I recently got an email with a brilliant little fairytale about how to trick people into happily giving you all their money. I wanted to share with you, but it was in Dutch, and the origin was cleary not the original author. Today I was rummaging around the internet to see if I could find the original author, and I …

A lot of great ideas start in the heads of creative minds. Unbound by budgets, planning, and customers, these ideas are passed around, and some of them turn into projects. As soon as companies and managers get involved in realizing great ideas which are not really theirs, things can go very wrong. The least that can …

Just to get this out of my system, I'll tell you what I think of the current crisis in the monetary system. It starts off with a fictional story, and explains why we need to get rid of the monetary system, and why you should have physical gold in your safe. Suppose I have a nice big bar of gold, sitting in my very safe …

The past week, I've heard some collegues talking about tweaking websites so that they will show up in Google search results. A lot of people actually try to figure out how to "fool" the Google search engine, and actually make a living writing books about it. The strange thing is, that a lot of people want to …

As Seth Godin pointed out, "Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter." Just to let you know, all my mail is hand typed, including the _"Kind Regards" _and my name at the end. You may find it silly, but I think it shows that you care. I always …

...can and will be used against you. I got an email with a great link to a blog post containing 2 links to great presentations on why you should never talk to the police, even if you're honest, or want to help, or have an alibi, or whatever. Never, ever answer any questions, no matter how trivial. Although this is an …

For those of you who think that media and information are free and uncontroled, guess again. Lately I have been seeing more and more incidents of large corporations hiding information, and even telling other people to hide it for them. I think this is plain wrong, and the guys involved should have been fired or …

Some developers nowadays still think that putting an exclamation mark in their log entries adds to the visibility of their entry. When other developers notice this, they will add even more exclamation marks so their log entries are even more visible. I compiled a few examples of bad log entries and some pointers for …

Like any good software company, when a project starts, we sit down with the client, and talk about what we can do to help. The result is usually a more or less complete SRS (Software Requirement Specification). The SRS serves as input to the design fase (we usually already have an architecture sketch when the SRS is …

As you may know, Norton and Symantec were originally rivals in the anti-virus software market. Then, Norton bought Symantec and the two anti-virus products merged into Norton Anti Virus. Yes, I know, I'm talking PC here. Bare with me on this one. If you are the "you do something with computers, don't you?" free …