I'm currently reading "The Market Driven Organization" By George S. Day.

Here are a few important quotes about being market driven:

"Market-Driven firms view market research as descision insurance: a premium that is paid to widen and deepen the understanding of customer, competitor, and channel factors; anticipate changes in market requirements; and eliminate poor descision alternatives. To get the most value from this market research, these firms involve researchers early in the descision process, so they are aware of alternatives being considered. "

Day contrasts that with self-centered companies, who do market research as a way of selling their descisions (that are already made) to upper management or others in the organization. Its sort of a "see we did some research and here's what we found". This is very flawed as Day points out:

"This "security blanket" research is conducted after the descision has been made. Such studies are designed to buttress political positions and gain support rather than assess whether the idea was worthy of investment in the first place. This has the corrosive side effect of biasing the choice of research design and shading the question wording to favor the chosen alternative. The scope of the inquiry is likely to be constrained, since there is no incentive to seek disconfirming evidence or troubling but inconsistent trends. When market research has been widely misused in this way no market study will have much credibility and little learning will happen."

Just some stuff to think about...

Merry Christmas everyone. I'm having a great time over at my in-laws place right now. I'm sort of showing off how Blogger works to my father-in-law. I'm trying to get him to publish a blog about his favorite subject, food. He's a walking, talking historic map of food in LA, Orange County, Pittsburgh, Napa Valley, well I could go on, but suffice it to say that wherever he's lived he can tell you a great place to eat. And he can throw in a little history to boot!

We just recently got a Cannon A70. Overall I give it a A-.

Here are some of the features I like:

• Great picture resolution. At 3.2 megapixel, the pictures come out with great detail that rivals 35mm film.
• Great optics.
• Uses (4) AA batteries. Quite nice that you don't have to buy custom batteries for it.
• Good battery life. I took 52 pictures, all with flash, all with the display on forever and futzing around with the settings, zoom etc. Using the batteries that came with the camera. Not bad. I hear the rechargables will last much longer.
• Easy to use software. I'll admit I haven't read the manual for the software yet, but to get the pictures off the camera took no time to figure out.
• More manual settings than you'll ever really use.

Here's what I don't like:

• When I read of other people complaining that the LCD display is easily scratched I figured I'd get a decent case and that would solve the problem. Uh no! Simply taking it out of the case a few times has already made tiny scratches on it. I'll have to add a cloth or something to the case to keep the fragile thing from looking like a cutting board
• Lag. Damn the thing is laggy. You click, you wait, and then it takes a picture. I'm used to SLRs and it really stinks to press the button and 3-5 seconds later it actually happens. Cannon engineers: Think about buffers in the next design...
• Its hard to tell if you've taken a picture on not. There's some sweet spot for pressing the button that I haven't figured out yet. Press it to short and it doens't take a picture. Hold it too long and it also doesn't take a picture. I don't quite get it.
• Weak flash. You need to be very close to your subject if it needs flash. At about 12 feet, you might as well leave it off because it barely does a thing.

Some general thoughts that probably apply to all digital cameras:
Be sure to play with it and get used to its settings. Go through an entire set of batteries before you go out and take pictures of anything you' really interested as a keepsake. I learned that lesson yesterday at the Firefly talk. I missed a bunch of shots due to my inexperience with the camera. And last, take WAY more pictures than you would with a film camera. It doesn't cost anything and you can always delete them when you get home.

I just got back from the LA Shrine Auditorium where Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, Ben Edlund, Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Ron Glass, and Adam Baldwin spoke about Firefly. Oh, it was at the LA Comic book and Science Fiction Convention. Joss made no real annoucements, so I'm not going to be breaking any news here that hasn't been around in the different fan websites. First, I had the impression before attending, that Firefly, the movie, was a go. Joss said several times that though he's seriously working on making it happen, its not a done deal yet. The script is done and all he would say is that it's written with audiences who have never seen the show in mind. He also said that he didn't recycle any material for the movie, so there'd be a lot for us die hard fans. Especially things that explained many of the unanswered questions that were left when the show was canceled. Joss himself said, if he had known that he was writing a mini-series, he would have added a lot more closure.

Someone had asked what was the most difficult thing to do on the show, Tim Minear's answer was "Getting canceled." Everyone laughed, but as it turns out they were filming when he got the phone call. He told the cast and crew, and the very next scene was of the Serenity crew sitting around the dinner table laughing and cracking jokes. He said that was the most difficult thing he had done on the show.

I'll post a few of the pictures that I took. I'm sort of peeved at myself that I didn't take more...

I gave up (temporarily) on OJB and began working with Hibernate. Hibernate is very slick. Once you define your mapping, POJO and config its a breeze to use. The learning curve isn't all that steep either. It took me only a few hours to get things going. In fact, the only problem that I hit was that the instructions for Hibernate have you place JAR files in the WEB-INF/lib directory that are duplicates of files that Tapestry uses (and has you place in the shared/lib directory). The only thing I don't like about it so far is the query language. Its way too SQL like. I'd rather see a pure object oriented aproach to queries like OJB and some others have.

After setting it up I decided to write a chapter for the Tapestry tutorial on hooking the two together. For an early preview you can grab it from this link TapHibTut.doc. You'll also need theHibLib.zip source code file.