Goodbye! Farewell!

09/08/2008 01:51 am in Misc

So Wednesday this week is the day the new LHC supercollider is switched on at CERN. And apparently, worse case scenario doesn’t just include the usual suspects - like funding for the project running out - but a black hole being created and swallowing the earth. I do love it what the media latches onto scientific [...]

Does Chrome Spell The End Of Browser As Platform?

09/04/2008 06:16 am in Misc

Love the bold UI / workflow approach of Chrome. It also makes complete sense for Google to make a client service play as the gatekeeper to the worlds information, though I’m not without enormous reservations here (too much power and control perhaps). I’m wondering how the web purists crowd will take a potential kill shot [...]

Yegge’s Business Requirements Are BS: Jingstream Cliffnotes

09/03/2008 03:00 pm in Misc

Steve Yegge lambasts business requirements as heaping piles of, well, shit. It’s an evocative rant with a few pearls and paradoxes. Definitely worth a read if you’ve got the time. If not, but you want a peek inside my notebook, here’s a jingstream of what I found interesting.

Transparency Means Little Without Integrity

08/27/2008 07:52 am in Misc

LibraryThing’s Tim Spalding might just have renewed my belief in transparency. Skip the spin, deliver the truth and stand by your convictions with competitors and users. Transparency has been a trendy web 2.0 business tenet for awhile and I’ve been a huge fanboi, but after reading Tim’s post I realized I had only seen half [...]

Hyperlocal Snackr - Effective Workplace RSS Communication

08/25/2008 08:25 am in Misc

I’ve got a bit of a love hate relationship with Snackr, Narciso Jaramillo’s AIR based rss ticker (watch the screencast below to see Snackr in action). Watching feeds roll along the ticker fuels an already dangerous information addiction, but I’ve never quite been able to justify having the constant bombardment of external information while working [...]

Dear Adobe - A Lesson On Lowering Transaction Costs

08/22/2008 06:28 am in Misc

Another great snag from Twitter (make sure you click on the “love it”, “hate it” , “more bitching” links). There’s a few things to mull over here. First off, Adobe should buy the site and integrate it prominently into adobe.com. In fact, every company should have one of these pages. It should be a place for [...]

I Got My Wings!

08/06/2008 08:22 pm by Daniel Dura in Miscellany

While I usually keep this blog strictly ‘work related’ I am going to get a little personal. Yesterday evening I became an official FAA certified pilot. After a year and a half of training, almost 90 hours of flight time, passing an FAA knowledge test, and three hours with an authorized examiner, I was officially [...]

Historical Quicksand

07/30/2008 06:29 am in Misc

Preach it Rands. When Rands says, “sales is historical” I just hear chanting in my head: “history is a trap.” Then I start thinking of the innovators dilemma and how to avoid the historical quicksand. Passionate geek alert–you might want to approach with caution until there’s a little less juice in the pipe. I’m a pretty [...]

Simplicity - The Holy Grail Of Software Development

07/23/2008 03:23 pm in Misc

Simplicity. A word to live by. An unending quest. The holy grail of software. As software makers our raison d’être is making complex tasks easy. We’re back to that elusive word–simplicity. In a beautiful twist of irony it turns out that even thinking about simplicity involves a great deal of complexity. Enter John Maeda’s Ten [...]

New Theme

07/18/2008 03:26 pm in Misc

I finally got sick of grey the other day, and vowed to update my blog theme before it started to affect me mentally. Having an unfashionable love of fractal art, I thought this theme was perfect (if a little brooding), and quite apt given that fractals are prone to infinite characteristics. Must dig out that [...]

News Flash: Blogging Requires A Compelling Narrative

07/08/2008 09:43 am by Brooks Andrus in Misc

This rings all too true. Companies that get real value from social media put forward informal / conversational narratives from subject matter experts. Granted sometimes its hard to find geeks with the requisite communication skills, but when you do find them they should be out front. Once you get to multiple author blogging it feels [...]

Software Development: No Silver Bullets, But Plenty Of Gunslinging

07/08/2008 07:50 am by Brooks Andrus in Misc

Hank, one of my favorite dev reads, hits the nail on the head on manpower issues. The problem is that folks still think they can scale and grind. Get enough developers and, though less efficient, the scale moves operations forward. This strategy doesn’t work when individuals and small teams can dance circles around you and [...]

Transaction Costs Make Or Break Great Ideas

07/01/2008 05:32 am by Brooks Andrus in Misc

I’ve long been a fan of Gary Vaynerchuck. He’s innovative and in many ways represents much of what is good about the new media / user generated content revolution. That’s why I was stoked to stumble on to Cork’d. I signed up for the service and immediately started kicking out my first wine review. However, during [...]

Gates Through Rose Colored Glasses

06/27/2008 10:33 pm by Brooks Andrus in Misc

I call bullshit. These are unprovable assertions based on purely imaginative history. The web has proven that cooperation and standards can emerge from billions of diverse voices. If anything TCP/IP probably had as much to do with where we’re at today as anything. Computers were just expensive word processors until the Web emerged. Most of [...]

The $300 Million Makeover

05/22/2008 05:26 pm by Brooks Andrus in Misc

Apparently for a cool $300 million you can get a bunch of avid Mac users to attempt to convince themselves that Microsoft is cool enough for them to give up their Apple. Article just emphasizes the perception problem MS has. It’s 6 pages, but the first page and a half and the last couple of [...]

More Is Often Less

05/20/2008 07:09 pm by Brooks Andrus in Misc

Keith says something I feel very strongly about, but how do you get business types to get out of the feature arms race? Lot’s of business folks still feel like its the bullet points that win product comparisons and sell upgrades, but do they help you create passionate users who love your products? I’m not [...]

Hysterical Microhoo! Analysis

05/20/2008 08:17 am by Brooks Andrus in Misc

Poached from TechCrunch comments (a rare gem). I must of had a mind-meld with this cat when I was reading this leaked internal memo.

Winning Hearts And Minds

05/20/2008 07:22 am by Brooks Andrus in Misc

Microsoft’s biggest problem these days isn’t technology, it’s ecosystem, or corporate strategy. Instead it has something far worse — a perception problem. There’s a ton of historical evidence — monkey boy, M$ (a slur used by geeks to describe corporate greed), Apple’s Mac vs PC (it wouldn’t be effective if the perception didn’t already exist), [...]

Will Nerd Conferences Survive?

05/19/2008 10:07 pm by Brooks Andrus in Misc

Seth Godin meet Aral Balkan and welcome to Singularity. Now that I’ve done my best as matchmaker I ask only one thing — please don’t take SXSW away from me. I mean, my god do I need nerd talk followed by long therapy sessions on 6th Street. …oh, and lest I forget — Aral you’re a bastard [...]

The 3rd Adobe London Poker Tournament

05/19/2008 03:08 am by infinite turtles in Misc

The 3rd Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is now open for registration at www.pokercoder.com. For those who haven’t been before, it’s a fantastic FREE event with beer, chips and prizes all provided. Dealers at your table will be giving everyone 20 minutes of training if you’ve never played before, although Adobe are making a point [...]

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