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The subjects' levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to stress, was tested before and after the interaction. The researchers conclude that, when in the presence of a desirable female, the average male's production of cortisol shoots up by roughly the same amount as it would if he were in the process of jumping from an airplane.

Programmers love to work long hours! There I said it, c'mon admit it, your job/boss doesn't make you do it, we do it to ourselves. Alright, I'll concede, maybe not all programmers love long hours, but surely with the amount of overtime that is prevalent in this industry at least half of us must love it. Right?

I can hear the excuses already. "No, no that's not it, we just love working with cool tech and don't want to leave a problem unsolved. It is actually a good thing it's what makes us awesome!"

I’ve learned to look for the intent behind behavior that I don’t understand. What could Apple’s intent have been in having Mr. Chen’s house searched in the manner it was? The explanation that makes sense to me is that they wanted to intimidate anyone who was thinking about writing about Apple “secrets”. The course of justice doesn’t demand what they caused to happen. They were looking for effect, is how I read it.

Here’s where it starts to affect my life–what if I figure out something about Apple next “big thing”, purely legitimately? Am I going to write about it? Well, if it’s me I probably will because 1) I’m clueless about what’s going to upset people (obviously) and 2) I hate people telling me what to do. I’d certainly think about it, though. What if Apple took umbrage at what I wrote? Josephine County sheriffs would be battering down my door in no time, and there’s nothing I could do about it. I don’t like that feeling.

My conclusion is that Apple has read too many of its own press releases and thinks the world should run for its benefit. I expect more boorish behavior and increasing alienation from the needs of customers and developers. That’s too bad, because I like my Apple products.

Lala is shutting down The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Unfortunately, we are no longer accepting new users.

College works on the factory model, and is in many ways not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student and out comes a scholar.

Amazon has started rolling out the 2.5 software update for Kindle and Kindle DX to a small group of users — a broad release planned for “late May 2010″ — and boy does it bring a lot of goodies.

Perhaps the most notable new feature is the ability to share book passages with friends on Twitter () and Facebook () directly from your Kindle. Sure, the Kindle may not have a flashy color screen, but it doesn’t mean you can’t access your social networks from it. The list of main improvements in the 2.5 update is as follows:

• Collections: Organize your books and documents into one or more collections.
• PDF Pan and Zoom: Zoom into PDFs and pan around to easily view small print and detailed tables or graphics.
• Password Protection: Password protect your Kindle when you’re not using it.
• More Fonts & Improved Clarity: Enjoy two new larger font sizes and sharper fonts for an even more comfortable reading experience.
• Facebook & Twitter Posts: Share book passages with friends on Facebook and Twitter directly from your Kindle.
• Popular Highlights: See what the Kindle community thinks are the most interesting passages in the books you’re reading.

As always, there’s nothing you need to do to receive this update; when the update is ready, it will automatically be delivered to your Kindle.

Yes, iTunes (and all other Windows software Apple ships) is the Flash of the Windows platform (other than, uh, Flash itself, obviously).

Holier-than-thou, an adjective, meaning "marked by an air of superior piety or morality". Everybody has moments in their life where they get into a "holier-than-thou" attitude, and I think Steve Jobs' open letter regarding Adobe, and Flash in particular, really fits the bill. There are three specific points I want to address to illustrate just how holier-than-thou, hypocritical, and misleading this letter really is.

Jobs' letter contains a lot of good points. Flash is indeed a very problematic piece of software; its performance is terrible (although 10.1 improves this), it's riddled with security issues, and it's highly unstable. It crashes a lot, eats CPU, and to boot, opens up your machine to all sorts of security nastiness. To make matters worse, it's proprietary and not a web standard in the true sense of the word.

That being said, Jobs' letter is incredibly two-faced, hypocritical, and very misleading. It's clearly a marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers, and while that's okay (they're in it to make money, after all), it's our job to remove that wool from our eyes. Just as we geeks immediately understand Microsoft's ulterior motive in licensing patents to Linux/Android vendors, we should not just accept Jobs' words either.

There are three points I wish to address specifically to illustrate just how hypercritical the letter is: Carbon, H264, and iTunes on Windows (or iTunes' non-existence on Linux). The order is entirely random, and there's no deeper meaning behind it.

