Gerry Heidenreich

Things have been busy, I've got a lot going on.  I'll get back to regular posts, and it's a promise that DNN will be in my sights again soon.  In the meantime, it's more management stuff: holding meetings, holding hands, badgering people to get their content together for our Intranet rollout in January, etc...  Anyway, there are a few things to note, posted in no particular order:

Fixed-Width Fonts- Everyone knows about Courier & Courier New, but I just started using Lucida Console (mostly for SQL query results), it looks sharper & comes with windows.  A Fixed-Width font page here has tons of  information.

DiskMapper vs. SpaceMonger - I've been using DiskMapper for at least 6 years now, but it's a commercial product ($99) that works unlike any other... until now!  SpaceMonger is a beautiful new disk-mapping utility that runs on Win95+, has a footprint of about 200k, and is FREE.  The visualization algorithm has been used elsewhere (network traffic monitoring app maybe?), I've seen it, but I don't remember where, or what it's called.

Joel on Software's MicroEconomics 101 - Joel's Dec 15 post is an intruiging article on pricing software, and a good refresher on Economics concepts I personally haven't had in my head for a decade at least.  It covers concepts and ideas like demand curves, consumer surplus, product segmentation, net present value of an investment, and his key point: Prices send signals... which builds off the idea that people generally believe that you get what you pay for, and that classic Economics and demand curves are wrong when they imply that 100% of people that would pay $120 for a pair of sneakers would buy the same sneakers if they were only $20.  Joel's June 12, 2002 post talks about substitutive and complementative (?) marketing concepts, and is much quicker to read. It sheds some light on commoditization, motives behind open source software, and initiatives by MS, Sun, IBM, Netscape to raise demand for their products by commoditizing their products' compliments.