President-elect Barack Obama is being sworn into office today. Where are you watching the events of this historic day unfold?
I watched the inauguration live in Helsinki. As soon as President Obama was sworn in we popped a bottle of bubbly. The TV had BBC World, while our laptops had CNN, CSPAN and pic2009.org streaming. Yes, I know...
The event felt like a media milestone, and I loved the CNN and Facebook integration. For once, I could watch news and be a geek at the same time. :)
We have received more than a foot of snow over the weekend, and it is still snowing a little bit. Yay!
It's been more than a year ago since Gladys and I left San Francisco for a year of business school at INSEAD. It's time to pick up this blog again.
It was a truly amazing year, and we made many incredible friends. I studied, partied and traveled. There are a lot of INSEAD bloggers, and they have done an excellent job capturing what the experience is all about, so I won't delve too much on that here.
Somewhat unexpectedly, we are now in Helsinki, Finland, where I work for Nokia. Although I am lucky enough to live less than 10 minutes walking distance away from the office, it is difficult to not notice that the days are getting shorter. This morning I saw what looked like sunrise when walking to work. By the time I packed up it was dark outside. Fortunately, it is not that cold yet, still slightly above freezing.
I suppose this is what happens when someone tries to make a system a little too intelligent, but forgets that sometimes the account owner isn't the one actually making the purchases.
I'm a fan of refactoring, and I pretty much always hit Ctrl-Shift-O in Eclipse (organize imports). It's such an easy hit, and removes a few compiler warnings. Little did I know that there's a much better way: Guide to refactoring in Eclipse 3.2.
I'm not sure how I managed to miss that wizard, but the Clean Up wizard will actually clean up the imports, remove unused variables and more for your entire project.
My favorite Eclipse refactoring shortcut is still "Extract Method", though.
Thus, I was excited to see that usability expert Jakob Nielsen says that breadcrumbs are becoming increasingly useful. In some cases breadcrumbs can even remove the need for a back button.
A post on Software by Rob, Case study of unmotivated developers, has an interesting discussion on how to motivate developers.
Picasa now has a Web API using atom and GData. Very cool.
http://code.google.com/apis/picasaweb/overview.html
This is hilarious: The Works on My Machine Certification.
Someone even made badges. I have of course already taped the printouts to my cube wall.
