Build-A-Bear to evaluate strategic alternatives
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Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc.  said on Thursday it has hired Lehman Brothers  to help it evaluate its options, sending the retailer's stock up more than 14 percent.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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You want a business plan? Here's a strategic vision you can't refuse.
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How to outmaneuver the wizards of Wall Street.
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Play the horses? Use that to beat the bulls and the bears.
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DevShed is wrapping up their look at the Strategy pattern with the last part of their series posted today - a look at validating a user's input via the pattern.   In the next few lines I'm going to demonstrate how to use the strategy pattern in a useful case, that is validating user-supplied input. Sound like an interesting experience, right?   They start by show how to build a "validation strategy selector" that uses a switch to hand off the request to the correct validation function. Naturally, this is followed by the creation of those validation classes and an example of their use. They wrap it all up with the complete code listing to make cut and paste coding easy.
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A search for investing opportunities in military and defense.
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As both Andrei Zmievski and Clay Loveless mention in new blog posts from each, things in the PHP framework scene are getting a bit out of hand.   Andrei's comments:   I know you might be lusting after Rails for some reason and want to have the fame, the glory, and the dancing girls of DHH, but are we not going to be satisifed until Sourceforge is filled with the object-oriented diarrheal remains of our overblown egos and delusions of grandeur?   And Clay's thoughts:   Build a cool app. Forget about your own personal stamp on the framework world; you missed the boat on that one. But, if you want to make a mark, the world is wide open for new and cool applications. Pick an existing framework, start building your app, and contribute fixes back to that framework's community as you find shortcomings in your needs for your app.   They're both in agreement, and on more that one point. They recommend the best course of action for anyone out there with "the itch" to really work with a framework - fine one of the already established ones and dive right in. It might not be your own code, but you can contribute your own functionality and thoughts into the project and establish your own little niche.
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Have fun -- and learn -- with business beyond your portfolio.
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Preconfigured containers offer resource-constrained companies a viable option.
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What social web services do you get the most out of? And which ones are just a waste of venture capital? We want to know. In Monkey Bites.
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Learn to identify companies ready for a breakout
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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New and old business strategies meet in a clash of titans. Who will make the final cut?
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Software maker considering online and perhaps ad-funded versions of the low-end productivity software.
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Chasing relative performance leads to a short-term orientation.
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Pulling a growth stock off the value investor's plate.