Software Links IV (and a few others)

• Not a software link, but Alex Carnevale's short piece on "In Which We Consider the Macabre Unpleasantness of Roald Dahl".  He's still one of my favorite authors.  I adored him as a kid, precisely because he treated children as real people.  But I've never read a biography of him, so this was illuminating.  Reminds me of my mother's story about how my grandmother wouldn't let her read or see The Wizard of Oz because Frank Baum was an anti-Native American a-hole.
• Richard Dawkins interviews a creationist via Thoughts From a Godless Heathen (about an hour if you watch all the parts).  Dawkins' patience is amazing.  And Wendy Wright is nuts.
• Eagan Market Fest is live and you can earn free food if you bike there.
• On to actual software links: A quick comparison of Joomla!, Drupal, and Wordpress.  I agree about the ease of Wordpress for blogging compared to the other CMS platforms.  Joomla! can be a bit of a bear to modify if you're using a third party blog.
• I saw a quote by Alan Cooper, "Software is not built with 'resources', nor is it built with 'money'. It is built by intelligent, non-fungible people."  Absolutely true, although it screws up my idea to use underground, mushroom people as our next outsourcing pool.
• I'd like to read this book on Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder (and others), it looks very interesting.  Amazon seems to bear out that it's worth reading.
• Expression Engine - an interesting CMS Erik pointed me at.
• Touch and Gesture events, also from Erik.  A working example.
• Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla! market shares in Europe.  Even there Wordpress outnumbers the others installs combined.
• Lullabot on The Art of Estimation: " I would advise breaking the project down into existing Drupal solutions. What are the content types, the views, the taxonomy requirements, the menus, the blocks, etc.? Will you require Panels or Context modules for help with blocks or layout? Knowing the tool ahead of time is a huge advantage when it comes to making estimates. When you've already used solutions like Panels, or Services, or SOLR, or Migrate, or Features to solve problems in the past, there are fewer unknowns, and you can estimate off of past experience."  They provide a Numbers spreadsheet for doing some of the Drupal breakdown.
• Have you considered SaaS before choosing your CMS tool: it is possible to choose a CMS hosted in the cloud.

Software Links II

• A guide to mobile blogging - a light dig into a few CMS platforms to discuss what blogging options they support via mobile.
• Software Craftsmanship 2011 - interesting that it has content similar to Code Camp.  I primarily like the post for the pub metaphor, "To me, "software craftsmanship" is a pub where a certain crowd of talented, brilliant and passionate programmers hang out. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, they hung out in the "Object Oriented Arms", which had great real ale and comfy chairs. But the OO Arms got overrun by consultants and salesmen in suits who all stood around drinking expensive cocktails and talking ignorant crap in very loud voices, so the crowd started drinking in the "Patterns Bar" a few hundred yards down the high street. That too soon became overrun by the suits, so they moved to the "Agile Lion" (briefly stopping off at the "UML & Firkin" for what turned out to be a very heavy, stodgy meal that made them feel slightly sick). In recent years, the Agile Lion has started to fill up with suits - indeed, it's more of a wine bar these days. So a bunch of us have decided to open our own pub, called "Software Craftsmanship" - a traditional, no-frills boozer where all that matters is quality beer and good conversation."
• Calipso - a NodeJS and MongoDB based CMS that claims to support 180 hits/second (that's 648,000 per hour.  Makes me wonder what other CMS platforms support).  Can you tell I have an interest in CMS platforms lately?  You can see a demo here, and a further write up here at the DailyJS.
• Scott Hanselman giving an MVC tutorial (for .NET) from Channel 9 and Dev Days.  Over an hour long video.  Very nice way to dig into the .NET MVC space.
• 10 free wireframing tools from SpeckyBoy -  I've heard of Cacoo and Pencil Project (for Firefox).
• 15 best wireframing tools via Tripwire Magazine (note, note necessarily free) - I've heard of Basalmiq and Creately.  Looking forward to giving a few of them a try.
• Ultimate Guide to Wireframing - nice definitions of wireframe, mockup, prototype, low-fidelity, high-fidelity, and considerations about what tools and resources.  Reminds me of the horrible paper-wireframing presentation I went to at Code Freeze that involved watching people use Facebook.  Ugh.  The real value was a single statement and then they could have skipped the whole presentation, "If you're wireframing, it works just as well to use a sheet of paper and a pencil, or cut out pieces of paper you can move around."  We did real paper wireframing in Scrummaster class (I'm a certified Scrummaster - quite the trick as I've never led a truly Agile project) using Post-It (tm) notes to create a pet services brochure.  Worked very well.
• Is There a Peak Age for Entrepreneurs from TechCrunch - it should be noted that Mean Mr. Mustard will have to identify with Arianna Huffington.  "the majority of the sustainable businesses created in the 90′s were founded or run by older entrepreneurs...The research shows that an older age is actually a better predictor of entrepreneurial success, and that three other traits also correlate strongly to success: strong fluid intelligence, high openness, and moderate agreeableness."