I have a sad history of hobby based research into company compensation and rewards plans. One concept I’ve always been attracted to is that of gainsharing. The basic concept being to tie any form of compensation to actual productivity. When actual productivity increases above a baseline then the people making it happen see some benefit instead of only the so called powers that be.

The only formal plan I’ve researched in any depth is one called The Scanlon Plan. Years ago I found a used copy of an out of print book on the plan. I believe this is it, since reprinted.

“The Scanlon Plan was developed from the innovative work of Joseph Scanlon during the 1940s and 1950s. Joe’s experience as a steelworker and union leader during the Depression prompted him to conclude that a company’s health, indeed its very survival, required a climate of cooperation rather than competition between labor and management.”

Joe Scanlon worked very closely with Dr. Douglas McGregor in the development of the plan. If you haven’t read McGregor’s 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, I highly recommend it.

What’s my point here? Sorry, don’t have one, just some links and references to old reading.

Some Links…

• Is Gainsharing for You?
• A 1955 TIME article about Joe Scanlon

This is an intriquing design as posted at core77.

Be forewarned, I’m having an “I’m so happy I work in linux” day. A quick example why. My wife’s a photographer and while she’s relatively technical, she’s no nerd. I have to give her respect though as she now works fully in linux and is slowly mastering the gimp. [Insert bad jokes here…]

In any case she has to resize a large volume of images very often. Basically, fill a dvd full of low resolution images that are passed onto her client to review for the purposes of eventually ordering prints. Clearly you can use photoshop, gimp, etc for this purpose. Open up the images, scale them, save as, etc. As well, photoshop and others have batch tools for repeating actions like these often.

Another option for people working in linux is the appropriately named ImageMagick. ImageMagick allows you to do almost everything from the command line. Personally I’ve hardly scratched the surface on this but some quick examples I’ve played with…

Convert from a jpg to a png

Lower the resolution 50%

Add a border

Add a watermark

Of course you can now mix, match, and combine all the commands. In my case I need to write a simple script that took a directory full of jpg’s and tif’s, lowered the resolution to 30% and dropped them all into a destination directory in jpg format.

It took me about 15 minutes to write this script which does just that. My wife can now drop a whack of images into the source directory, click an icon I put on her desktop, and then burn the dvd directly from the destination directory. Come on. I know I’m a nerd but that’s cool isn’t it?

I’m test driving google analytics on this site using this plugin. I’m not sure I’ll keep it around but I’m interested in how it works as we’re using it on some of our client applications.

Rick Chapman spoke about software as a service(saas) at The Business of Software.

A lot of his examples, meant to convince the crowd that saas was the way software was moving, were based on flawed products. He listed a ton of poorly designed software products. My thought was he did little to nothing to sell saas. For me, crappy software as a service is still just crappy software. Altering delivering, deployment, etc isn’t going to make your crappy software better.

I’m heading to DemoCampToronto is tonight. Sign up here.

“Whether you are looking for a job, looking to hire, looking for inspiration, needing to kill time before going home. DemoCamp offers good company in the form of demos from passionate developers, designers and entrepreneurs.”

This is just plain silly. If you haven’t tried google maps on your mobile device lately, just try it. It knows where you are without using gps. Very slick.

Just saw this after the fact on LifeHacker, they explain how google’s doing it.

All I can say is that if someone starts doctoring like this in my area I’d try it in a heartbeat. He’s a doctor in NY who’s combining old school house calls with new technologies such as email and IM to create something truly unique.

Ricardo Covo came out to DemoCampGuelph3 and demo’d one of the facebook applications he’s built called Network Trotters.

The interesting part for me is that he’s building facebook applications in .NET. Personally I have zero interest in actually using facebook apps. I am, however, curious about facebook applications from a development perspective so I’d love to see Ricardo come out again sometime and show some code. As well, what are the dirty details involved in building and deploying these applications?

If you missed DemoCampGuelph3, sign up for the google group and join us next time.

“Without appropriate design, yesterday’s success is tomorrow’s straightjacket, since today’s great applications are tomorrow’s legacy systems.”, Buxton.

We’ve all worked on projects with ‘crappy code’. How do they get like that since none of us writes crappy code? The more successful a project is, the longer you have to survive with that codebase. We never have to live with codebases on unsuccessful projects. They disappear into the abyss. So it’s a waste of time to properly design a project that won’t be successful and it’s extremely detrimental to a successful project to poorly design it.

So does that mean a project’s design time should be relative to how successful you intend the project to be?