Category: Technology

I often ask the question “How can we properly work out pay for performance?” For some teams it sounds pretty simple. Sales, for instance, has some relatively simple metrics. How many encounters? How much did you sell? It’s a little more difficult for Engineering. Here’s an example that I often see: A great product team…

In a previous post about the F-117, I described some of the rules Kelly Johnson had for his projects. As promised, here is how I would map Kelly’s rules to agile development. Kelly: 1. The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a…

The History Behind the F-35B Continuing the theme of the Lockheed Skunk Works, this is an interesting take on the development of the shaft-driven fan on the F-35B. The inventor discusses how he came up with the idea and how the system works. Like any good research project, there was a risk of failure, but…

In my previous post, I went over the changes I made to Workling to add threading and allow it to run for long periods. Now, we need to deploy and monitor everything. In the Linux word, there are several options, but monit seems to be the most popular. However, I wanted to give god.rb a…

EDIT: The latest workling on github has all of the changes described here. There is no need to download my patch anymore. See github.In my previous post, I briefly described how simple it is to add background processing to your RoR app with Starling and the Workling plugin. Now, let’s discuss the changes I made…

At Inquisix, we help sales professionals exchange trusted referrals. To do that requires several background tasks, some that could take 10-15 minutes to process. Obviously, I can’t make a client wait for that, so I needed a system that could handle background tasks. At first, I started with backgroundrb, and it worked just fine. Backgroundrb…

F-117 stealth fighters to make final flight no one will know about – Engadget It’s the final flight of the F-117. It’s not exactly the prettiest aircraft in the world, but it sure broke new ground. At first, I was surprised, but I didn’t realize there we so few of them left. Then it makes…

CeBIT 2008: Vodafone demos “Otello” visual search Now this is interesting, and it sure would save a lot of typing. Now, the engineer in me marvels at how you could actually pull this off. The data requirements to do this kind of pattern matching is staggering. I suspect it will be a while before it…

DORmino Eco Mouse Gets Its Juice From Laptop Itself! – Ecofriend This wouldn’t help me because I use my trustee MacBook Pro with an external monitor and keyboard most of the time, but I could see how it could work — especially with aluminum laptops like the MacBook Pros. The aluminum transits heat out of…