Earlier this week, I read a terrific post by Ron Chester on the effect of silence at the end of the performance of a piece of music. I sing in a church choir, and there have been many times that a short silence at the end of a piece can really bring home the feeling of richness to the experience. During the past weekend, I also had two musical experiences that reminded me of the power of live music. I sang at a church retreat, and attended a community band concert. In the retreat, I was moved to tears at one point by one of the songs as I sang. At the band concert, several of the pieces were ones I had played when I was in band in high school or college, and the pieces brought back fond memories of making music with a group. It also helped that the band was excellent, easily the best community band I have ever heard. All of these experiences helped to remind me that having music in my life is an uplifting experience, one that I want to continue to have.
Stars and Stripes Forever – It’s the law!
The Stars and Stripes Forever March is the national march of the United States of America. It’s not just a good idea – it’s the law!
See this article for more background. Also, the Marine Band website has free downloads of Sousa march recordings – neat!
Three tips for satisfying the users of your products
Capturing these so I don’t lose these:
- Make users happy with your product as quick as you can
- Help your users as much as you can after that
- The simplest way to create value online is to save the user time
How embedded software projects run into trouble
Jack Ganssle has written articles for his top ten list of how embedded software projects run into trouble. Most of this could apply to any software project! Here are the links:
- Unrealistic schedules
- Quality gets lip service
- Poor resource planning
- Writing optimistic code
- Weak managers or team leads
- Crummy analog/digital interfacing
- Bad science
- The undisciplined use of C and C++
- Jumping into coding too quickly
- Not enough resources allocated to a project
When I read this, I decided to start working on the asset that is my weblog. I will strive to post something daily, even if it is only a link….
I would like to try this out!
I really like reading Belle Cooper’s post on leaving Micro.blog (via Chris Aldrich, which I saw in my RSS reader web app). I think it is good for people to share all sides of the experience of using a service. My preference is to host my own weblog and content, which I think is in sync with some of Belle’s points.
Doing a local install of Federated Wiki
Earlier this week, I installed the latest version of NodeJS and NPM (https://nodejs.org/en/) . I am going to try to install wiki on my Windows laptop.
Per this page (https://www.npmjs.com/package/wiki), I started Node.js command prompt and entered the following command:
npm install -g wiki
I then opened a browser tab and went to http://localhost:3000 and was able to see the Welcome Visitors page:
To be able to see the journal icons and be able to make edits, I clicked on the word “wiki” at the bottom of the page. After doing that, I saw a check mark appear next to the word, and I was able to make and save edits. It still looked like there is a yellow background to the pages. In the past, I thought that meant that changes would not be saved, but I will need to look into that more.
Next steps – look at getting wiki source code and running that so I can make local changes.
Getting back into Federated Wiki
I had a Google Hangout today with Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki and his newer project Federated Wiki. I have my own wiki instance, spent the day discussing support for a project in Oregon using wiki and how I can help. It was good to catch up with Ward, I am looking forward to working with him.