remote controls
What is it with consumer electronics and the uncontrolled proliferation of remotes? We recently upgraded to an EDTV plasma, which I am very happy with, but the nature of the inputs forced another remote on to the coffee table. That brings us to a total of four: HTPC, Tivo, Receiver,
user experience
There are so many that it’s really hard to choose, but I think this may be my favorite nonsensical dialog in Lotus Notes, our enterprise mail system of choice: Good luck. You’re gonna need it. I’ve given up criticizing Lotus Notes. There’s no point. It’s
technology trends
Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We’ll sit with our families in warm, candle-lit dining rooms eating stuffed turkey, reminiscing over old photographs, preparing holiday shopping lists and... Please. Let's be frank. We are going home to
software development
There’s an interesting eleven page article in the Economist considering the cost of software complexity: The economic costs of IT complexity are hard to quantify but probably exorbitant. The Standish Group, a research outfit that tracks corporate IT purchases, has found that 66% of all IT projects either fail
technology trends
I recently took the plunge and upgraded to a plasma television, mostly because I want a decent native resolution for my home theater PC under Windows Media Center Edition 2005. Analog televisions don’t do 640x480 very well, and can barely be coaxed into legible 800x600. However, HDTV or EDTV
software development concepts
Today’s dose of YAGNI comes from a recent Anders Hejlsberg interview: If you ask beginning programmers to write a calendar control, they often think to themselves, “Oh, I’m going to write the world’s best calendar control! It’s going to be polymorphic with respect to the kind
productivity
Derek Sivers relates an interesting Steve Jobs anecdote: In June of 2003, Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do (x)?”, “Do you
security
This Slate article highlights an interesting statistic: A few years ago, Microsoft set up the Windows Error Reporting Service to help find out where crashes come from. After a Windows application – or your whole PC – shuts down, a box pops up asking you to send a confidential error report. Using
programming languages
I had no idea this was happening, but it is fantastic news: according to this GamePC article, the latest 2005 version of Windows XP Media Center Edition will be released as a retail product within a few weeks: Windows XP Media Center Edition was originally launched roughly two years ago,
software development concepts
Of all the professional hubris I’ve observed in software developers, perhaps the greatest sin of all is that we consider ourselves typical users. We use the computer obsessively, we know a lot about how it works, we even give advice to friends and relatives. We are experts. Who could
java
I got into an interesting discussion today about that recently published report, Comparing Microsoft .NET and IBM WebSphere/J2EE. If you haven’t read it, there’s a summary at eWeek, but I definitely recommend downloading the full report for the details. If you’re too busy to do either
spam filtering
In my previous blog entry on some plan(s) for spam, I mentioned that I didn’t care for challenge/response “human-only” whitelists. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why I felt that way... until I happened upon this John Graham-Cumming PowerPoint presentation: I don’t “do” Challenge/