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Posts with tag iso9000

Filed under: Developer

Dev Chair : First love

As the senior manager of the software development team, part of my duty is to interview job candidates. One thing that jumped out to me a while ago as I was going through a resume is that a lot of candidates have more interesting jobs at the beginning of their career than their latest employment.

My own experience is very similar. The first job I got after finishing college was with a software engineering company for transportation (mainly trains) and traffic control system, where 'engineering' meant exactly that. The company was ISO9000/9001 certified so that means every process and decision had to be clearly documented and signed off. The traditional software development model, i.e. "The Waterfall", was king and the thickness of the requirement and design documents were matched by the comprehensive testing documents. Every change request must be approved, coded, tested, and signed off before

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Filed under: Business, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Synthis Process Modeler - Today's Free File

synthis process modelerSimilar to Microsoft's venerable Project app, or (my favorite) FastTrack Schedule, Synthis Process Modeler is a flowcharting/process modeling/doc manager app that is free for the price of an email address. I said similar, becase this is more document and process management, and isn't really designed for timelines. It's pretty robust for a freeware app, but the catch is, for the true ISO9000 or Sarbanes-Oxley features, you'll wind up paying for a server edition, or at least some consulting time with Synthis. It's an interesting way to sell services (not that it's unique), giving away the client software to tantalize the user into the larger products or services. Would you like to super size that?

The Process Modeler itself looks like a pretty good product by itself, however. If you're a one-man show having to manage some project assets, or if you manage a smaller project, I can definitely see this as being useful. Process mapping is drag and drop, linking elements is a right-click away, and publishing to a website (the HTML anyway) is a simple menu button affair. It's hard to make process management exciting though, which I guess explains the monochromatic look of the app and it's icons. Worth a look for small teams though.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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