February 2006 Archives

Very cool. Create a Simpson character of yourself. Here's my attempt to portrait myself:

(Via Bob Congdon).

...hitting the nail right on the head: Sunday Morning and Married

Another great post on Coding Horror: Error Codes Must Die.

Martin Fowler on Getters.

Excellent post: Making technology simple.

Kind of resonates with my thoughts on lacking advances in UI design.

Here's a good one: Brown Numbers.

I like it. We have lots of brown numbers, brown schedules and brown ship dates over here.

There's a new, slick service by 37signals: Campfire. As expected, a very nice piece of web software.

But....I don't get it.

Home vs. homeless

They have a point that the invitation process of existing chat clients is cumbersome.

Network compatibility

Well, this translates into having a chat client running (for communicating with all those traditionals like me) plus having an open web-page for group chats. Not very appealing.

File sharing

Well, for most businesses, it doesn't matter. Because everyone uses the same chat client anyway.

History and transcripts

I'm using iChat, which logs each and every chat incident. Plus, there's a tool to search these logs.

Persistence

That's a nice feature.

Security

Well, yeah. But do you send each and every business e-mail encrypted? I don't think so.

Plus, my chat client is free. No cost. Zero. I don't think they have enough compelling arguments for businesses to switch.

Sinclair/ZX81 (there was a chess program fitting in 1K of main memory - of course, real men used the 16K memory module to create huge pieces of software):

(Via The Tao of Mac.)

The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming.

(Via Software by Rob)

...here's a great post by Dare Obasanjo on Democracy.

Om Malik notices that we're living a Cached Life:

If we're willing to give up (a certain amount of) privacy to gain something else, we should make sure that we don't erode another fundamental right which is paramount to our democracy:

However, like with every right which is granted to us, freedom of speech isn't free. With it, there's the obligation to use it responsibly.

This one is goooooood.

I had the pleasure to read "The Humane Interface" of the late Jeff Raskin over the christmas break.

Raskin very much focusses on techniques to make a touch-typing, text-processing power-user more efficient using the computer. While these techniques are definitely worth pondering, I was hoping for some insight on how to make the casual, non-touch-typing, non-power-user more efficient in using the computer to accomplish a task. That's a much harder task than improving a power-users efficiency.