Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Got this from a friend

President Bush was receiving his daily briefing from his defence secretary, who concluded: "Three Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident."

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Bush, who held his head in his hands in a show of emotion which startled his staff.

Finally the president looked up and asked: "Just how many millions are there in a brazillion?"

Common Sense may not be that common but the common cold is ... for now.

1.  According to the times, Procter and Gamble have developed a treatment that claims to “reduce the chance of developing a full-blown cold by up to 50 per cent if taken promptly at the first sign of symptoms and to cut symptoms by up to 40 per cent.”

Cool!

I’m impressed too by the healing power of a placebo:

 “In a second trial on 400 volunteers, it was tested against naturally acquired colds. The volunteers were asked to start their treatment four times a day as soon as they experienced cold symptoms. Those using First Defense recovered in an average of 6.1 days, compared with 7.2 days for those using a placebo and 8.9 days for those taking no treatment. Although this is far from a cure, it is an improvement that may justify the £6.99 that the treatment will cost.”

That’s a about a third reduction for the treatment and a fifth reduction for the placebo. 

2.  And according to another article from the times ‘Supplements of “friendly bacteria” can reduce the duration of the common cold by nearly a quarter’.

Opera browser now for free

Opera no longer charge for their browser.  The ads have gone too.  Cool.  Apparently they were making lots more money from searches than from the software and so they figured that they’d make even more money by expanding their customer base by giving away the software for free.

For probably the dozenth time during the last few years I’ve just down-loaded opera and tried it out.  It looks nice.  It feels nice.

But.

• One of the first things that the “Getting started” screen tells me that I can do is to import my favourites.  I choose to import my firefox favourites but rather than importing them directly it opens a dialog box from which, I guess, I’m meant to tell it where my favourites are.  I’m a bit thick to know where my favourites are so I cancel out.  I guess that I’ll just add them as I go.
• I notice that I can import my email too.  So I chose the option and it gives me an several choices – import from opera 5/6, import from Eudora, import from netscape 6/7, import from outlook express, import from generic  mbox file,  import from thunderbird.  Where the F* is Microsoft Outlook?  It’s not in the list.  I panic.  I choose – possibly foolishly – to import from generic mbox file (what ever that is) and it impressively starts importing stuff.  I guess it’s from Microsoft Outlook but I don’t know because opera crashes.  When I start opera again I deduce that it must have imported some email settings from somewhere because it gives me an error message telling me that it can’t down-load my email because the settings are wrong.
• So: I uninstall, unimpressed.

NUnit guru Charlie Poole has just started blogging

Charlie Poole spoke to us at AgileScotland a few months ago.  Funny thing was even though he is famous in the XP world, I’d never heard of him.  Despite my utter ignorance we got an excellent turnout for a fascinating talk.

Charlies just started a blog: http://nunit.com/blogs.  Looks good so far.

 

WHY XP MATTERS TO YOU, NOW MORE THAN EVER by Tom DeMarco

Tom Demarco says: 

The process movement, for all its merits, was a dream come true for those who would move IT work to cheaper distant locations. If you are CMM Level 3 at home and there is a CMM Level 3 offshore provider, moving the work at almost any stage is optimally easy. The crown jewel of process is a fixed specification, and this too is a boon to outsourcing. The consistency of method and approach makes the seam between the distant parties easier to live with. Just as important, the regular, methodical development projects that CMM worked best on are the very ones that were most attractive candidates for cost reduction.

That left a core of more complex projects: the ones that had strategic import, that affected the backbone of the organization, that required far too much user involvement to be successfully offshored. These too were the projects that were important enough so that cost savings were not at the top of their sponsors' lists. And these are the very projects in which XP and other agile methods work best.

[via Robert Hanson on the agilemanagement yahoo list]

New name

We’ve decided to rename 2 week old Baby Alice.  Henceforth she shall be known as Scree no-middle-name Ching.  Scree Ching – it has a nice ring to it, I think.

 

Free Harvard Business Review - Fixing Healthcare from the Inside today

I haven't had a chance to read this yet, but here's are free HBR article about using lean thining and the Toyota way within health care.  The author, Steven J. Spear, is coauthorof the classic “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” (HBR September–October 1999) and is the author of “Learning to Lead at Toyota” (HBR May 2004).

I imagine that it will only be free for September so grab it while it is available.