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It’s more and more common that the things we buy or are given come without manuals, documentation, drivers, etc. At least when you receive something as a gift from a company there’s no wonder the product is cheap and comes from we-know-where.

It’s a shame that (I’m generalizing here) the entire population is in favor of cheap but crappy products. Products made by companies that do not care about the final customer. They do not pursue quality at all, don’t even study a little bit of english or send a little piece of text to be translated properly.

Here I have a “USER’s Install Manual (For vendor preference only)” for a nice looking pen that also is a “USB DISK”. Look at all what it pretends to say and you’ll see that it’s bad big time.

QUICKLY MANUAL
Windows 98/ME/XP
Version 1.20/2.O
Install Driver
Turn on your computer power, and plug the USB DISK into the USB port.
For more in formation, please look out the install note.
1.Install driver for Windows 98/ME
At first, you must install “USB storage device”
1 ) Boot the computer, and plug the USB DISK info the USB port.
2) Windows will detect the new hardware, and inform you for “a new USB storage device” .Please click the  ”next” button.
3 ) Then Windows will question where the driver is.You must click the “browse” button and locate the driver. After doing it, please click the  ”next” button to continue.
5) For WIN2000/XP, the product is driverless, plug and play.

Suddenly we don’t have step 4, but with this explanation, who cares?!
We have more:

2.Operation
1 ) Format
Run command “Mangager.exe” .for first,please choose “Full Format” and click the right “format” button.  (fullformat will take offa few minutes.) After the format is finished, the USB DISK will be useable.
2) Boot set
The option will only for WIN98.Run command “Mangager.exe” and select the  ”boot disk”  option,the format the USB DISK. (NOTE:YOU MUST FORMAT THE USB DISK)  Reboot the computer,and set the BIS’s Boot Device to  ”USB-ZIP” ,the boot will enable. ( NOTE:IF YOU SELECT THE BOOT DISK, THE “ENCRYPT DISK” OPTION WILL DISABLE.)
3) Set password and operation
( 1 ) After format the USB DISK, Run command “Mangager.Exe” again
(2) Please select the “user password” option.quit and re-plug the USB DISK.
(3) Click “My Computer”  icon,entering the movable disk. Run command “Pass Man .exe” ,the default password is.
(4) After login,the  ”PassMan” windows will close in a second, then you can use the USB DISK.
4) Change password
Run “Change password” .and enter the same password in the “new password”  and “confirm password” ,then click the “OK” button. Re-plug the USB DISK,the Encrypt will be enable.

GUARANTEE ITEM
1.At normal, electric moveable hard-drive Will be change in three moth and guaranteed in a year. (It is count from the buy date. )
2.If you buy the products in three months and in troubles, please send the product to dealer.
3.The card must be marked by the sales. IF NO, please to return it to the dealer.

Got it? Finally:

GUARANTEE ITEM
Der user:
Thank you to use our products. Please seriously read the item and carefully keep of the guarantee card.

Er, yes, of course.

I just saw a blog post that Joydipto created about cscope. It made me remember of those days when I used it for my Domino for IBM i development on AIX + ClearCase. I really liked cscope, the only problem is that the machine where it was running wasn’t fast.

Well, you should know that still in January 2009 I was still doing development for Domino on IBM i as the Team Leader and Technical Leader of the team in Guadalajara, but then in February I changed gears.

For several months now I’ve seen that when going to most of the IBM developerWorks articles, the main home page itself, and some other IBM sites like PartnerWorld, the CSS files don’t load and I end seeing plain Web pages without good navigation nor design (for obvious reasons).

I didn’t care too much for a while, but a month ago I decided to take a look and while seeing the Web page source code noticed that most of the CSS and .js files were being loaded from akamai.net. I remembered that there was a filter in Adblock Plus for Akamai content, went to check the Adblock Plus preferences and there it was, a filter blocking the files that some IBM sites need.

Want to say first that it surprised me that IBM was also using Akamai services in order to allow for faster load times of pages. You know, I think the service includes caching those static files to improve performance, etc.

I took a look to the Adblock Plus documentation and found the page that talks about filters, added the following exception rule and I’m now in business:
@@//a248.e.akamai.net/*/www.ibm.com/*

It was the easiest and quickest rule for what I wanted. Still I think it can be narrowed down even more for security purposes. If someone has any suggestion I’m all ears.

Man! It’s been a while since I last posted on this blog… Lots of changes happened at the end of last year and beginning of this one. Hope to have time later to create a post with that.

I was reading an article about HTML and XHTML and wondered whether or not developers who prefer dynamic or loosely typed programming languages also prefer HTML versus XHTML, since XHTML is stricter than HTML.

I know we can’t compare apples with oranges, but this thought just make me think that I like strongly typed programming languages and appreciate XHTML more than HTML. So maybe those who like dynamically or loosely typed programming languages prefer HTML over XHTML.

In the end it probably doesn’t matter since we know we should use whatever is best suited for the task at hand (and not use the hammer for everything). Perhaps someone already researched or created a study about this and I haven’t seen it, you know, there are tons of useless studies out there, hehe.

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.