps the traveling folks feel at home in all the offices when travel is needed.

Have you found other characteristics that are important to software managers? Share in the comments section.

Of course typing with a real keyboard is going to feel great. The problem is that it's just field typing. On most of the apps, tabs don't work to move from field to field, and the PageUp/PageDown keys on the small apple bluetooth keyboard (Fn and Up/Down) are not wired in at all.

All the media function keys, however (from the brightness controls of F1&2 to the media and volume controls on F7 through F12) work fine. Which underscores the idea that this is a media consumption device more than a production device.

Dear Madam/Sir,

According to our records you have downloaded a version of WebLOAD Open Source. We would like to reiterate the following:

-WebLOAD Open Source has been declared End of life (EOL)

If you still have a version of the product we remind you that under the EULA, any distribution of the product or using it to service third parties is strictly forbidden.

What are the options available to you?

For a limited time RadView offers a competitive upgrade to WebLOAD Professional. We encourage you to contact a sales rep in your region quickly as discounts are set to expire.

Yada, yada, yada marketschpiel

Here's my response:

Well I'm glad I ended up staying with jmeter for my load testing needs then.

You may want to take a look at how your community is seeing you. This is not exactly the best way to acquire new clients or even retain your existing ones.
http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/5922

Now I will go out of my way to recommend any competition to you (even commercial, fully closed source) because at least I know what I get when I purchase from them instead of getting what seems like a bait-and-switch. I don't have time to deal with dishonest people, I have software to write.

It's not like there's no alternatives.

Maybe they hired a Music lawyer as their marketing person?

And honestly, did they really think nobody was going to blog about this??

"Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?"

-- Alan Kay, "Computer Software", Scientific American, September 1984

Fantastic!

I have traveled to Mexico with the iPhone on business a few times now. I get the international data global plan for 50Mb and disable all automatic checking (but keep Data Roaming on), and I also get the Mexico calling plan (not sure of its name but it makes the phone part cheaper). Then I enable Wifi and enable the phone asking me to connect to wifi signals.

The next step is to just be conscientious on the use. For example I open the laptop in the morning and get rid of all spam, etc, on the laptop so my inbox stays tidy throughout the rest of the day. I also use some server-side mail rules - procmail in my case - so the inbox doesn't get clogged with mailing list stuff unless I want to see it. Resetting the counter I haven't done but it's a good idea so you can keep tabs on your usage. Even with that I still get an overage of about $100 on top of it for a two week trip, which I arrange to expense with my company.

In Mexico there is a system called Prodigy Movil which is similar to T-Mobile's Wifi. Most airports have it, and a lot of restaurants and other public places do as well. If you have a friend with TelMex as their provider you can have them arrange for their monthly unlimited plan for $22 (or if they have TelMex broadband but no laptop, maybe they'll be nice enough to lend you their credentials because this service is free to their Broadband users).

My hope is that with the iPhone going international the phone companies will start taking a closer look at the data plans which are a complete rip-off as they stand today. If they end up with all you can eat plans throughout, maybe we will be able to pay for a month's worth and then not worry about it?

First, you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing. And the reason is that you have to work so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. And you have to do it over an extended period of time. So if you don't love it, you're not really have fun doing it, you don't really love it, you're going to give up. And that's what happens to most people, actually, if you really look at the ones that ended up being "successful" in the eyes of society and the ones who didn't, the ones that are successful oftentimes loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it quit, because they're sane - who would want to put up with this stuff if they don't love it? So it's a lot of hard work and a lot of worrying, constantly and if you don't love it you're going to fail. So you have to love it and you have to have passion, and that's the high order bit.

The second thing is you have to be a really good talent scout. Because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people. And you have to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to build an organization that eventually can just build itself. Because you need great people around you.

Now I even made a web clipping dashboard widget with the homepage of my instiki on localhost. Awesome.

• iCal: I add a calendar named Clients:ClientName for color-coding their appointments (and hide/showing).
• Mail: I try to practice Inbox Zero. For this I use MailTags and I try to do something with an e-mail within 2-5 seconds after scanning or reading it. Mail Act-On is crucial for this. So I do the following:
  • Add a Mail folder ClientName under Clients
  • Add an Act-On rule for the client's initial letter that will: Set MailTags project to ClientName, Move E-Mail to the Clients/ClientName folder
• Finder: Under Documents/Clients, add a ClientName folder. Using Mercurial, "hg init" the folder, or do whatever you do to put it under version control.
• OfficeTime: Add a ClientName project
• iGTD: Add a ClientName project

If you already use this, all of this takes less than 10 minutes, and it's only done once per client. Finger-memory takes care of the rest, because all your other clients work the same way.

You just can't tell me that, since the programming model is fully on the web, that I cannot use my apps when not connected. People's brains just don't work like that. It's a major cognitive dissonance that of the 12 main menu options on the machine, 5 don't work unless you are connected at the time.

So a "real" programming model, with a rich language and apps that get downloaded to the machine and store their data locally simply makes sense.

I mean, this machine has 8Gb of storage, for crying out loud.

At least my Blackberry was smart enough to know when it was disconnected and would save the request for when it connected again (so it could show me the pages on the message viewer). I missed that today.