Google Visualisation API

This API has some excellent potential - we have recently started using Google Sites as an extranet platform, as it works well in a multi office environment and damn easy to use and update.

A nifty feature of Google Sites is that you can plug in Google gadgets anywhere throughout the site, which was nice. But now that I've seen these gadgets, it's not just nice, it's FANTASTIC! Pick a graph type, give it an XML feed and away you go.

The Gantt charts will be nifty for scheduling. I can just spit out a feed from my task system. Org charts so everyone knows their place. Gauges and pie charts and heat maps.... oh my!

Excuse me while I go and calm myself down.

Innovation with James Gosling

The Sydney Morning Herald had an excellent article this morning on James Gosling - the principal creator of Java.

The Gosling creed

• Reward risk and don't penalise failure.
• Innovation is about risk and thinking that risk and failure are good things.
• You have to learn to trust crazy people. It's the people on the edge that have the most interesting, insightful comments.
• Have confidence in yourself. People you think are oracles of wisdom - they're just making it up.
• Listen carefully, and try to figure out what the problem is to solve.

Test Driven Development

Steve from the Newcastle coders group did a informative session on test driven development on Wednesday night - and used Eclipse with JUnit to develop some unit tests. Was good to check out eclipse, and interesting to see his methods of testing.

In fact - I'm now beginning to take the following perspective...