Techie Manager

Wow.

Some shameless self-promotion in Computerworld magazine:
A coalition of 360 users and vendors led by the SANS Institute last week launched a new information security skills assessment and certification program for corporate and government software programmers.
The National Secure Programming Skills Assessment (NSPSA) examinations will provide IT managers with a process for assessing the secure coding skills [...]

I love Firefox. Really, I do. I can’t live without AdBlock Plus or del.icio.us bookmark support, so Safari is a non-starter. But both Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 use up 50-100% of my Mac’s CPU while idle. This kills the battery on my poor little Powerbook G4 laptop, and also makes it [...]

From news.com:
The head of Google in Spain and Portugal has confirmed that Google is working on a mobile phone. “Some of the time the engineers are dedicated to developing a mobile phone,” Isabel Aguilera is quoted as saying on the Spanish news Web site Noticias.com.
Google spokespeople in the United States have repeatedly declined to comment [...]

Wow - very interesting. From OnStartups.com:
I’ve come across some new information that causes me to reconsider this point of view. Business Week posted an article recently titled “Ranking The States For The New Economy”, which cites a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation, a well-known private foundation that promotes entrepreneurship. The study [...]

Maybe it’s already too late…
Dear Mr. Gates, Mr. Ballmer, and the many good folks at Microsoft Corp.,
It’s time to sober up on Windows Vista. This just isn’t working out, and your users are getting frustrated to the point where they’re souring on Windows altogether. In case you haven’t seen some of the more noteworthy blog [...]

This actually sounds kinda nice… (via Neatorama):
Joan Brady of San Francisco can’t even count the number of computers that friends have foisted upon her over the years. Laptops. Desktops. Monitors. It’s like they can’t help themselves. Like they just can’t accept her for who she is: a woman daring to live without a PC in [...]

Helpful hint from the Windows Secrets newsletter:
In my Dec. 14 article, reader Michael Thomas recommended that you wait at least 10 seconds before turning your computer back on when performing a full power-down. That short delay allows the system’s capacitors to lose their charge. This, in turn, completely resets any status information that may be [...]

CIO Insight has an interesting article discussing eBay’s move to a new open architecture allowing 3rd-party integration via web APIs.

Infopia is not just another software vendor. It’s part of a growing community of some 40,000 independent developers, all building products using eBay’s own application programminginterfaces, or APIs—the connection points that let a program share data [...]

I used to be a gadget freak. Every time a flashy new device was released I’d be the first in line to buy one. Over the years I’ve had 5 Palm devices, including one of the first Palm phones (the Kyocera 7135), several digital cameras, 3 iPods and 6-7 cell phones. After [...]