On this day - some twenty years ago - November 10th, 1983, Microsoft Windows was announced – it should be on the shelves April 1984. It didn’t make it there until November 20, 1985, that first Windows 1.0 was on the street.

While project management often focuses on management of the processes, information management and other work issues, one of the most important areas often overlooked IMHO is the physical environment and how it may improve efficiency of the project workers.

Joel Spolsky just moved is company to a new office and spent some time to figure out how to improve “developer workspaces”.

It quite an interesting read.

It seems it’s going surprisingly well for java after a rough birth and slow adoption. This year on the JavaOne conference they celebrated the success by changing their logo and launching a new end-user oriented portal at java.com. If you’re developer, your source for information is still at java.sun.com.

I don’t know how many (Internet development) projects I’ve been on, but it’s quite a lot through the years. One thing happening over and over again is that all the ambitious goals of the project isn’t quite reached before the launch – and something is either cut short or not quite as polished as it should have been. Lately I’ve been wondering weather this is the right approach. Many of the things you leave out when the deadline starts getting closer is “the finishing touch” – this is especially true for back-ends and other invisible details everywhere. Last time I changed this site, I didn’t get to write a back-end for “site maintenance” where all those things driven by databases – figuring I could do it later – and loaded the initially needed data into the database. I did never get on to write the backend – instead I got used to maintaining the database contents from a mysql client and moved on to doing other little projects.

To write efficient Mysql-powered applications a little insight in how Mysql works is needed. One often overlooked example of this is Mysqls silent column changes features, which may cause your tables to look different than you specified. I’m sure most people know, that using chars is generally faster than varchars, but did you know that Mysql may actually change your char-columns to varchars? This happens if you have a variable length column in a table (ie. one varchar and two chars in a table causes all to be converted varchars). You can find more on the automatic column conversions in the Mysql manual.