IMAP Released for GMail

Finally, IMAP is available for free on GMail.

It was only released within the last few days and is still being rolled out to everyone.

Here is the official word.

Great Mistakes in Technical Leadership

Came across this article on Hacknot.

It's worth a read.

From the article:

A Technical Lead lacking in self-confidence can be a major frustration to their team. They may find themselves waiting on the Lead to make decisions that significantly effect their work, but find that there is some reticence or unwillingness to make a firm decision. Particularly when new in the role, some Technical Leads find it difficult to make decisions in a timely manner, for they are paralyzed by the fear of making that decision incorrectly. Troubled that a bad decision will make them look foolish, they vacillate endlessly between the alternatives, while their team mates are standing by wondering when they are going to be able to move forward.

I'm online with Plugoo

I've just added Plugoo to my blog and gave it a test run last night. What a cool idea!

Thanks to Plugoo, visitors on your webpage, friends or family, can easily chat with you while visiting your website!

Plugoo enables you to chat directly from your Instant Messenger with any visitor of your blog, personal webpage or e-sales site.

When you’re logged into your Instant Messenger (Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, GoogleTalk, Jabber or ICQ), you can receive in real time all the comments of your visitors or any question they might ask, and answer instantly!

It's very easy to sign up and get it working on your website or blog. If you are reading this from my blog directly rather than a feed reader, make sure you say hello!

Google Apps includes presentations

Google have just released another application to add to their Doc & Spreadsheet Google App suite called presentations.

As far as I can see, Google have recreated Microsoft Office online. Well done Google!

• Word = Documents
• Excel = Spreadeheets
• Outlook = Calendar + Gmail + todo
• PowerPoint = Presentations

The rest of the Office suite doesn't matter. No one uses it anyway!

I wonder how long it will be before businesses will starting using Google Apps in earnest?

Mingle Roadmap

There are a few nice things coming our way in Mingle before Christmas. This pdf shows a roadmap at a glance. I'm particularly interesting in parent-child card relationships and CruiseControl integration both of which I'll need to wait until v1.2 scheduled to be release in December.

However, there are plenty goodies in version 1.1 that will keep me interested in the meantime such as card printing, enhanced transitions and date properties to allow card scheduling.

It's not surprising that the Mingle development team use Mingle themselves and here is a picture of their current card wall for release planning.

Of all these goodies, I'm still concerned about the memory use of MingleServer.exe. It seems to take up a huge amount of memory which I understood was to be fixed in the RTM release. If anyone out these knows how to make this memory use any better, I'm all ears.

Shared Posts

I've starting using Google Reader in earnest now and one of its features is the ability to share items on my blog from feeds that I read. Basically, I act like an aggregator for the items that I think are worth sharing.

This is separate from my blog feed so if you are interested, you can subscribe to my shared items list list using this feed ,or you can see it on the homepage of my blog.

Recent Comments Widget

Came across this cool gadget that allows you to add recent comments to your Blogger sidebar.

Very easy to install and configure. Download it here

While you're at it, you should check out the other widgets from this site.