http://www.hartsteve.com "The best prophet is common sense, our native wit." - Euripides Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:22:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've used Adobe Photoshop for a while now and never really progressed beyond the basics.  That is, until recently, when faced with the challenge of putting together a collage image for an Enterprise Search presentation that I'm working on.  The idea for the image was not mine.  I saw the ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2008/09/26/adobe-photoshop-scripting/ On the subject of coffee parlours, today I read a great diagnosis of the growth-induced erosion of Starbucks' brand value and, consequentially, the erosion of their growth.  Clearly Starbucks have lessons to learn about balancing growth with brand, but they certainly aren't new lessons.  What happened?  Read John Quelch's article ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2008/09/19/growth-at-the-expense-of-brand-value/ I like the coffee from Take 5 Cafe. Beats Starbucks hands down.  I mean, when all that the Starbucks "barista" has to do is press a button to brew a shot ... well, I'm sure Starbucks was aiming for infallible consistency while maximizing throughput but they lost the plot when ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2008/05/19/the-last-mile/ Recently I took a dive into the world of Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL).  Why? I didn't yet have the source code for an assembly I was referencing and I needed to remove a date validation constraint that was affecting the solution.  This is how I resolved the situation: Disassembled the assembly ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2007/01/08/msil-foray/ Roberto Ruggeri has just posted an article announcing the publication of the Microsoft Connected Health Framework.  As usual, Roberto has done a good job of introducing and explaining things and, therefore, you should be able to easily discern how the Connected Health Framework (CHF) is being positioned.  I really like ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2006/11/21/roberto-announces-connected-health-framework/ Andrei Kossoroukov has started writing some interesting pieces about Christopher Alexander and software architecture (see part 1 and part 2).  A while ago I read Christopher Alexander's The Oregon Experiment, and thoroughly enjoyed it. [tags]Andrei Kossoroukov, Christopher Alexander, Software Architecture[/tags] http://www.hartsteve.com/2006/11/12/andrei-talks-about-christopher-alexander/ Pluck used to be my RSS reader.  I chose Pluck because I wanted a reader that was integrated into Internet Explorer.  But Pluck developed problems: notifications of new postings that didn't exist, Pluck server outages, unresponsive to support requests.  With Pluck no longer responding to queries and no longer mentioning ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2006/10/12/onfolio/ Denny's Restaurant Session Bellevue, Washington, 3:00am At approximately 3:00am, me and two of my colleagues decided to do a bit of food research at a Denny's restaurant in Bellevue.  You could call this our first morning session. There is More to Life in Healthcare Integration than Technical Compliance Elizabeth Redding, Partner2Learn Elizabeth has been helping ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2006/10/08/ms-soa-bpm-2006-day4/ Data and Transaction Management Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters Connected Systems Division, Microsoft The core foci of this presentation were the characteristics and architectural patterns related to data storage and data access. The core takeaways were the importance of early data architecture envisioning and that the correct data architecture is the ultimate performance ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2006/10/08/ms-soa-bpm-2006-day3/ With a good dose of business-focused keynotes and sessions under my belt, I was ready for a bit of a technical dive. So, my first session of the morning was WCF: Extensibility in the WCF Service Oriented Platform, presented by Craig McMurty, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. It started with an ... http://www.hartsteve.com/2006/10/05/ms-soa-bpm-2006-day2/