Rakesh Agrawal presents an interesting summary of a talk by Carl Sjogreen describing Google’s approach to the software development process. Google Calendar was a relatively small project (3 engineers, 1 product manager). Google talk to real users (‘Grandma in NYC’) not techy geeks to find what users really want. Google ’eat their own dog food’. Lots of internal testing prior to public launch. Gap in the market. Lots of calendar products out there but none do what people want. Typical Google opportunity. Paper based calendars are the real competition.

And just this once, not mine. When you take out a Self Invested Pension Plan (SIPP), most SIPP schemes are unable to accept Protected Rights. Imagine my surprise, then, when Sippdeal contact me asking for authorisation to make a payment from my SIPP to Equitable Life in respect of a refund of Protected Rights payments that the Government are requesting, in turn, from Equitable Life. Equitable Life claim this refund is now very urgent because the original request was made in January 2006 and no response has been received. ...

Yesterday I had a pretty bad day. I got up early and drove to Chesterfield. Unfortunately, the performance environment was not available as originally planned (overrunning weekend engineering works) so I simply collected some data and drove back to London. Still, it could have been worse. The original plan had me staying overnight in a hotel in Chesterfield. Although this unexpected change of plan was inconvenient and tiring, it still wasn’t as terrible as this gentleman’s bad day ...

‘Dad - please can I have 5 pounds ?’ ‘If I were to give you the 5 pounds, what exactly would you spend the money on ?’ ‘I’m going into town to buy Emma a CD for her birthday.’ ‘…but surely 5 pounds won’t be enough.’ ‘Well Mum gave me 15 pounds but I can get the CD for 8 pounds from Tesco’ ‘Oh I see. Now you’ve got me interested. You have already secured seed funding from an angel investor. Net margin close to 100%. What will your turnover be in years 2 and 3 ?’ ...

[With apologies to Cabaret Voltaire] I want to synchronise my Thunderbird address book between work and home and my Palm Vx. I also want to synchronise Google Calendar with Sunbird and my aging Palm. This is for two reasons; to synchronise and simultaneously back the data up. I feel nervous and exposed, like an Oracle DBA relying on nightly exports. One option was to repeatedly export/import the data between applications but that is far too time consuming and I am lazy. ...

What’s going on ‘ere, then ? Woof.

I briefly used Box.net as a virtual 1GB memory stick. Briefly because after the initial transfer of important files, the onus was on me to identify files I had changed recently and upload them. Mozy seems better suited to lazy people. You simply download a lightweight client, identify folders you want mirrored and Mozy encrypts and mirrors them, quietly in the background. When you add new files, Mozy mirrors the incremental changes. Mozy offers 2GB of storage for free. ...

Thankfully, I don’t have cause to use Microsoft Excel much. My kids can produce pretty charts about the demographics of pet ownership in the classroom better and quicker than I can. Excel is a very powerful product but the sheer size and complexity of the software is just overwhelming which makes it difficult (for novices) to accomplish straightforward tasks. For example, people are kind enough to send me gargantuan, complex spreadsheets where I want to freeze the header row while scrolling data down to the sole point of interest on row 23,538. A seemingly simple task. ...

Thoroughly enjoying ' Margave of the Marshes' and pleased to see The Chameleons get a mention: For David Fielding of The Chameleons, that meant loitering outside Broadcasting House in order to press their tape directly into John’s paw. In the case of The Chameleons, John thought he was the victim of a practical joke after listening to their demo: the recording was so accomplished that he suspected he had been given a cassette of an established band. ...

I subscribe to a fair number of blogs. Some of those bloggers use Blogger (despite my WordPress evangelism). Some of those Blogger bloggers are technical types who would normally seize any chance to play with newly announced beta software. Curiously, not a single one of them has experimented with the recently announced Blogger beta which includes exciting new developments like ‘Labels’, drag’n’drop page design, private blogs (where you can be assured no-one is reading), multiple authors, additional templates, RSS feeds and ‘instant’ publishing. ...