Is your Enterprise too big to fail?
We have met the enemy, and it is Complexity. About a year ago, the media was flooded with debate about financial institutions that were deemed “too big to fail” by industry analysts, financial experts, and government representatives.  A failure by one of these institutions, these experts told us, would have catastrophic effects on our economy, and it was therefore incumbent upon us as a nation to keep these firms solvent. And if you believe this, I’ve got some great beachfront property in Kansas I’d like to talk to you about. What dependencies?How, exactly, are all these financial firms connected?  Obviously, a full expl

Agile Leadership: Methodology Ain’t Enough
It’s a running joke in software development that as soon as someone demonstrates that he’s a good software developer, he’s promoted to management, whether he wants it or not. Image by Cappellmeister via Flickr In recent years, of course, many companies have addressed this to some extent, and it’s now just as common to see software leaders come from a forma

Smashing Magazine on Mastering CSS Coding
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are critical to web layout these days.  If you do any web work at all, you owe it to yourself to have at least a passing knowledge of CSS, while most of us need a solid grasp of the subject. Just because CSS is nearly ubiquitous, however, doesn’t mean that it’s easy.  In fact, CSS can be just about enough to drive you batty when it’s not working the way you expect.  In those moments, in can be helpful to go back to basics and make

Callouts: I need a WordPress plugin
In a recent post, I wanted to break out a paragraph into a callout or sidebar — a little box of goodness inset into the body of my post. This proved rather more difficult than I’d planned. Initially, I crafted the callout by hand, using a DIV for the box, and two DIVs within that for the title and body. I putzed with the CSS for a while to get it looking the way I wanted, and when I finally got it looking the way I wanted, I pulled the styles out and coded them in my blog’s stylesheet.

Tilting the web — really?
Here’s a gem for you, courtesy of Engadget: Firefox 3.6 will support accelerometers, make the internet seasick (video). Right.  I can’t wait to write CSS for this.  Are you kidding me?? If you look at the picture of this browser, you can see that the frame of the browser window stays locked in place on the screen, and sure enough – as the screen is tilted, the rendering within the browser is tilted to compensate.