programming languages
A colleague recently pointed me to a Steve Ballmer video I hadn’t seen before; the one where he pitches Windows 1.0. All three of the Ballmer videos are essential viewing for any Windows developer: * Windows 1.0 sales pitch * Dance Monkeyboy * Developers, Developers, Developers I love the fact
software development
Wil Shipley, the entity behind Delicious Library, has a hilarious (and informative) talk on why he develops software for the Mac – and also netted $54,000 from Delicious Library on the first day with zero advertising. How to Succeed Writing Mac Software (176kb PDF) One of the funniest and most
programming languages
In “Who needs talent when you have intensity,” I proposed that success has very little to do with talent. This blog entry by Brad Wardell offers even more proof: In 1992, OS/2 came out and I felt I could get a competitive advantage by pre-loading OS/2 onto the
design by committee
In a recent interview, Don Norman warns of the perils of design by committee: You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy, and I don’t see
.net
Owen Winkler put together an overview of all self-installable blogging software, circa mid-2004. After surveying his options, he notes one clear trend: Even more disheartening: .Text is the only blogware that anyone suggested for the Windows platform. I asked and asked about it because I wanted to give Windows a
hardware interfaces
The standard computer keyboard is the quintessential human input device. Although it’s amazingly adaptable, a recent Tom’s Hardware review of the Ergodex DX1 underscores the limitations of the keyboard as an input device – and also highlights some of the crazier keyboard alternatives out there: So far, technology hasn’
hardware
The always entertaining Dan linked to something I hadn’t seen before – an archived page of the Google server hardware circa 1999: Here it is in all its, uh, glory. I don’t know what’s more impressive, the two dual Pentium II 300 servers, or the 90gb SCSI drive
blogging
Like Steve Broback, I spent many of my formative years in computing reading John Dvorak’s magazine column. I started enthusiastically reading John Dvorak’s columns back in 1984, at my first job selling IBM PCs and Mac 128k computers from a storefront in Seattle. I have always enjoyed his
learning
I found this Will Wright quote, from a roundtable at last week’s E3, rather interesting: Will Wright said he’s learned the most from games that seemed appealing on paper, but were failures in the marketplace. “I actually ask people when hiring how many failures they’ve worked on,
community
Dare Obasanjo recently wrote about the failure of Kuro5hin, which was originally designed to address perceived problems with the slashdot model: [Kuro5hin allowed] all users to create stories, vote on the stories and to rate comments. There were a couple of other features that distinguished the K5 community such as
technology trends
I’ve talked about the programmer’s take on keyboard and chair, but I have yet to cover that other computing staple: the mouse. I was reminded when HMK referenced Ars Technica’s, History of the GUI: This was the mouse, invented by Douglas himself [in 1968] and built by
diversity
A few months ago there was a little brouhaha about lack of diversity in weblog authors, which caused a few ripples. Julia Lerman asks the same question about software development in a recent interview: I think that the lack of women in visible roles in our community is one of