Archive for July, 2008


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Cuil Search Engine

July 28th, 2008 by Gregory Silvano Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Today I read about Cuil for the first time.  It’s getting quite a bit of press, probably thanks to the prominent link on the Drudge Report today.

So I gave Cuil the same test I give every search engine - and it failed miserably.

  1. A search for Gregory Silvano didn’t pull up anything special.  And if the first page doesn’t include my LinkedIn account, then sorry - it’s not a very good search engine.
  2. A search for Stature Software returned nothing worthwhile.  We’re not a hugely important site on the web, and that’s exactly the point.  Most sites aren’t hugely important on the web and that’s why I need the search engine.  If you search for Stature Software on Yahoo, Google, or MSN you’ll get our web site at least.
  3. It was slow.  Too slow.

 

I’m no Google lover by any stretch, but Google wins this fight.

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The Most Important Project Manager Skill?

July 24th, 2008 by Gregory Silvano Posted in Software Development | 1 Comment »

For the past few days, I’ve been working closely with Stature’s newest hire, Mike Bykow.  He’s a Project Manager at Stature and is handling several projects for us.

As I was driving him back to South Station yesterday, I listed all the things I think are important for a Project Manager at Stature (or anywhere, for that matter).  I mentioned the obvious things, like: communicating with the clients, making sure you understand every facet of the application, keep in touch with the developers frequently so you’re on top of schedule slips, etc.

But then I told him something that, the more I expanded on the idea, I realized it was the most important skill of all.  I told him he needs to learn to finish the project.

Software projects can go on forever.  Literally.  They can be tweaked and tweaked for months on end.  This is beneficial to no one, but especially for a company like Stature.  We need to finish projects to maintain profit since nearly all of our projects are fixed-price and we don’t issue change orders (see our 3 Guarantees).  So to have a project run over by a month is a big deal for us since we can’t recoup those costs.  Software Projects don’t end naturally - they need to told to end. 

If I were a Project Manager, I’d want to be known as The Closer.  The guy who wraps up his projects on time, on budget, and to spec.  If another project is running past schedule, I want to be the guy they bring in to restore order and get the project done.

In the coming weeks, I want to expand on this topic and discuss the tricks we’ve learned over the years that allow us to close a project.  It’s something you learn through experience and observation, and I think with just a few high-level rules any Project Manager can become The Closer.

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New Project: Online Store

July 18th, 2008 by Gregory Silvano Posted in Stature Projects | No Comments »

We started a new project this week for a publishing company who needed a very customized online store for their products.

We started down the path of DotNetNuke and some commerce modules, but in the end it was easier to just code it ourselves.  Although very powerful, the DNN commerce modules were just too limiting.

We’re using C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server 2005.  They already have an Authorize.net account, so the credit card processing is very easy through their API.  The store supports features such as pricing matrix, related products, out-of-stock messages, shipping, tax, filtering the products by the registered user’s state of licensing, and full integration into their CRM system.

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Seymour Papert

July 12th, 2008 by Gregory Silvano Posted in Technology | No Comments »

I just read an article in the Boston Globe about Seymour Papert and his struggles since an accident left him brain damaged.

I remember using Logo, which Seymour helped created, in 2nd grade.  I still remember the drawings I created using Logo - every kid in the class loved Logo.  We were fortunate enough to have some Apple IIe computers in the school, which in hindsight was a pretty remarkable achievement.

Anyway, good luck Seymour.  And thanks.

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ieSpell - Must Have for Bloggers

July 10th, 2008 by Gregory Silvano Posted in Technology | No Comments »

I’ve been doing a lot of writing online lately, for blog posts, blog comments, and LinkedIn Answers.

If I have to write more than a few sentences, I typically write it in the web browser and then select the text, copy to the clipboard, open a new email, paste into the email, and see if any red squiggly lines show up for misspellings.  The whole process just takes a few seconds but it’s a total hack, of course.

I was going to have one of our developers write a quick spell check application that sits in the system tray.  I wanted something that I could double click and it would load up, automatically take the contents from the clipboard, and run a spell check on the text.  It would be a more elegant solution, but still not perfect.

Then I stumbled upon ieSpell.  Free, integrated right into Internet Explorer and can spell check any editable field in IE by just right-clicking in the field and choosing “Check Spelling”.

I highly recommend it.  There are a lot of words not in the dictionary by default (in this post it flagged LinkedIn, Bloggers, and a few other words) but just click Add to Dictionary and it’ll be that much smarter the next time around.

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