Jeremy Lavergnemy personal web site

Care About Your Craft

There is no point in creating anything unless you care about doing it well.

Think! About Your Work

Challenge yourself to think about what you're doing while you're doing it.

Provide Options, Don't Make Lame Excuses

Before you approach anyone about why something is late or broken, stop and listen to yourself; talk to the rubber duck on your monitor or the cat. Does your excuse sound reasonable or stupid? How's it going to sound to your boss?

Don't Live With Broken Windows

Don't leave "broken windows" (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired – fix each one as soon as it is discovered. If there is insufficient time to fix it then board it up. Perhaps you can comment out the offending code, or cover your project with a "Not Implemented" message, or substitute dummy text instead. Take some action to prevent further damage and to show that you're on top of the situation.

Remember the Big Picture

They say that if you take a frog and drop it into boiling water it will jump straight back out again. However, if you place the frog in a pan of cold water and gradually heat it, the frog won't notice the slow increase in temperature and will stay put until cooked.

Don't be like the frog: keep an eye on the big picture. Constantly review what's going on around you, not just what you're doing.

Make Quality a Requirements Issue

There are often situations where trade-offs are involved. Surprisingly, many users and companies with tight budgets would agree: great results today is often preferable to perfect work tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution.

Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio

Even if it's just a small amount, the habit itself is as important as the sums. It's important to continue investing. Once you feel comfortable with some new language or bit of technology, move on. Learn another one.

• Learn at least one new language every year
• Read a technical book each quarter
• Read nontechnical books, too
• Take classes
• Participate in local user groups
• Experiment with different environments
• Stay current
• Get wired

Critically Analyze What You Read or Hear

There are few simple answers anymore, but with your extensive portfolio and by applying some critical analysis, you can understand the complex answers.

It's Both What You Say and the Way You Say It

Unless you work in a vacuum, you need to be able to communicate. The more effective communication the more influential you become.

Ever since the the Pirate Bay verdict was announced, the poor record labels have been waiting to collect their share of the damages. The law firm representing several record labels has now filed a request at the Swedish Enforcement Authority, to claim anything of value from the Pirate Bay defendants. However, their involvement in the case might backfire.

Read more of Ernesto's article at torrentfreak.

Also of interest today:"Based upon a quick examination of the records in PACER, I detected 62 new cases brought by the RIAA against individuals in the month of April alone. In December, 2008, the RIAA had represented to Congress that they had 'discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August [2008]."

It's time voice mail threw in the towel.

Since March, I've been using Google Voice, the search company's fantastic Web app that gives you a single number to connect all your phones and lets you make rules about who can call which phone when.

Voice mail is one of the most inefficient, socially awkward, and least user-friendly means of communication out there, and I'd gladly change my name to Bob, Todd, or Sue if it means never having to sit through a parade of pointless messages ever again.

Unlike your e-mail inbox, voice mail is impossible to skim: If your phone tells you that you've got five new messages, you've got no choice but to listen to at least a bit of each one before you can decide what to do with it.

But wait, is it 9 to archive and 7 to skip, or is that the way the work phone does it? I couldn't tell you, because every voice-mail system seems to have settled on different numbers to activate its main functions.

On the rare chance that you do get an important voice mail, your first move is to transfer the information to some more permanent medium — say, ink and paper. Unlike just about every other mode of electronic communication today, after all, voice mail can't be searched.

This gets to what's so magical about voice-mail-to-text apps like Google Voice. They don't try to fix voice mail by improving its interface; instead, they remove it from its interface entirely and let you deal with each message in the same way you go through your e-mail.

In Italy artists and musicians have made a charity song to raise money for victims of the recent earthquake and over in Spain, artists have performed to raise funds for a seriously ill boy. Both events, thanks to the involvement of music industry lobby groups, have been touched by copyright controversy.

Read more of engimax's article at torrentfreak.

Some choice words from David Post:

The Google Books project has the potential to become one of the great information-gathering activities in human history — every book (just about), at everyone's fingertips, searchable and instantly accessible from any corner of the globe. And we want to deter that?? Because that will decrease "respect for IP laws"? Talk about putting the cart before the horse!! Because it will inflict some sort of terrible "harm" on copyright holders? I'm not terribly sympathetic. Copyright, as Jefferson stressed so long ago, is a "social right" — given by society because we feel it serves useful ends (incentivizing authors to produce new creative works). When it ceases to serve those ends, it should be eliminated. The Google Books project is another example of how copyright interests, these days, do little more than obstruct useful innovations. There are 7 million (or more) out of print books that Google would like to place on-line where they can actually be accessed and read. I'm sorry if that infringes someone's copyright, but really — in what way is society better off, exactly, from recognizing the copyright holder's rights in this circumstance?

Read the whole thing — along with the comments it generated.

Even before it’s officially adopted, France’s controversial anti-piracy law has already claimed its first victim. Jérôme Bourreau-Guggenheim, head of web innovation at one of the largest TV-networks in France was fired recently because he criticized the law in a letter to his MP.

Read more of Ernesto's article at torrentfreak.com.