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This week I noticed that the Starbucks near my house changed the design and names of the list of items they sell, and the prices also changed. At first it gave me the impression that the prices had gone down a bit, but after seeing the prices on purchases I made on previous days, I clearly saw that they actually increased the prices on everything.

Good trick. I wonder who they paid for the Christmas-like design that gives the impression that everything’s cheaper when in fact everything costs more now. They’re now prepared for the coldest season of the year when people consume more coffee (I think) so, at least I’m sure Starbucks won’t go out of business. Right?

The IBM Systems Magazine, Business Systems edition created a 5 page PDF with an illustration containing a 20 years timeline of the AS/400, now IBM i operating system on Power Systems hardware.

When I joined IBM in 1998, development of OS/400 V4R4 was on going and obviously there were support for a few previous versions already in the field. I remember that the IBM Guadalajara site still had some CISC systems in there for the support of earlier versions of the OS/400 and several products.

Via The iSeries blog.

I read an article that came in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review named “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity” containing a sentence that I’m not sure if Ed Catmull, the author, was the one who said it or not, but I really think it’s true.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.

I agree that it’s not about good ideas but about the people, talented people. Be sure to surround yourself with them.

You would remember that several weeks ago I was asking if Juice will ever support Atom feeds because internally in IBM we have a huge repository of podcasts, videos, webcasts, presentations, etc., for which Atom feeds are provided to subscribe with a podcatcher.

So I tried to use iTunes to subscribe to the podcasts and at least when I was subscribed to just one feed it was working, not completely good but was working. Then I decided to add a couple more and that’s where things started to go wrong. When I added the third feed, iTunes was not able to retrieve anything about it. Well, it looks like it retrieved the name of the feed but it assigned it as the name for the first podcast I subscribed to. Yep, you read it right, it overwrote the original (and good) name of the first podcast with the name of the third I added.

To make things worse, since the date I added the third feed, it doesn’t retrieves any new file from any of the podcasts.

Could someone please do me a favor and send the Apple developers this link to the specification of the Atom format? I’ll appreciate if they can at least implement the basic stuff that is retrieve the files from where the enclosures point to. Well, no, I’ll really appreciate it if they also do not install, along with iTunes, ‘Bonjour’ nor the MobileMe thing that I don’t need at all.

On Wednesday I received my July copy of Communications of the ACM and I have to say that it looks nice, and new! The content has always been very good, but now the feeling is like you really have in your hands a magazine that features and talks about the latest and greatest.

Kudos to the team that produces the magazine! Well done!

I have been very interested lately in articles, studies, etc., about Virtual Teams scattered in different locations throughout the world and their interaction. Primarily because I’m in one Global Virtual Team since several years ago working on the development and support of IBM Lotus Domino for System i (including QuickPlace, Quickr, Sametime, Domino Document Manager, etc.).

Recently I found the link to this white paper titled New Methods for Studying Global Virtual Teams: Towards a Multi-Faceted Approach where one of the different findings, not surprisingly, was that of trust. This same issue of trust is something that we know happens also between people in a team working in the same place.

Communication and collaboration tools are critical to the success of a project, and thus every member of a team needs to be educated so that he or she can make effective use of the tool at hand.

I don’t remember where I found the link, but anyways I wanted to share it here.

Anybody knows if Juice will ever support Atom feeds? It has been sleeping for several years now that I’m sure there are not developers left doing anything with it.

Anyone knows how can I get the source code? I would like to take a look and see if I can add the Atom support.

Some hours ago I read this post and it’s sad and unfortunate that when pride and you-know-who reign in your soul it’s obvious that you won’t believe in anything, in fact I have seen and heard people that say they are god. Success, happiness and wisdom are essential things that do not agree with pride and intelligence very much. Wisdom is something that only God can give you, unfortunately almost no one deserves it these days. And it shows.

I really feel sorry.

With great excitement I can tell you now that IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 is available for everyone to download for free!

It has good support for ODF, OpenOffice, MS Office and Lotus SmartSuite documents, so you can get rid of all of those other office applications and have just one installed (as I’m gonna do next!).

I just finished hearing episode 27 of the No Agenda podcast and the stuff about China is pretty interesting. Worth a look.