bob-ak.com

Let’s say you are a boss of some developers. And you’ve got this one guy who is way too motivated. He is making everyone else look bad. You want to force him to quit. I have no idea why you’d want to get rid of your one motivated good programmer, but you boss-type guys pull this kind of crazy stuff all the time, right? Anyway, let me explain how you, the boss, can suck the ever-loving life from this programmer and make him hate his job.

Some valid points made in this article. If you’re a programmer and love/hate your job, read the full post here. From lbrandy.com

Have finally deided to do some sports! This is a great thing as I’ve been talking about doing daily/weekly exercise for ever.

The plan is to play sqaush with Max twice a week starting this Wednesday.

Here are a couple of links I found useful for playing squash at beginners level:

- How to Play Squash and other Squash Tips from SquashClub.org

- Essential stretching for squash from ScottishSport.co.uk

Ahmadinejad accepts Israel’s right to exist

Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made a remarkable announcement. He’s admitted that Iran might agree to the existence of the state of Israel.

Read the article here. From the Guardian, written by Peter Tatchell.

New radar to calm Israel-Iran attack fears

The United States has deployed a sophisticated long-range radar system in Israel capable of providing crucial early warnings in case of missile attacks.

Read it here. From theage.com.au written by Jason Koutsoukis, Jerusalem.

‘Song of Sparrows’ Representing Iran At Oscars

After a critical misfire with the moralistic melodrama The Weeping Willow, Iran’s only Oscar-nominated director, Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven), returns to the dramatic territory he effectively mined in earlier works with The Song of Sparrows.

Link - from radiojavan.com

GREAT tune - read about the man here.

Scott Hanselman’s 2007 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

A great site for hi-tech Windows developers. Check his Tools List for Windows-based applications used for programming.

Sometimes you happen to come across a great tune - this one happens to be from an Iranian artist living in the US. There are lots of awful/average Iranian ‘rappers’ out there but this is truly amazing.

The Pascals (last fm link)

A 15 member Japanese band who play a range of instruments from violins and harmonicas to ukeleles and toy pianos. Pascals is a mini orchestra led by Rocket Matsu on accordian and pianica.

The Defectors (last fm link)

60’s Inspired Garage-punk band from Denmark - formed in 1997

Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby (myspace link)

Wreckless Eric is an antique English pop musician, He lives in France with Amy Rigby, a collectable, delectable American pop musicienne.

This article on how we came to comit to the QWERTY keyboard layout was written back in 1997. It’s a good read if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Here’s an excerpt captures the mood:

Commitment to our spouses, our children, and our careers is held to be virtuous; lack of commitment is a common criticism. Yet commitment should be seen as morally neutral. After all, what one is committed to might be either good or bad; commitment to a destructive relationship, an unsatisfying job, or alcoholism deserves no praise. Often, commitment can mean nothing more than an involvement that has outlived its original justification. All of us have at one time or another felt trapped by such a commitment, longing for a happier, though uncertain, state of existence but fearing the short-term pain required to reach it.

Read the full article here.

This is short movie about what developers can go through while building applicationsg is absulotely spot on and gets a thumbs up from me!

From develop-one.net.

I was trying to find information about a book called The Age of Conversation when I came across the main site promoting the book and read a post on how thet intended to promote the book on a particular day and wanted to get their readers to help this happen.

This is the gist of what they planned to do:

1. Buy the book - pretty obvious as to why!
2. Blog about it - yes!
3. Twitter Commentary - if a certain keyword is used when twittering, the site Twemes.com will pick it up and you cab track its popularity
4. Trackback or Comment on a particular post written by them - “everyone can follow the conversation and help promote exposure on social sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc).”
5. Stumble, Digg and Reddit the posts & tell/email all your on-line friends to do the same
6. Post to the main other social networking sites like Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Facebook, Technorati and Ma.gnolia (search engine for searching blogs), Furl, BlinkList, Newsvine, etc.
7. And finally keep talking: “Get on ooVoo, iChat, Aim, or where ever you like to talk, and start talking”