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Svein-Magnus Sørensens business blog
November 28, 2009
Category: Business
Experiencing Defrag 2009
Now if you'd like to start off by getting an impression of what went on during the conference before I get into my analysis, then go have a look at the Defrag 2009 liveblog that Graeme Thickins did throughout the event. Another good starting point is to look at the twitter-talk that took place with the #defrag and #defragcon hash-tags, which is all documented at Defrag's EventVue page. Finally there is a guerilla video stream covering most of the conference that were being created and put online by ReussDesign. My talk on open data was also filmed by Reuss and can be found about 12 minutes into the recording titled "Defrag Conference Clip 4". Continue reading...Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 22:20
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google October 6, 2009 Category: Computing Getting around the real name length limit in Twitter
Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 18:46
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google September 6, 2009 Category: Chocolate Three special kinds of chocolate
Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 22:44
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google March 18, 2009 Category: Business Learning to Fly!
Since the lectures of Stig are truly amazing, there is no substitute to attending one yourself. However I that is not an option for everybody, so while you might not learn to fly without actually being there I'll recap the highlights of his creative methods and some of his amazing stories here to try and give you at least a bit of air under your wings. Also remember that if this leaves you wanting more, then you can always buy Stig's books (in Norwegian) or even hire the man himself for a lecture or workshop. The stories he spin about his life with creativity are just incredible, and if you believe him mostly true as well. They include everything from practical tips on idea-generation to stories about inspired new ways of doing business, and how just being curious and doing things differently can be a powerful force in itself. Continue reading...Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 22:08
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google March 4, 2009 Category: Chocolate The Makings of a Taste - Fine Chocolate for Beginners (Part 2)
Read it? Good. Now lets take you to the next level. As you may have guessed yourself, the taste of a chocolate-bar is not only dependent on the declared ingredients on the back, but also very much on quality differences in both the cocoa-beans themselves, and even more so by the processing they are put through. So lets get into the chocolate production process from pod to bar to give you a understanding of how it all fits together, so that finally we can explain why some chocolates are so much better than others. First a quick recap: Chocolate production begins with harvesting ripe cacao pods which are opened and emptied to extract the seeds and pulp. This mass is then fermented for up to a week until the pulp have disappeared, leaving only the seeds which are then dried for shipment to chocolate-makers around the world. There the beans are roasted and shelled to separate out the cocoa nibs, which can then finally be milled and refined into a liquid cocoa mass, the basis of all chocolate as we know it: cocoa-liquor. Whew, that was quick. If you couldn't follow me through all of that then have a look at how chocolate is made for additional details. Now lets dig into the details to see how all of this combines to affect the final taste of a chocolate bar. Continue reading...Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google January 21, 2009 Category: Business Creativity in Organizations
Well, not so according to Swedes Göran Erikson, initiator of Better Working Life, and Mats Birgerson, former CEO of the ventilation systems manufacturer Fresh AB that has proved such changes to be possible. Their theory is that motivation and productivity are directly influenced by the creativity of employees, and that the keys to fostering an improved and more creative working environment is to accommodate freedom, understanding, participation and contributions at all levels of an organization. Under their management they have successfully implemented a range of changes to this effect in dozens of organizations across Norway and Sweden. Fresh AB did for instance, despite the ventilation-industry having a negative market development, go from beeing an apparently doomed business heading towards bankruptcy, to having a 50% productivity increase per employee that allowed a tripling of their staff and being named among the top 25 employers in Europe in less than five years. This amazing achievement and the ideas they presented are certainly very intriguing, and many of them are absolutely worth their salt. I can myself vouch for the advantages of several of the changes they suggested as I have personally experienced them in action at my former employer. For me it was both motivating and inspiring to work in a culture of responsible freedom and mutual respect, and I believe that this applied to most of my co-workers as well. But how exactly does one create such an environment? Below I've compiled an overview of some of the ways to go about this that was mentioned in the lecture. Continue reading...Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google January 7, 2009 Category: Knowledge Management Improving folksonomies with tag-typing
