Outlook and Thunderbird are two examples of programs that aren't laptop ready. The reason being that the SMTP setup is fixed. Most SMTP servers have IP whitelists, meaning that only a few, known IP addresses are allowed to send mail through them. Therefore, the SMTP server that is used should vary with my current IP address which changes all the time.
Apple Mail solved this problem - if an SMTP server rejects the connection, it will try the next known SMTP server until a connection is accepted.

I am quick to tell developers off if they seem too attached to a metaphor. In this case however, the mail metaphor actually works really well. You have a personal mail box where mail sent to you ends up. And then you have the mail boxes on the street corners for outgoing mail. Those are perfect analogues to POP3 and SMTP. Outlook uses the metaphor of an account where stuff enters and leaves, which means that an account knows about a POP3 server and an SMTP server.

By Kristian Dupont

Reading the danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten today, I felt like writing a blog entry in a category we rarely touch on this blog. That is, commenting on political issues in Denmark. I was quite surprised reading that a recent study showed that infants born in Denmark in the year 2008, would during their entire life end up costing society more than they contribute. Naturally a problem, especially considering that Denmark already has one of the highest income taxes in the world (up to around 62% depending on your total income).

According to the article politicians are faced with only 3 options, to overcome this lack of balance between national income and expenses.

1. Increase taxes       
2. Make people work longer
3. Cut budgets

Now, I would agree if the assumption of time spent working, directly affected the tax incomes at a fixed ratio. That certainly isn't the case. Let's try and shift the problem. Imagine if companies were able to become more profitable, they would then pay more taxes, hopefully to the benefit of the nation. All without picking any of the options above.

So what options do companies have at becoming more profitable?

1. Increase prices on products and services
2. Lower average employee salary
3. Layoffs

Not surprisingly it looks a lot like the list in the top. Also, it has the same built-in assumptions.

It seems like a common misunderstanding that there is a direct link between time spent and value created. Does people that work longer create more value? Maybe, but not necessarily. It obviously depends on what they spend their time on.

None of the options listed above are particular popular, as they all have negative impact somewhere. But as I see it there is at least one more option, which is far more interesting. I am surprised that it is really so hard to see, that we jump to conclusions on time and value being part of a fixed equation.

The Fourth Option: Do more with less.

Sounds impossible? It's not. You see, working is not a goal - if it was, we could all just be digging holes in the ground and once done, we could fill them again. Value creation is the goal and work just happens to be a necessity in the process of creating value. By focusing on maximizing work, we are not necessarily maximizing the value created. Have you ever considered that much of the work we do today could be as value-adding as digging holes in the ground? And if that is the case, we have a potentially of increasing value creation, without working longer hours.

It makes you wonder, if doing work is not the goal why do we spend so much time talking about lowering unemployment rates? Unemployment is cleary related only to whether people work or not? I personally wonder why this nation have something called The Ministry of Employment? It should be changed into The Ministry of Value Creation.

I think it's about time we change focus from working hard, to thinking hard. I bet we could work towards unleashing the abundant source of human creativity, and surely we can find ways to add more value to our customers, our society and ourselves without working longer hours.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

By Sune Gynthersen

When a softwareproject is about to finish, the most important task is to deliver the software into production. The goal of most projects is to create business value, and software that creates business value is by definition in production.

BestBrains often argue that this final delivery becomes easy, if the team has practiced many deliveries during the lifetime of the project, in essence acting as if they should deliver at any time.
But is it really possible to actually deliver at any time? Well, on one of our current projects here at BestBrains, this assumption was tested by our customer:

The project in question was in the middle of its fourth iteration, when our customer asked, if we would recommend against using our latest delivery for an important last-minute event with one of their customers. This latest delivery was from the beginning of the current iteration, and we knew that the customer had actually tested it. They were very confident about its quality and wanted to use the features it contained. So we said: "sure, go ahead".

After running a successfull event without support from our side, we now know that delivery at any time is attainable. It could be for you too! By Lars Thorup

On Hacker News, uuilly tells how they implemented a simple bugtracking scheme using DropBox, see Using Dropbox to Track Bugs. I don't know if I should smile because this is a nice example of how to find a simple and pragmatic solution to some problem you have. Or if I should cry over all the bugs they are now going to track instead of fixing them, see Why Bugs should not be Tracked.

By Lars Thorup