REGISTRATION VERIFICATION Precinct Finder

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DISCLAIMER:

Data is based on the submissions of our field election offices after the 16 November 2009 ERB hearing. If you applied for registration last December 21, 22, 23, 28 and 29, 2009 your record is not yet included here.

The majority of Android phones are still running an outdated firmware, but that hasn’t slowed Google from advancing their mobile operating system. Everyone knows the next version of Android (codenamed Froyo) is on the way and the rumors (1, 2) are beginning to pick up that the Nexus One will receive it soon.

Based on the data from our analytics reports it appears Google has already begun testing on their next firmware – Android 2.2. Google engineers have routinely given codenames to future builds of Android (Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, etc.), but they don’t receive a point release till they are finalized and nearing distribution.

You want to make a good investment in your people, and you know they need training, but when you invest thousands of dollars in courses without giving your people the slack they need to apply what they learn, you’re just being cruel.

Now granted, you don’t mean to act cruelly, but you have to take responsibility for the fact that when you give someone a chance to learn, but not to practise, you not only waste their time, but you tear down morale. Some of your people will even interpret your move as shallow, transparent appeasement. I’ve seen it, and I’ve felt it.

Let me explain.

First, let me start with a diagram that you absolutely need to know. I didn’t invent it, and I have definitely simplified it, but I believe I’ve kept its essence intact. This diagram graphs productivity against time as we learn a new skill.

When you provide your people training, you start them off at the beginning of this graph, with whatever productivity level they have in that area. If you wanted to train your people in design techniques, or a new programming language, or a new programming platform, then you could interpret the productivity level in terms of features delivered per week. If you wanted to train your people in negotiation techniques and interpersonal communication, then you could interpret the productivity level in terms of complaints about others, fights, or the general quality of discourse you perceive in meetings and during daily work. However you choose to interpret this graph, it works out the same for just about any measure of productivity. Before training, your people find themselves at the far left, at some baseline level of productivity.

After training, your people start to incorporate what they learned into their work. As they practise, they learn to execute the new techniques correctly, with uneven results. Once they become comfortable with the basics, they exhibit some improvement, but over weeks or months, they reach the first plateau. At this point, they have learned most of what they will learn from the first set of ideas and techniques they try.

Next, they incorporate some more of what they learned into their work. This time, their productivity decreases for a while as the new techniques they try clash with what they already know. During this time, they don’t know which techniques work best in which situations, so sometimes they choose well, and other times they choose poorly. They generally struggle integrating the new ideas and techniques into their work. Eventually they reach a point where the new techniques begin to mesh well with what they know, they see new benefits that they didn’t see before, their confidence improves, and their productivity resumes its increase, past their previous highest level, on to higher levels than they’d experienced before. This continues until they reach the next plateau, then the cycle begins again: struggle, bottom out, improve, plateau. This cycle continues indefinitely… unless you get in their way.

Saboteur? You?

I’ve seen two major categories of errors that managers make when they encourage their people to develop new skills: giving them no slack to learn, and panicking when they bottom out the first time. You might not realize you do these things, so watch for them, because I routinely see otherwise thoughtful, intelligent managers ruin potentially game-changing improvement programs by doing one of these two things. Let me clarify what I mean.

I’m going to tell you a story

I remember when I first tried to use the Getting Things Done system to manage my own work. I spent dozens of hours creating projects, contexts, and next actions. I think my first task review took an entire day, as I questioned at every step how to review tasks “correctly”. I also remember spending plenty of time learning to use first iGTD, then later OmniFocus, struggling with how to synchronize tasks with my calendar, and generally feeling my way around the system. I remember mechanically clipping parts of email into an OmniFocus task, creating a project for it, then responding to the email and marking the OmniFocus project as “completed”. I remember thinking that this couldn’t possibly improve my effectiveness, as it now takes a handful of steps simply to reply to an email, when it used to take only one. Still, I knew that unless I practised the steps, I’d never manage to execute them deftly, so I invested the time I needed to practise. For that, I needed to build some slack into my schedule.

