Coffee Machine

Originally uploaded by mattm

I think this goes to show that beauty can be found in even the most mundane/everyday places.

I was waiting for the machine to heat up this morning when it struck me that the light and reflection off of this machine was really cool.

I'll admit that the iPhone would be hard to use as a blackberry replacement. This is based on my recent experiences with the iPod Touch which shares the same basic platform (and on-screen keyboard) as the iPhone. What makes the iPhone so darn special is not email ... it is... the WWW!

The Safari browser on the iPhone/iPod Touch is nothing short of phenomenal. So much so that email is no longer the killer mobile app.

I just had a neat thought. I'd been pondering the whole idea of socialization (the process whereby individuals learn to behave willingly in accordance with the prevailing standards of their culture) and identity. I also had a database schema in my mind for something I am working on, so naturally...I am thinking about primary keys (a primary key is an attribute whose value is unique across all occurrences of a relation).

My idea is that what our parents (or whoever is present in the developmental stage) give is is our primary key, and that key determines how we consume all of the data that passes by us. Of course, it is possible in computer science to develop a database driven system without primary keys, but often the system operates slowly and is hard to adapt (dysfunctional?). This is probably possible in the human case as well, and perhaps would explain why stimuli is consumed and processed in significantly different ways from person to person.

Just a thought.

When: September 30 - October 3, 2007
Where: Chicago, details here.

This year's MAX conference is a big deal for a lot of us who work on the LiveCycle ES product line because it coincides fairly closely with the release of LiveCycle ES 1.0. ES 1.0 is a dramatic re-design of LiveCycle, and we're excited to show everyone all the cool things we've done, including:

• Form Manager is replaced by a new, cool, customizable Flex 2.0 application.

I went out and bought a replacement windows machine on Saturday. Its an HP Pavilion m8000 series machine with a Quad Core processor, 3gb of Ram, etc. etc. etc. Many of you know me as a rabid mac fanatic, but the reality is that I am a multi-platform type of guy. I prefer Mac, but I like to use whatever gets my work done quickly. I like to have a windows desktop at home because it integrates well with my work network which I access via VPN when I am working from home. Yes, I know all the bootcamp, fusion, parallels tricks...this is just better.

...but when I do, people laugh. If you are one of the folks that are prone to laughing at such a thing, here is what Scrum is:

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration. It's attributes are:

• Scrum is an agile process to manage and control development work.
• Scrum is a wrapper for existing engineering practices.