“Rands in Repose” is a blog on life as a software development manager and one of my all-around favorite blogs. He writes a handful of articles a month and they’re invariably insightful and well-written. Managing a development team can be a tricky thing, given that developers sometimes have quirks that are “outside the mainstream” — such as being night-owls, extreme introverts, very focused, or logic-driven at the expense of diplomacy.

He just started a new series called “Deconstructing Managers” that I’m really enjoying. In it, he’s breaking down some of the stereotypes of engineering managers and trying to serve as a translator between “the manager” and “the engineer”. It’s great stuff and takes a balanced, humorous view of this relationship.

So if you’re new to managing a development team, or if you’re on a team and have a new/challenging manager, it’s definitely worth subscribing and following along.

Edward Tufte, author and infoporn guru, is giving a series of one-day courses in various cities across the country. I just registered for the course in Denver on July 21 and am really looking forward to it. The course fee of $360 seems like a great deal, especially given that attendees receive copies of four of his books.

Now if only that other ‘guru’ whose work I admire could come to this area…

Did that suck, or what? It took two years to get another season out… and it came in with a bang and went out with a whimper. I know they’re doing another “mini-season” next year (already shot… but we still have to wait a year), but I’m not sure how much I care.

Honestly, for a show that started off so strong, the creative team and/or HBO is sure doing a good job of marginalizing it.

Assuming this goes through and shows up without a hitch, the server migration is done. The Server Intellect folks were great when I had questions about control panel issues or moving mailboxes during DNS propagation.

The kind folks at Server Intellect (my hosting provider) are adding some newer, beefed-up servers to their data center… so it’s time to migrate everything over. I always feel like I’m missing something when I’ve done this in the past, but this time I’m feeling good. They have a really good setup and migration plan in place, so as the DNS updates there should be little, if any, downtime.

Crossing fingers…

Google announced a number of new products/tools yesterday, but the one I find the most interesting is “Google Trends” (also found under the “Labs” section).

It basically lets you see the history of a search term’s use over time… and if the search term appears in Google News as well, you see that along with regular web searches. Just as with Google Finance, there are links along the chart to news items that occurred at that point in time. A search for ‘tivo’ yields:

You can also view the popularity of a search term by city, region, and language.

Even cooler is that you can supply multiple search terms and compare them all on the same chart. This lets you do things similar to what the “Google Fight” site has done for a while (by running both searches and scraping the count of items found). Here’s a comparison between the phrases “playstation 3” and “xbox 360”:

I’m not sure how current these search results are, but with E3 happening this week and a bunch of PS3 announcements, I’d expect to see a spike there pretty quick (for both, though probably with PS3 searches surpassing 360 searches for a time).

Also interesting with this search is how Seattle appears in the searches-by-city result… among the lowest in searches for “Playstation 3” and the highest of all with searches for “xbox 360”. Wonder why.

I just tried this little sneak/workaround from LifeHacker to see if it would convert my Yahoo Mail account over to the new beta… sure enough, it worked!

I like the look and functionality, but it definitely “feels” slower. Thankfully, I use the Yahoo account primarily for minor registrations (forums, news sites, etc), so it’s not something I have to spend a great deal of time with. Still, if they can get it sped up a bit, it’s a great UI.

The New York Times had an article yesterday entitled “Software Out There,” which discussed the whole “programmable web” movement that’s sprung up over the last couple of years. The author says that the internet is entering its “Lego” era.

It was actually a semi-interesting article, but I wish I could read an article in a major paper just once without cringing at the leaps of faith and hyperbole made by the author. Is it so hard to get an expert to look over an article before publication? The key example from this NYT article is this section (mid-way through Page 2):

Mr. Ozzie, who used the Firefox browser (an open-source rival to Internet Explorer) during his demonstration, said, "I'm pretty pumped up with the potential for R.S.S. to be the DNA for wiring the Web."

He was referring to Really Simple Syndication, an increasingly popular, free standard used for Internet publishing. Mr. Ozzie's statement was remarkable for a chief technical officer whose company has just spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars investing in a proprietary alternative referred to as .Net.

At what point did .NET become a “proprietary alternative” to RSS or any other “standard for internet publishing”? Or vice versa?

But hey, why pass up the opportunity to put out something that seems semi-scandalous (“Imagine, a CTO for Microsoft using Firefox! Suggesting RSS as an alternative to .NET!”).