Short collection of insights
From the past few weeks on the web (catching up on a backlog here) ...
Open Source for Business: This is pretty interesting stuff - Graham writes about taking organizational / collaborative ideas from the open source and blogging movements. Of course, it's helpful if you have actually created or participated in an open source project on SourceForge, or built your own blog, or contributed to Wikipedia.
New Tricks: Progress Software embracing Eclipse for their development environment - news for a bunch of folks I know. I was always interested in Progress, sort of RPG-like in it's old-school green-screen approach. Of course, I learned about Crimson Editor from a contractor that came in and did a lot of great work; Crimson, the only free editor that did syntax-highlighting for the Progress language. Well, I'll refer my old mates to my previous posts, and hope they enjoy the new IDE, but I wager the majority will prefer to stick with their telnet sessions - old dogs, yada yada.
Need an Idea: Business Experiment - interesting approach, but sometimes I fear most of the ideas are done already or really tech focused, not enough emphasis on business benefit. See also this post. Another interesting / related post: Business 2.0 has published an article (recently Slashdotted) on a number of ideas that venture capitalists would love to fund. This is a fun read, not only as an idea-generator and source of creative energy, but also for the realization that you can get terrific ideas for internal projects from the business folks; everything doesn't have to come from IT.
Clever: Possibly the most subtle logo design I've seen in a while (for the noobs).
Stick to the Basics: I just liked this story of the two woodsmen. It reminds me of a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend seven hours sharpening my axe."
Aside: This clears out a bit of the backlog of items I had earmarked in Bloglines for later followup / evaluate. The backlog gets big quick, its yet another time trap - you should see the size of my "Followup" bookmarks collection! Yes, I've read GTD, and follow some of the ideas; I'm just a natural packrat at times ...
Also: This will keep your brain busy for a while ...