Happy New Year
Happy New Year, everyone. May 2007 rock. →
2006
The Coathanger
They're testing the New Years light-show tonight. →
Five things you may not know about me...
I don't normally do memes, but since Mike, who laid this one in my lap, is responsible for signing my pay-cheques, I thought it politic to not be the one to break the chain. →
Faint Praise?
The patch is doing fine at customer system, thanks. →
The Only Flowchart You'll Ever Need
Rules to live your life by. →
On the iPhone
The mobile phone market is completely different. Apple would find itself pitted against massive incumbents who are focused entirely on keeping their market-share. Even if Apple came out with something truly revolutionary, would they be able to come out with something revolutionary that couldn't be copied by Nokia in six months? →
Technology is Like That
I was watching TV tonight when I saw something I wanted to share with my workmates. So after the segment was over, I rewound the show on my PVR, paused it, took a photo of the screen with my camera, transferred the photo onto my laptop via Bluetooth, then posted the image on my internal company blog. →
Effective Management
Around Thursday of last week, somebody put this helpful article on my desk... →
Rigid Agile?
Is that the sort of pressure a development methodology should be placing on people, that having to reassign a resource for a single day is a cataclysm? →
How Not to Take my Money
Then I remembered, I did precisely the same thing (and got the same error) six months ago. That time, I emailed support, got back instructions on what I had to do to reactivate my account, put those instructions in my "things to do" file, and then eventually deleted them because it wasn't worth the effort. →
Free Shipping!
It's nice to know that if I spend more than $30, O'Reilly won't charge anything to ship me my PDF. →
Vale Valleywag
Nick Douglas' Valleywag was unashamedly lowbrow, and not afraid of picking fights and then extracting every last bit of juice from the resulting enmity. That's not to everyone's taste, but it found a niche and filled it, and aren't niches and narrowcasting what blogging is all about? "We want to be more bland so we can appeal to a wider audience" is just so old media. →
My One Post on US Politics for the Year
Now the big question is: "What are the Democrats going to do about Iraq?" And there's no good answer. Iraq is that sign up on the store shelf that says "You break it, you bought it" →
Things I've Learned in the Last Ten Days
Crossing the road in Hanoi isn't for the faint-hearted →
How to (and how not to) sell technology
Steve Jobs can make sharing earwax sound sexy. Ballmer can make a digital file transfer sound like something you'd need to clean up after. →
Anatomy of an Obsession
We're moving our mission-critical mail aliases. Spot the odd one out. →
Comment Your Performance Hacks
If you make a change to a piece of code that doesn't change what it does, but just makes it faster (or more secure, more flexible, or any other of the engineering concerns that cross-cut pure functionality), Murphy's Law makes it almost inevitable that your good work will be undone by some future refactoring. →
A Little Knowledge
And here he comes to the ring, to the sound of _O Fortuna_ from Carmen Barina! →
The Greatest Trick
The greatest trick Apple pulled was to build a market where lock-in is mandated, but convince the world that this was something they did reluctantly, at the behest of the villainous recording industry. →
Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death
So I drew up plans to quietly step back from Flickr. I'd already paid for a year, so there was no real value for anyone in making any immedate move. Just when my account was coming up for expiry, I'd extract my photos from the site, find some convenient way to host them myself, and feel that warm glow of low barrier-to-entry middle-class social consciousness. →
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
Often, full disclosure is explained as a way to make sure vendors are responsive, using "naming and shaming" to force a faster patch schedule. This is certainly one aspect of the practice, but far more important is the fact that it gives those people who might be running the vulnerable software enough information to make informed decisions about their security. →
Spotted at the Baseball
Just in front of us in the crowd at yesterday's baseball game were dozen or so young lads and lasses, all dressed in green t-shirts with "Add me" on the front, and their myspace IDs on the back. Well, all except this guy. →
Why is XSS so common?
The prevalence of any bug is directly proportional to how much extra work a programmer must do to avoid introducing it. Writing software is 90% attention to detail, but programmers are human and the more details there are to pay attention to, the more likely one will be missed. →
Yahoo Could Learn Something from Flickr
The competition was a token gesture in every sense, but it was a humanising gesture. Everything about Flickr's message turned them from a faceless website owned by a big corporation into a bunch of guys and gals who were just as upset about this as you, and were working hard to make things right again. →
A Marine Biologist Reviews 'Pirates of the Caribbean'
My friend Danna is a marine biologist. She has also been obsessed with squid since the age of thirteen. I asked her opinion of the latest Pirates of the Carribean movie. →
Just Because You Could be More Paranoid
We slept well for the first time since 1998. The high pitched tone in our ears is much less under the canopy and we feel much less nervous. It's a wonderful feeling to be under the canopy. →
Just Because You're Paranoid...
