The Bots of Online Gaming - It's late one Wednesday afternoon, and CptPokr is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, the captain exudes a certain brash charisma - broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He's seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold 'em. Ever since a guy named Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 Internet tournament buy-in into a $2.5 million championship at the World Series of Poker in 2003, card shark wannabes have been chasing their fantasies onto the Net. There is one thing that you should know though; CptPokr is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by WinHoldEm, the first commercially available autoplaying poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, CptPokr (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Still want to play?

Death of the Textbook? - The Associated Press reports that in Vail, Arizona, "students at Empire High School started class this year with no textbooks -- but it wasn't because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks -- laptop computers by Apple Computer -- to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks. Social studies teacher Jeremy Gypton said the transition was easier than expected. Gypton said he assigns readings based on websites, lists postings to news articles, uses online groups and message boards to keep the students connected on weekends and asks them to comment on each other's work. One of the more surprising things, he said, was finding that students' proficiency at video games and e-mail hasn't always translated into other computer skills. "One of the greatest challenges actually is getting the kids up to speed in using Word, [and] using an internet browser for other than a simple global search," Gypton said.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the Web - In August of 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years later he talks to Mark Lawson of the BBC about the web and how blogging is very close to how he originally intended the web to be. When Lawson suggests that the Internet is becoming an "great empire of lies" Berners-Lee becomes a bit testy. "When you say there are a lot of lies out there, if you go randomly picking up pieces of paper in the street or leafing through garbage at the garbage dump what are the chances you'll find something reliable written on the paper that you find there? Very small. When you go onto the Internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value? ... A good blogger when he says that something's happened will have a point to back, and there's a certain ethos within the blogging community, you always point to your source, you point all the way back to the original article. If you're looking at something and you don't know where it comes from, if there's no pointer to the source, you can ignore it."

Concepts in Software - Find out how you can ensure that your software project will be a success by studying the concept of Anthropology, yes, Anthropology. Come to our next free 90 minute "Taste of Success" seminar focused on High-Tech Anthropology^(R). Our approach will show you techniques for creating the right software for the right application.  We encourage you to share your software development war stories so we can all learn from them.  See you on October 20!

Bringing Sight to the Blind - R & D Magazine reports that Dr. Mark Humayun, a professor of ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine and associate director of research at the Doheny Eye Institute at the Univ. of Southern California, has pioneered new ways of helping the blind to see. He is doing this is by melding high-tech materials, software and technology with advanced surgical methods to restore sight to those who until now had little hope of ever seeing again.

The Art of Ripping - For music lovers, it can be a duanting task to get their record collection into an MP3 format so they can play their favorite tunes on their new MP3 player. Say you have 400 CD's you want copied or "ripped." It's going to take you a long time. So what do you do? A number of services have sprung up on the web. iRip, MusicRip and Riptopia are just a few. Eric Dahl, of PC World, has some great tips you should consider before you box up your cd collection and send it off to one of these services. If you decide to do it yourself, Dahl provides excellent tips on how to ensure that your CD's get copied into the new format correctly.

Smartening up the Clock - At Menlo we often hear customers tell us that in order to improve their software that we should look for way to "dumb-down" the design. But what they really mean is for us to smarten it up. There are a lot of everyday things besides just software that need smartening up. You would think that an item like the alarm-clock that has been around for many decades would be perfected by now. USA Today reports that Hilton Hotels recently determined that one of a key points of anxiety for their customers was not knowing for sure if they had programmed the alarm clock correctly. When they attempted to purchase alarm clocks that were more user-friendly they found that none of the 150 models that they tested were any better than what they had. So, they decided to build their own.

Smart ways to Spend a few Days this Fall  – It's fun to have a process you believe in. It's even more fun to teach it to others, to try to inspire them to paint a picture of a process they also might believe in. It is for this reason that Menlo offers a series of one, two and three day seminars in our agile practices including project management, High-tech Anthropology^(R) and agile software development. While each of these courses offers an excellent peek into their own individual disciplines, we believe the greatest strength of Menlo's practices is how they are all knitted together into a set of cohesive processes. The Menlo Fall 2005 class schedule is out and now is the time to sign up for a Menlo class. Come learn the real secrets of software success! Menlo's one day "foundation" course Agile Explained – Lessons Learned from Seven Years of Agile Software Development is being taught by Rich Sheridan on September 27th. Check it out.

Passion, Enthusiasm, Energy and a timely message – This combination in a public speaker could energize your next event. Call us at (734) 665-1847 to schedule one of our speakers. Look here for a list of some of the topics that we’ve spoken about in the past. Columbus, Rutgers, Toronto, Panama City, Panama. These are just a few of the places we'll be speaking over the next month.