Building slack into my schedule meant disappointing some people. It meant letting some revenue-realizing activities slip. I invoiced clients later, I paid bills slightly after they came due, and I turned down some opportunities to market myself that would surely have resulted in an increase in sales. I knew I had to do this, because if I didn’t improve how well I executed the work I needed to do, I would never clear the ever-lengthening backlog I had to complete. (Before you comment, I did consider throwing away the bottom 80% of my backlog, and could manage to throw away only about 20%. This helps you understand how far behind I fell in completing this work.) Even in a desperate situation, with wolves knocking at the door, I invested the time I needed to learn how to work more effectively, because if I hadn’t, then I would have continued struggling while even bigger, more ferocious wolves found me and knocked longer and louder.

Turning the first corner

Over several weeks, I noticed the first hint of what Getting Things Done promises: the feeling of having a trusted system that helps you ensure you do whatever you need to do. I started to see tasks show up a week after I’d added them, because they started to come due. Unfortunately, while I saw some early wins, I feel into a deeper trap: due dates. Knowing the urgency of my backlog items, I’d set tentative due dates for the vast majority of the tasks that I felt I needed to complete within two months. Naturally, since I had a blind spot for identifying all the tasks I needed to complete a project, that meant I had hundreds of tasks with due dates, averaging about fifteen per day. Every day when I looked at that list, I felt defeated, but I tried to soldier on. I fell into a rut of completing about five tasks, while deferring five more to “three days from now” (or worse, Friday) and, at the end of the day, pushing the last five to the next day. Within two weeks I went back to bed, feeling depressed about having over 40 “urgent” tasks to complete in a single day. It seemed hopeless.

At this point, I could have filed for temporal bankruptcy, abandoned Getting Things Done, thrown away the task list I’d spent dozens of hours crafting, and wallowed in my own inability to make progress on my backlog. I had some serious deadlines looming, which then passed, and I began to suffer so much from the stress of the wolves at my door that I reach my wit’s end. I could have simply quit, and for a while, I did.

Summoning the courage to try again

After a few weeks of fighting fire after fire, interspersed with hours spent in a mild vegetative state in front of the TV, I resolved to try again. I had read a great article about why high achievers procrastinate, and it resonated with me. At the same time, I ended up spending a week at my wife’s family cottage, re-reading Getting Things Done, then reading The Four Hour Work Week. Armed with more information, more ideas, and renewed enthusiasm, I cracked open OmniFocus, performed a thorough task review, threw away 90% of my due dates, and moved most of the projects into “Someday” and “Maybe” folders. This took over six hours spread over two days. After I got back to the office and resumed completing tasks, I noticed how much more I felt in control of my work. Within a month I had made more progress on my backlog than I had in at least two years. I felt better, but noticed a new problem: due dates started sneaking up on me.

Into the abyss once more

Since I had stopped setting due dates for most tasks, I found that some due dates began sneaking up on me. Some deadlines blew right past me. I felt a momentary and mild depressive state as I wondered whether I had chosen incorrectly in removing all the due dates. I read some more, thought some more, and performed another very thorough task review. After a week I decided to experiment with adding due dates only when I absolutely knew the date on which a task came due, then measure the results. I would occasionally agonize during a task review about whether I needed to put a due date on a certain task. Sometimes I decided in a few seconds, and sometimes it took me fifteen minutes, because I didn’t want to do this mindlessly. I needed to avoid falling back into the old habit of deferring tasks that had due dates, but didn’t really need doing by that date. I needed not to see 40 tasks due on a Friday ever again. I persisted and, since then, I gladly report that I get good results from my use of Getting Things Done: I still have the occasional hiccup with a due date sneaking up on me, but it happens once every couple of months. For the most part, I do what needs doing and aggressively look for ways to delegate what others could capably do for me. Services like Your Man in India and elance.com help me with that. I still have things to learn, but I’ve reached a pretty comfortable plateau where my productivity level appears to have matched my current workload.

And then…?

So why did I tell you that story? I hope to demonstrate the power of having slack to apply what you learn when you learn it, and the power of not panicking when things start to go wrong. Specifically, I have this advice for you:

• If you plan to provide training to your people, you need also to provide about 20% slack time for them to practise what they learn.
• If you cannot provide your people with 20% slack time, then do not schedule any training yet. Instead, figure out how to get them the slack time they need.
• If you have currently scheduled training for your people and they won’t have the slack time they need to practise what they will learn, then balance the cost of canceling the training against the cost of getting them that slack time between now and when the training will begin.
• After your people complete their training, work with them to build a charter related to the way they will use what they learn. This consists of a time-boxed experiment with a single measure of progress and a single goal related to that measure.
• When you choose the length of time for your time-boxed experiment, make sure make it long enough to get past the first bottoming-out phase working towards the second plateau.
• When your people show that they continue to struggle even half-way through the experiment, don’t panic! Trust the system, and maintain your commitment to invest in the entire experiment. Continue to measure progress, and make sure to check in with your people frequently and regularly, but whatever you do, don’t panic.