I'm tempted to write to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and ask them, in the light of this information, what steps I should be taking to shield my passport from unwanted radiation. →
Someone in Apple Marketing Has a Sense of Humour
Apple have been taking a lot of stick recently over heat issues in their new Intel range of notebook computers. So I was amused to receive this little marketing gem in my inbox over the weekend. →
Fishbowl hot with the youth market
One of the screenshots below is MSN's estimated age-distribution of you, my dear readers. The other is for popular children's site site Neopets. →
We Come to Bury WinFS...
It's perfectly reasonable to sugar-coat a bitter pill, but giving someone a teaspoon of sugar while you sneak up behind them with the suppository won't make you any friends at all. →
Superdickery
In preparation for the upcoming Superman movie, now is a good time to revisit Superdickery.com, a collection of very wrong comic panels. →
The A20 Hack
This behaviour was later moved into the CPU, which means every Intel-based PC built in the last twenty years (including the X-Box) has contained a variant on this quick-and-dirty hack, for those few 8086 applications that expected a couple of segments of memory memory to wrap around above 1MB. →
Science Fiction
If you're going to invent words and concepts unfamiliar to the reader, you can't introduce them gradually without undermining the reality of the language. But at the same time explaining everything up-front would make a book awkward and top-heavy. →
I'm Not Making This Up
This is a real book. →
Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury
Microsoft get a free run on the "evil" front because hell, they're Microsoft. That's what they do! Google don't get a free run, they invite debate and ask the world to hold them to their stated principles, and I sort of like that they're not getting rid of that slogan any time soon. →
Post Apple-event Let-Down Syndrome
But what happened was – I found this interesting girl off match.com, and after exchanging e-mails I asked all my friends to e-mail drawings to me of what this lady might look like. My favorite drawing was the one which was a spitting image of Maggie. →
Can you digg it?
After a brief moment of excitement, my webserver traffic returns to normal and I fade back into comfortable obscurity. →
The Perils of Metadata
Another for the comp.risks archive. How journalists can accidentally reveal their sources by forgetting to strip their metadata. →
A Slice of Life
Yes, but Klingon isn't officially a part of Unicode, so you'd have to come up with your own encoding anyway. →
You Wouldn't Steal a Movie
And I'm thinking: "Yes, I would. I'd steal it in a second if the stolen version allowed me to fast-forward past the adverts." →
Recruiters. Grr.
That fast a response means a first-pass rejection -- I didn't make the technical requirements for the position. Which is exactly what I said in my email before I had to rewrite my CV. →
Wiki, a Subversive Technology
Except it is, and it does, because our poker standings page on the extranet represents, in a microcosm, every little bit of information that a company's employees think is worth writing down, if only there were a convenient place to do so. This is one half of the corporate wiki's raison d'etre, and is the reason that so many of our customers tell us how quickly "Just put it in Confluence" and its converse "Look for it in Confluence" have become almost cliché in their organisation. →
A Tale of Two Googles
Google image search results for the term "Tiananmen", performed in two different countries. →
Quotes of the Day
I'm not sure "made me walk more than any other car I've used." would be complimentary. →
Ha Ha Only Serious
"Because written English survived quite happily for centuries without needing punctuation to delineate humour. I can almost understand why it might be necessary in back-and-forth conversational one-liners, but I don't see why we have to start corrupting honest prose just because some readers are getting too used to being spoon-fed joke-markers to work it out for themselves." →
Build One to Throw Away?
The only novel feature I could see on Flickr when I first signed up was the 'shoebox' of images that you could upload to the site and share with other members, or paste into conversations. The way things turned out, it looks like I wasn't the only user who thought that way. →
Random Java Trivia
When does the following code not throw a NullPointerException? MyClass obj = null; obj.doSomething(); →
Should We Talk About the Weather?
It's not raining tonight. Rain is something that starts in the sky then falls down until it hits the earth. The weather I can see outside my window is just humidity reaching its natural conclusion and becoming too heavy to stay where it is. It's not raining tonight; the mist has just discovered there's only a little way left to fall. →
Full of (Cold) Air
I wonder, since online shopping really started taking off, how much money and effort has been expended shipping plastic bladders full of air around the world? →
The Sum Total of Human Experience
Follow the storage performance/size/capacity/price trendline out 10 or 15 years, and we get to the hard-drive that John Gilmore's been describing: the size of a sugar-cube, costing $1-2, powered off of the occassional hard shake... →
Online Video, Three Stories
Streaming video sucks. →
Preaching to the Perverted
Tom Bridge explains the MacWorld San Francisco keynote to non-believers. →
This is Our City in Summer
The slogan for the Festival of Sydney this year is 'This is Our City in Summer', which can lead to a certain level of signage-irony when it's pissing down with rain. →