I’m a sucker for observing behavior in non-software industries that’s analogous to perceived problems in the software industry. This is from a blog post on the 2008 Honda Accord:
The day an automaker redesigns a midsize family sedan and declares it to be, “Less roomy, less powerful and less luxurious!” is the day that [...]
Tags: · business, cars, software development
Today I reluctantly migrated the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. There are many things I like about Movable Type, especially in version 4.0, but for whatever reason it was very slow and seemed to keep getting slower. I installed FastCGI but wasn’t sure if it ever worked, made sure the database was properly indexed [...]
Tags: · meta, Movable Type, WordPress
Florian Jensen reports that AOL is testing ICQ and AIM interoperability using XMPP. If they adopt XMPP, AIM and ICQ should work with Google Talk as well, although they could of course prevent that from happening if they chose to do so.
I started blogging about the need for interoperability among instant messaging services years ago, [...]
Tags: · instant messaging, standards, XMPP
Bruce Schneier explains why he runs an open wireless network. I leave mine open as well, so it’s nice to know I’m in good company.
Tags: · security
Wow, Sun is acquiring MySQL. That’s sort of stunning.
My first impression is that MySQL has been under a bit of pressure in that big companies like IBM and Oracle have been buying up the companies who provide their transactional storage engines. Now MySQL has the (perhaps diminishing) clout of Sun behind them. Oh, and suddenly [...]
In World of Warcraft, there are raid instances that reset once a week. The instances consist of several encounters that usually have to be defeated in order. For example, Gruul’s Lair, the easiest 25 man raid instance, has encounters with High King Maulgar and then Gruul. The hardest instance, the Battle for Mount Hyjal, includes [...]
There are a lot of old Web sites out there these days. Plenty of organizations have had a presence on the Web for upwards of ten years, and like it or not, their Web sites are showing their age. It seems like I run into more and more groups who have old, crufty Web sites [...]
For all of the negative talk about Rails lately, the truth is that for cranking out Web applications quickly and easily, it remains difficult to beat. I started on a new project last week, and in an afternoon, I managed to go from having nothing but a CSV export of a database to having a [...]
Tonight I happened to catch the end of the Golden Globes press event, on which two of the stupidest people in the world read the names of the award winners. The real show was canceled because the actors agreed not to cross the writers’ picket line. Anyway, in addition to reading the lists of nominees [...]
I’m one of the people who was concerned that the portrayal of the characters in the Baltimore Sun newsroom in the season premiere of The Wire was a tad unsubtle. Actual newspaper employee Fred Clark disagrees:
I’ve read reviews complaining that Haynes seems unrealistically heroic, or that the newsroom scenes are overly explicit, with [...]