The presentation rapidly convinced me of the potential usefulness of having a distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' tags for semi-structured data like program code, but I sensed that the concept could be put to even better uses elsewhere. A rather obvious application for this would be to improve the currently popular approach of single level folksonomy or social tagging, like that which is used on YouTube, Flickr and Del.icio.us amongst others. By separating the tags used to describe items on such services into multiple logical groups, one will immediately get an extra level of semantics for searching or filtering the otherwise unstructured data. This should make the tagging systems of such services a lot more powerful and useful than they currently are, especially in providing better findability for items and more descriptive search-results on the service. It is however apparent that a clear limitation to the potential of tag-typing hinge on which selection strategies are used to decided on which logical tag-groups to include. A first impulse could be to continue with the successful crowdsourcing used in the original folksonomy tagging, and simply let the users themselves assign the tag-groups. While tempting, I believe that this would not alleviate the current trend of non-semantic tags and neither provide any particular advantages, so in this case going towards the other extreme of semantic taxonomies appears to be more suitable. But while semantic taxonomies are generally considered very advantageous over folksonomy tagging, a major downside is that they are often overly complex and thus can be very demanding to work with, especially for amateurs. To alleviate this I instead propose using a professionally selected, limited set of tag-types, and combine these with folksonomy tagging within each type. This way one can get the best of both worlds by obtaining a modicum of semantic meaning from the tag-types, while at the same time providing the freedom of independent crowd-sourced tagging as we already know it. On which tag-types to expect I would suggest that images for instance should have separate tag-types to describe its actual contents, its context, any persons depicted and perhaps its intended usage and any special techniques used to create it. With the addition of such tag-types the accuracy of an advanced search on Flickr or iStockPhoto would most certainly improve greatly. The big open question then is if this is an actual feasible technique, or if there are a bunch of reasons for why this wouldn't work as I have proposed here. Please enlighten me if you have any thoughts or experiences about this, as I feel that a system such as this could be a suitable next step towards a more semantic web. Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 19:13
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google December 4, 2008 Category: Chocolate Sjokolade i Oslo
Akkurat det siste er litt merkelig, for etterhvert som jeg har blitt godt kjent med sjokolademarkedet i Oslo har jeg funnet en rekke gode butikker her, fler enn i de fleste andre Norske byer. Dette illustreres godt ved denne fristende artikkelserien hos Oslopuls om de mange sjokoladebutikkene som finnes i byen. Jeg går derfor med planer om å registrere disse på ChocoMap når jeg får tid, men travel som jeg er blir det nok ikke med det første. Enn så lenge får jeg derfor nøye meg med å anbefale mitt eget kart hos Google Maps som heter "Sjokolade i Oslo". Dette kartet har en oversikt over så godt som alle forretninger og kafeer i byen som jeg vet at fører god sjokolade, så jeg håper dette kan være en super ressurs for de som befinner seg i Oslo og lurer på hvor de kan kjøpe seg noe ekstra godt. Merk dog at dette ikke er noe jeg har brukt mye tid på, så det er helt sikkert både butikker som mangler og andre feil på kartet. Jeg blir derfor veldig glad hvis du sier ifra til meg om de feilene du finner, eller best av alt om du har lyst å hjelpe til med å vedlikeholde kartet! Samtidig vil jeg også nevne et annet kart jeg har laget: "Aktiviteter rundt Bygdøy & Skøyen" som er en oversikt over alle matbutikker, restauranter og andre steder som kan være interessante for beboere langs Karenslyst Allè og andre som ofte befinner seg i dette området. Håper dette også kan være til nytte for noen :-) Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 18:47
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google December 2, 2008 Category: Computing Updated Gravatar plugin for Movable Type 3.x
However I still wanted users to get neat avatars next to their comments, and the easiest way I found to do this was to add support for the Gravatar user-pic service and Favicons to my comment-listings. Adding them was very straightforward as there are ready made Movable Type plugins for both, except of course that neither of the Gravatar-plugins worked. *Sigh* That leaves the option of hacking the plugin! Yay! With no plugin-documentation to be found and me never having toyed with MT-plugins before, the task naturally stumped me a bit at first. However I figured out soon enough how to get it working, so for anyone else having the same problem I hereby present you with the updated Movable Type 3.3 Gravatar plugin! Enjoy :-) And now all that remains is for my readers to get their own Gravatars. Go fetch! Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 10:33
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google November 21, 2008 Category: Computing Fixes for slow browsing in Windows Explorer
Apparently many people are having problems with Windows Explorer being slow, and for a host of different reasons too. Most commonly I found the obvious suggestions to run windows update, antivirus, antispyware, defrag and chkdisk, as this will commonly fix the performance and many common issues that crop up on computers that are not kept and maintained by professionals. The next step is to improve performance by adjusting the Folder Options in Explorer. Good tips here are to disable the automatic search for network folders and printers, as well as using simple folder view and to not cache thumbnails. But it didn't make any difference and explorer was still just as slow afterwards. Then I downloaded and ran CCleaner to do a full systems checkup and registry cleaning, and I also removed all recent network paths from my "Network Neighbourhoood" as these things also appear to cause many slowdowns too. Still none of these suggestions made any difference. A thread at Google Answers hinted to NeroVision Express as a possible culprit, but I didn't have that installed of course. Finally I stumbled across a Techspot thread describing how you by logging in as a different administrator user and deleting the folder "c:\documents and settings\<username>\local settings\application data\microsoft\windows", can fix the problem of extremely slow browsing in Explorer, and this actually worked! Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 13:48
