Andrew MacNeill - AKSEL Solutions

Adam has a great post about how managers can take what many perceive as a weakness and turn it into a strength. His point is that if you consider a weakess is likely that the user is overdoing something, "which means that the person actually possesses a strength that they are just overdoing. Take away the overdoing and presto, what's left is a strength." It only goes so far certainly - we are talking about personality traits (what quality is a developer who writes buggy code overdoing?). I'm not so sure what the long term effects of promoting a weakness might be, but it is an interesting idea. Do you have a weakness that you can "flip" into a strength? Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: Leverage Your Weakness FoxPro VFP

This is a great 4 minute review of how social networking is changing the world...Some of the stats are pretty incredible to think about. I've been off Twitter and FB for a while now but using LinkedIn and VisualCV when looking for contract work. What was interesting was that one of the recruiters I was talking to was starting to get into the habit of using LinkedIn for searching for people. I'm sure in the US and other areas, this has pretty much already happened for recruiters months and years ago. What's different here though, is that these are federal government recruiters - one demographic that has not really embraced social media (at least in Canada). At any rate, very interesting and well-done presentation. Still think corporate participation in Social Media is optional? - Skrocki's Blog

I use gMail and just received an email asking for information regarding account currency. This is a major scam. Although this is being reported, immediate Google searches aren't turning up anything. The emails are sent from verifyscess@googledesk.com and is cc'ing a "Gmail Team" address at accessaccount10@gmail.com. Do NOT be fooled - this is most definitely a scam. Gmail Scam Warning Code:VX2G99AAJ

FoxPro developer Peter Hart has started a blog to showcase his learnings when working with the Arg Command Bars library. CommandBars is a fantastic library for FoxPro developers that replicates the Office command menus beautifully. Peter shows how it goes even further now with support for the Office 2007 interface. Great place to learn how to use this tool even further from my video below:   earlier videos . FoxPro VFP

Craig has some great reviews of the recent DevLinks days in his area but this post caught my eye: DevBlog: DevLink Day 2 Why? Two reasons: 1) This comment: "Concepts such as what kinds of comments and how many are important. It turns out that most comments in code aren't needed. If you write self-documenting code, even fewer are needed." Those who attended my sessions at last year's SWFox heard me state this numerous times in my session on Code Analyst - even to the point where it appeared I was suggesting getting rid of comments entirely. In a recent project, though, it became even clearer - I only needed comments to bookmark where I may need to do future work. Self-documenting code is essential to maintainable code - and while having methods like GetPubishingAcronymForABookTitle goes into overkill of how to name a method, naming your methods right is important regardless of the language. On the other side of the coin, one of the tools used in a recent project was a...

Change is never easy. I've been using Newsgator for several years now (even bought it when it was a commercial user tool) and have loved seeing it move from an upstart newsreader (congrats Greg!) to a great enterprise tool. When Google Reader came along, I still continued to use Newsgator mostly for the great Newsgator Go (or mobile) version. I loved being able to read feeds on my phone without having to go online every time. Sadly today, in my inbox, I received word that they are no longer going to support these tools for consumer use after August 31st. Now I have to move all of the great clips (another great feature of Newsgator) to another reader. I don't mind Google Reader but I will really miss not having it on my Windows mobile device. That said, it may convince me to look at other phones now that one of my main reasons for staying away from the iPhone and others was NewsGator Go. To their credit, Newsgator is providing some great transition tips encouraging users to move...

dev{shaped} » Book has compiled a list of various developer-oriented posts (and comics) and put them into a creative commons book called Developers, developers, developers. It covers specific development topics (like continuous integration and language wars) to career advice (remaining valuable) and up and coming concepts. Plus it has a handful of very funny comics. Sure, you can read a lot of these posts online - but now you can either a)buy it or b) download it in PDF.