If you’d like to learn how to help your team adopt new practices effectively, schedule a private course with J. B. During your initial conversations with him, he will walk you through chartering how your people will use what he teaches them, help you figure out how to give them the slack time they need, and even give you tips on how not to panic.

Incompetence is the cause of many ills in the software world, but increasingly I’m seeing a certain kind of competence as being just as destructive. You see, there are a lot of programmers who care deeply about their code. I did, but it turns out there are good reasons we shouldn’t do that; reasons why we should hate our code…

"She looks like she’s judging me for not being able to type in the proper URL." -- one of the comments

Why was the Symbian Foundation founded? Here is our reasoning.

The industry faces enormous opportunities and challenges

• Smart mobile devices are becoming astonishingly powerful. With connections to increasingly sophisticated networks, they promise ever more innovative new applications and services
• Industries such as media, gaming, banking, retail, travel, health, journalism, education, data processing and government (…the list goes on) have seen the potential, and are rapidly developing new uses for mobile devices
• The increasing complexity of mobile devices makes them more difficult to manufacture and program, more difficult to use and reduces their battery life
• Open devices on open networks could endanger privacy and security

By involving more people, more of these opportunities can be addressed

• The number of smart and capable people outside an organisation always far exceeds the number on the inside
• Freely available standard programming interfaces are an important first step to involving more people - but they only go so far
• Freely available source code, that is open to modification and experiment, enables deeper and more substantial collaboration: collaboration in the evolution and refinement of the platform itself, rather than application development on top

The Symbian platform has a unique legacy

The Symbian platform is already a robust, cohesive, well proven, high-performance software system, whose scope covers the complete needs of mobile developers - from the metal, via extensive middleware, to applications and UIs. This stable base is an excellent starting point for further improvement.
Many key personnel within the Symbian Foundation and the founding organisations have more than a decade of Symbian experience. The Foundation has battle-hardened skills in:

• Roadmap design and execution
• Managing software interfaces, platform compatibility, and rapid integration
• Dealing simultaneously with disparate powerful customers having divergent interests
• Mixing agile and modular development with overall architectural integrity
• Overnight builds, codeline management and quality gate-keeping

The road ahead

We’ve made a strong start by opening the Symbian platform source code four months ahead of schedule, but the road ahead is likely to contain pot-holes. To help us keep our footing, the following principles will be our guidelines:

• Practice not just open source but also open decision making and open governance. In this way we can benefit from the best ideas, and retain the maximum goodwill and trust from the entire community
• Aim to build bridges and overcome divisions. We must find ways to work with potential partners who have different outlooks, motivations and business models
• Value and respect developers. It is developers who provide the creative energy and insight to craft and re-craft the products that meet end-users' needs on every level
• Seek to engage the heart as well as the head. We must ignite and sustain intelligent passion to fulfil our vision of "freedom to create"

Read the FAQs

Kindlefeeder is a service for Amazon Kindle owners that lets you aggregate your favorite feeds and have them delivered to your Kindle in a convenient, easy-to-navigate format. Kindlefeeder also lets you save individual webpages and have them delivered to your Kindle along with your feeds.

Kindlefeeder offers a free basic and a paid unlimited service. Click here to learn more.

Kindlefeeder will never send any unsolicited content to your Kindle or your email address.

JNI has been part of the Java platform since the JDK 1.1 release and was extended in the JDK 1.2 release. The JDK 1.0 release included an earlier native-method interface that lacked clean separation between native and Java code. In this interface, natives would reach directly into JVM structures and so could not be portable across JVM implementations, platforms, or even versions of the JDK. Upgrading an application with a substantial number of natives using the JDK 1.0 model was expensive, as was developing natives that could run with multiple JVM implementations.

The introduction of JNI in the JDK 1.1 release allowed:

• Version independence
• Platform independence
• VM independence
• Development of third-party class libraries

It is interesting to note that younger languages such as PHP are still struggling with these issues with respect to their support of native code.