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The UK courts project is floundering. A few years ago ICL won the contract to modernise the UK Courts technology systems, by writing an entire new system for document sharing etc. This was heralded as a great move for the entire country, as many cases are delayed because of paperwork errors, leading to an increase [...]

Very interesting mail client (finally one with a blog style calendar!) Takes the Google approach rather than the Yahoo approach to information retrieval.
[via Simon]

Interesting presentation from Tools99 on improving code quality through Human Engineering.
The examples are a bit weak, and I suspect that the “conclusions” weren’t so much conclusions, but the starting point. But I think they’re good:

Humans make mistakes (especially programmers)
By “Human Engineering” the language various Sins of Omission, Confusion, and Sloth can be caught
[...]

David Schontzler has a wonderful javascript fix for Internet Explorer’s broken CSS margin support. Now instead of working around this with a variety of CSS hacks, you can write completely valid CSS, drop this JS in, and everything will just work.
I hope other versions of this start appearing for all the other broken CSS [...]

In “Agile Software Development Ecosystems” there’s an interview with Kent Beck, where he rants about requirements creep. However, unlike most project managers etc who similarly rant about requirements creep, Kent says: “We don’t want requirements creep; we want requirements to get up and dance. The problem is that they are just creeping. New requirements are [...]

Dave Winer has created a Google Outliner Browser: It’s a different way to crawl through The Mind of Google
For those without outliners, I’ve knocked up a simple web-based version at http://www.kasei.com/google/browse.

One of the really neat features about Wikis is the back linking - click on the title of any page, and see what other pages link to it. I was talking to Ken MacLeod about this a few days ago, and how we could apply it to weblog entries (after the conversation flow problems I [...]

Ebay’s latest financial reports reveal that:

over one and half million new items get listed every day
these generate almost $2.5m per day revenue
on top of this they earn about another $10m per month from third parties (advertising and other services)
they spent almost $25m in the quarter on the development of the software behind site and seller [...]

In Q4 2001, Amazon managed to save $22m in costs by tweaking its fulfillment operations. As well as the obvious fine tuning of its predictive software, it seems that one of the most effective changes was to rearrange the layout of their warehouses to make it quicker to pick goods that often get ordered together. [...]

Knowledge management isn’t just for big companies anymore … For sharing information Franey realized that old-fashioned methods are best. So she instituted a series of meetings. That’s right: meetings. Franey and her staff get together on a regular basis. That’s her “system” for knowledge management: a simple process to make sure that what one employee [...]

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