And here they are in YAML

Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1. Retweet Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.
2. Retweet Give honest and sincere appreciation.
3. Retweet Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Six Ways to Make People Like You

1. Retweet Become genuinely interested in other people.
2. Retweet Smile.
3. Retweet Remember that a man’s Name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
4. Retweet Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
5. Retweet Talk in the terms of the other man’s interest.
6. Retweet Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely.

Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

1. Retweet Avoid arguments.
2. Retweet Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never tell someone they are wrong.
3. Retweet If you’re wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
4. Retweet Begin in a friendly way.
5. Retweet Start with questions the other person will answer yes to.
6. Retweet Let the other person do the talking.
7. Retweet Let the other person feel the idea is his/hers.
8. Retweet Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
9. Retweet Sympathize with the other person.
10. Retweet Appeal to noble motives.
11. Retweet Dramatize your ideas.
12. Retweet Throw down a challenge & don’t talk negative when the person is absent, talk about only positive.

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1. Retweet Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
2. Retweet Call attention to other people’s mistakes indirectly.
3. Retweet Talk about your own mistakes first.
4. Retweet Ask questions instead of directly giving orders.
5. Retweet Let the other person save face.
6. Retweet Praise every improvement.
7. Retweet Give them a fine reputation to live up to.
8. Retweet Encourage them by making their faults seem easy to correct.
9. Retweet Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest.

Iran election has started as may be yet another election, peaceful and hopeful. For all parties. With the spread of voter fraud allegations, and suspicions over the way and speed by which the votes were counted, Iranian masses started to mobilize.

Twitter (the platform, not the application as mistakenly analyzed) became the favored topic-centric communication tool (#IranElection, Tehran messages) [twitter postponed maintenance in response to usage]. YouTube helped promote videos of mass protests. Flickr hosted numerous images. Meta-applications like TwitPic and news portals like BBC, have carried varied media propagating information much further. Reddit and other on-demand news aggregators enrolled worldwide symphathizers and activists.

I’m reading now about a twitter campaign encouraging people to change their location on their twitter profile in an effort to cripple down location-based filtering (not sure if it’s not a double-edged sword).
Update: “Senior officials say the [US] State Department is working with Twitter and other social networking sites to ensure Iranians are able to continue to communicate to each other and the outside world.” (via CNN)

Even further, a widespread campaign coordinating a DDoS attacks against .ir government websites out of casual web users. Wired is now saying that this might provoke the Iranian regieme into a reverse Cyber attack (Dr. Strangelove anyone?).

I’m not taking sides in this elections (yet?). I know for fact it’s hard to track down reality in the middle east, and I can’t rule out herd-mentality in this case.

Nonetheless, I’m fascinated with how the Internet has grown in the past years to have such influence on people’s lives. An influence that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Will we be one day able to coordinate election monitoring over the Internet out of Mom and Pop teams? Will we have expats volunteering to watchdog government activities?

Ladies and gentlmen, welcome to the age of the Peoplenet.

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world

• NASA Cassini Saturn Mission Imaging
• Highlights
• TED Talk

I found hidden code in wp-blog-header.php, a new user in the database and a few dozen templates I couldn’t even modify few files on the server (virus?) even with sufficient rights!!

So, I had to install a fresh copy of wordpress and hand-pick few items here and there to migrate.

Let’s see how long this installation stands

Let me just say that Ubuntu is living up to its claim of making Linux for Human Beings.

The boot from Ubuntu CD was a no-go. I found that Wubi would essentially install Ubuntu (without the CD) through a single click install (who could have imagined that Linux could be installed from windows just like any other application ).

And as far as the wireless connection setup, I only had to install Wicd to take care of it.

True the experience is less adventurous than my previous RedHat/XP , yet, it’s indeed less frustrating.

After dwindling Google result ranking, I discovered that my old installation of wordpress (ancient 2.1) was vulnerable enough to allow unauthorized template modifications.

All is fine now isA.

The 2008 World Development Report “Agriculture for Development” provides a compelling example of the food-for-fuel debate: over 240 kilograms (or 528 pounds) of corn – enough to feed one person for a whole year – is required to produce the 26 gallons, or 100 liters of ethanol needed to fill the gas tank of a modern sports utility vehicle.

Source: World Bank: Africa – Rising Food Prices Spell Hunger for Millions Across Africa.

If software development is at the core of a business (or even if it’s a support function), I would expect that such scheme can help shed a light on how the service is being delivered. It would make it easier for business people to understand what it means when a propeller-head say that “Story X would take Y days to implement” or that “a new release will be deployed to the production server”.

I can understand (and appreciate) that each party has his own value to add to the supply chain. But, sometimes that internal supply chain is taken for granted, and as days go by, everyone starts swimming in his own pond, forgetting that it takes a team effort to deliver quality service.

I’m not sure if such schemes (Business/Developer Pairing) are implemented, but, I would expect it being part of an operations management practice.

Anyone out there?

via Obie Fernandez.

Via reddit, and from there to the best quote I read in a while:”Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.” – Joel Spolskey. The quote is highly interpretive, but, to a great extent it bears the truth.