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google November 16, 2008 Category: Politics HTTP 503: President unavailable
It is really food for thought that the most powerful man on earth does not have the freedom to use the web as he likes or even to read his own email. Maybe then its not so strange that high-ranking politicians are becoming more and more disconnected from their electorate. On a different note Eirik referred me to some maps from StrangeMaps comparing the southern election-districts where Obama won with the cotton producing plantations in 1860. While not surprising, the overlap is certainly striking! Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 14:37
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google November 16, 2008 Category: Chocolate Fine chocolate for beginners (Part 1)
First things first: The wrapping. This is usually the only thing you have to go on when picking out chocolates at a regular store, so its naturally one of the things you must pay close attention to. It is well known that the branding and presentation of foods can have a great deal of influence on your perception of taste. This means that chocolates from a brand that is exquisitely wrapped or advertised to be a product of quality and luxury will often be a good buy, if only because the presentation will make you think it tastes better than the other brands. Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google November 15, 2008 Category: Business Pitching makes perfect
For those not familiar with the term, an "elevator pitch" is simply a short practiced speech that explains in an enticing way what you do during the time one usually spends in an elevator, often 30 seconds or less. And why an elevator in particular? Because it is based on the assumption that if you by chance should find yourself in the unique opportunity of being in an elevator with someone you badly want or need to talk to, having a prepared elevator pitch to present might pique the other persons interest enough for you to get a real meeting later, and with that a real chance to present your business or idea properly. That's not to say this is only applicable in elevators of course, as using it successfully in an elevator will likely be a very rare occurrence for most people. However it is also a very useful and efficient way to present yourself to new people in various other settings, for instance when people at a party ask what you do, or when you are presenting yourself at networking events. Having a good elevator pitch prepared in such situations lets you stand out and be interesting to the people you talk to, and lets you avoid having to say those conversation killing words: "I'm a consultant" So how do you prepare a good elevator pitch then? Well, like most things there is no single answer to how to make the perfect pitch, but good suggestions abound on the Internet so check out these resources:
Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 13:52
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Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google November 13, 2008 Category: Chocolate Discovering fine chocolate
This all changed in 2006 when I started traveling regularly to Brussels to visit my girlfriend living there. Flying down so often allowed me to thoroughly taste my way through all of the amazing chocolate-shops we came across on our travels around Belgium, and I got to try an amazing range of delicious pralines the like of which I could never have imagined, as well as the wide selection of Cote d'Or, Galler, Jacques and a host of other brands available in the grocery stores. But one day I came across something different, namely a set of three country-labeled chocolate bars in the display-window of a Neuhaus-shop. The label "Occumare Venezuela" especially piqued my interest, so I simply had to try one... Continue reading...Bookmark/Share • Email this • Reddit • Digg! • Stumble! • Technorati • Facebook • Linkedin • del.icio.us • Ma.gnolia • Google November 12, 2008 Category: Agile Smidig utvikling med PS2000
Veilederen er delvis delvis basert på pilot-erfaringene som er gjort i MATS-prosjektet der jeg selv har arbeidet i snart to år, hvor et stort team fra Computas arbeider med å utvikle et nytt enhetlig fagsystem for Mattilsynet. Avtalegrunnlaget for prosjektet er en standard PS2000-kontrakt hvor kunde og leverandør i fellesskap og med stor suksess har gått over til å benytte Scrum som arbeidsmetodikk for alle deler av prosjektet. I løpet av denne prosessen har mange erfaringer og tanker dannet seg her og på andre prosjekter rundt emnet smidig PS2000, og disse har blitt løpende presentert på en rekke konferanser, inkludert Smidig, Prosjekt og JavaZone, samt på andre møter og seminarer. Mine erfaringer fra dette og andre utviklingsprosjekter levner ingen tvil om at smidige og post-smidige metoder er veien å gå for å oppnå høyere kvalitet, måloppnåelse og effektivitet i de fleste typer utviklingsprosjekter. Sammenlignet med fossefall og andre tidligere metoder som i stor grad er basert på 'intelligent design' er smidige metoder mer Darwinistiske i sin tilnærming til problemene som skal løses. Dette gir systemutviklingen en mer naturlig flyt mot å oppfylle systemets faktiske krav og bruksområder, framfor å være begrenset til de løsningene man klarer å forutse på forhånd. Dette er virkelig et stort steg videre for systemutvikling som en prosess, og ennå har vi ikke engang begynt å snakke om automatisk programmering... :-) Posted by Svein-Magnus Sørensen at 22:18
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