source: 314 Technologies

Realization of projects and tasks, achieving goals in a group of people called company, require perfection in information flow and long term planning. Process management in that kind of group is a quite complicated issue. That is why since a couple of years a lot of techniques and methodologies, like Scrum, Kaizen, Kanban and so on, have been created to simplify it as much as possible. In short these are the most efficient ways to use your employees’ fullest potential.

On top of that we usually have a BIG MAN, who can be a leader, a manager or a director, etc. So here are the questions: What characterizes that kind of person? What’s the difference between a manager and a programmer? Are they able to change their roles?

………

Continue reading on the 314 website.

Source: 314 Technologies

With virtualization (which became a data-center standard by the way), it’s no surprise that vendors are trying to the plate with products for virtualizing the complex I/O architecture. There are several mature products on the market that support IO virutalization but let’s check what is it all about.

Read more….

Source: 314 Technologies

Some time ago I wrote here that time measurement is a very subjective issue. I Concluded that it’s better to useThe Pomodoro Technique, which is able to make us more efficient in the time we have. In short we could manage our time much better. Some people claim that something like time management doesn’t exist. But generally if something exists it is able to be managed. So basically time management is done, but what about tasks on which we spend it.

Very often our list of tasks, which we have in hundreds of task’s managers and notebooks brings to mind a monster in a wardrobe. Sure, everyone know that we shouldn’t be afraid because it’s only our imagination, however that’s the last place you look into in the night.

Don’t forget rules …

To fight someway with those tasks people through the years have created many techniques and systems. First and the most popular is probablyGetting Things Done by David Allen. It contains many tools for prioritizing tasks, categorizing by different contexts, estimating and so on. If we already know how it works then we should learn which task is for us the most important etc. So another place to go is Brian Tracy’s book which is called “How to master your time”. Everything now is well planned right? But not done yet. To get to know why, it will be nice to read another Tracy’s proposition “Eat that frog”. That’s not the end. To use properly our brain in the meantime we should also read “Six thinking hats” by Edward de Bono after which will be able to create groundbreaking ideas.

… Or Fun !

Every single thing on that list is just astonishing and worth to read. However we can’t also forget about one little aspect. Our brain isn’t just a machine to excute well prepared, reasonable looking, well planned tasks. If it would be so, Nobel Price would be just a formality. Brain is much more complicated and offers also something like emotions, intuition and both can ruin our well rounded plan in just a second.

To prevent that we must learn how to work to use those features properly and treat them as big advantages. Mark Foster has created something which is called Autofocus Index technique and I think it’s just brilliant.

Unfortunately you should be careful. That’s not the method everyone will accept, like and which lets you make more money. This method is based on natural need for action, which includes not only rational choices but also intuition and fun. It contains four different variations (AF1, AF2, AF3, AF4) depends on your working style (more deadlines, more flexible work and time etc). I won’t describe it here in detail, because Mark have done this fantastic here. But there are a couple of advices derived from my experience:

• this is a method which really works, but you have trust and don’t think about it
• you will be suprised that you will be doing much more tasks
• don’t worry just follow couple of simple rules
• every notepad can be use like a context from GTD (i.e. School, Work, Home etc)

I’ve choosen AF4 because it’s perfect for my current work. It works for me now and I can really recommend it if just wanted to try something new.

Hi everyone! Just few days ago a new cool plugin for Firefox has been presented. His name is ubiquity. Remember that name, becouse it’s very helpfull and powerfull tool. It’s still in early version (0.1) but you can find out yourself how usefull it can be even right now. Here you can find a link to Mozilla Labs where it was introduced and below you can watch a short video containing simple scenario of how to use it. I want tell you anything more. Watch it, install it and enjoy it!

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I have been watching what’s going on in web 2.0 world last time, and it’s just simple insane ! So many portals Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, etc… There are so many sites that I don’t know even where I have account and where not. But now they are going to coperate, like Twitter with Facebook, MyBlogLog which combines all platforms together. This is great idea - join all Web 2.0 stuff together, but also a big problem. Why ? Because now an application consuming user data must write-in direct support for each API for every service it requires, which usually requires a lot of development effort in terms of protocol and format support, maintenance of each API integration and other issues such as uptime and availability. Sounds terrible and it really is, fortunately now we have Gnip ! With Gnip, developers can write once for the Gnip API and gain access to user data for a number of supported publishing services.

“The goal of Gnip is to serve as a web services proxy to enable consuming services to easily access user data from a variety of sources.“.

On the publishing side Gnip supports formats such as standard RSS, Atom or XMPP.

Generally interesting thing and again we can see global trend to cooperation between services which is nice

Yes. How you can see we’ve changed our blog’s language Simple speaking it’s beacause more people can read english than polish, so… it was a good decision.

Ok… to be honest, I’m always using this one :

Witamy na oficjalnym blogu Uplevel! Mamy nadzieję, że zgromadzone tu informacje będą dla was przydatne. Odwiedzajcie nas często!