Planet Kurz

The Jolt Awards are back! Over the past year, the Jolt Awards underwent some restructuring. The group of judges spent a considerable amount of time and effort to redesign the process and format to adapt to changing times. Having been given the honor a few years ago to participate as a Jolt judge, I have been given a rare opportunity to be a part of the redesign, and I can honestly say that what we have now represents a great step forward. A few months ago, though it seems like just yesterday, fellow Jolt judge, Mike Riley , contacted me about some ideas he had to revitalize the Jolt Awards process. The old format was a once a year event with awards being given to the top products, all at the same time. For the vendors and the software community in general, this event lasted a grand total of one day. For the judges, this process took about six months. The new format is based on a continuous cycle of reviews and awards, with one category under review per month. In a way, this re...

At 3:30am, I was way ahead of the sun that day. I had to get up early if I was going to get to Grissom Air Force Base in time for the flight. I was 14, and a member of the Civil Air Patrol. My squadron was invited to go along on a re-fueling mission. We arrived on time, went through security, and soon we were on-board a KC-135. As I looked around, I wondered where we were going to sit, as I didn't see any seats. One of the airmen pointed to the straps along the sides. At that time I had never flown on any plane before, let alone a military aircraft. We strapped-in, the plane took off, and our mission was underway. There were about a dozen in our CAP group. After what seemed like a couple hours, we were now over the Gulf of Mexico. Our group leader told us to come to the back of the plane. In the very end of the tail section were three windows on the floor. The center position was for the boom operator, and the other two - one on each side - was for observers. We each got to take ...

I've been amazed at how powerful a force status-quo can be. It is a phenomenon that exists in the environment of nature, and political and corporate environments as well. Consider the cicadas, which emerge from their sub-surface slumber every so many years. They do not all rise to the surface when one of them says it's time to go. It isn't until enough of them say it's time to go that they all decide that it is in fact time to go. When that happens, they all go. So, what is happening here? One of them had the right idea, but the lot of them didn't start moving to the surface until enough of them said the same thing. What is that magic number? Who knows, but there is a tipping point, and when that happens, they all go along. The same could also be said of lemmings, even if that small group decides to walk over the edge of a cliff. If that doesn't describe corporate and political creatures, I don't know what does. We have seen record high gas price...

I was looking for information, or rather details, on Visual Studio 2010. Looking at the Microsoft website, information is everywhere, but details are hard to find. It's bad enough that Microsoft changes the names of the editions with each release, but trying to find out what is in each edition, and what the differences are from one edition to another is very difficult. I have recently been on something of a quest, to champion the use of UML . Without tools, UML is just a bunch of boxes and lines that simply makes working with Visio that much more painful. I know that in the past, Microsoft has kept UML at an arms length. They have told me personally that they use it all the time when whiteboarding, but when it comes to implementing a design notation in their tools, they want to use their own standard. I can appreciate that because it does give them the flexibility to build development tools the way they want, without tying them to a set of rules defined by some external org...

Today, I came across the story of Capt. Scott Smiley , a soldier who was seriously injured by a car bomb in Iraq. He was rushed to a medical center for help, and for a moment, flatlined. He came back though, and somehow pulled through the ordeal. The blast left him blind in both eyes. I won't try to re-tell his story, but his experience is one that everyone should know about. His story is one of courage - courage to serve his country, and courage to overcome and rise above his injuries. He still continues to serve this country on active duty, because he realized that he still had a lot to give, and he still had a lot of fight left in him. His family also deserves our gratitude, because they had to deal with the situation as well. In the churn of daily news, it seems that all we hear about are the misdeeds of the rich and famous, instead of talking about men like Capt. Smiley. It seems like we expect to hear all the bad, all the time. We should never forget that there are men...

Every once in a while, twice a year to be exact, I am forced to go through the house and change the time on all the clocks, and other appliances that have clocks. The atomic clock in the kitchen doesn't need to be changed, my cell phone is ok, and computers auto-adjust, but I still have to make the rounds for the other devices. When we are an hour early or late on our first trip after such time-changing events, I also realize I need to change the clock in the car. Growing up in Indiana, this wasn't as much of a problem, as we didn't change our clocks. The only impact was that TV shows started an hour early (or late) half the year. Fellow Jolt judge, David Dossot , reminded me of "beat time" from the late 90's. It never caught on, but what a concept? Could one time zone for the entire planet be possible? I have heard all sorts of explanations as to why we have to change our clocks, but that is just half of the problem. The other half is the concept of ti...

In the pecking order of most website projects, the actual coding part gets top priority, then architecture, followed by testing, then usability, then lastly is documentation. There might be differences in the order of all those, as long as the actual coding part comes first. Oh, and there was one more piece - accessibility. That is something so low on the list of priorities that if it is ever mentioned, usually gets a response of, "What is accessibility? If I don't know what it is, it can't be important, and therefore we don't need it." I can't tell you how many requirements meetings I've been in where I am the lone voice of introducing accessibility concerns as a business requirement. Don't even get me started on multi-language capabilities. That's one for another day. I find it very odd that it is so difficult to even get people talking seriously about making websites easily accessible to those who are visually impaired. It isn't rocke...