clock … watching time, the only true currency

Dreaming in Code covers three years of software development, without bearing witness to a final release. That’s really the whole story: software is hard, unpredictable, and never finished. The book, by Scott Rosenberg, aspires to match Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the classic record of a technology team overcoming the hurdles of [...]

[Read more →]

Luke Wroblewski wrote Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, published by Rosenfeld Media. Looking now, I realize I’ve read all the publisher’s books so far…both of them. A straightforward, well-argued, well-illustrated reference book, Web Form Design tackles the obvious subject in all its details. I’ve been involved with more web forms in the past [...]

[Read more →]

FrieNDA captured my 2005 reference to sharing private ideas with friends while asking them to keep it quiet. FriendDA is Rands’ take on the same concept. His sub-headline for the post? “Slightly more than a hearty handshake.” I like his slightly different spelling. (Google does, too.) Rands went so far as to write a FriendDA [...]

[Read more →]

Dan Farber previewed the next phase of CNET’s rolling redesign in today’s blog post. See the full image of CNET News here. My previous comments hold. The body of the home page looks fine, with no complaints. However, I find the reflection in the sub-brands of “News” and “Download.com” quite distracting, and hard to read. [...]

[Read more →]

When I saw this recent headline Aruba to buy ‘Switzerland of network management’, I cringed and knew I had to share this tiny rant. Too many people in technology want to be “Switzerland.” Nothing against the Swiss or their beautiful country, but this terrible shorthand needs to expire. No one should aim for that position, [...]

[Read more →]

I didn’t have any excitement about moving to Mac OS X 10.4.11, especially since Safari 3 was a required part of the update. I’m happy to say that Safari 3 has improved cookie management, nearly catching up with Firefox and Opera. I can finally search within the thousands of cookies and easily remove just the [...]

[Read more →]

This weekend, I read Happy Blogiversary, the Wall Street Journal’s review of 10 years of blogging. I found it first online, pointed to by Scott Karp because Dick Costolo cited Publishing 2.0 as one of his favorites. Skimming it over the weekend, via satellite broadband, the video vignettes embedded in the piece wouldn’t play…the player [...]

[Read more →]

Confirmation of the rumors started with typical Dick Costolo panache: “Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true.” What a great team and a great product. I first met [...]

[Read more →]

You know how it’s hard to write something brief sometimes? We’ve worked hard to make shortcuts come alive. The power of DNS just got a lot easier to explain. Sure, you don’t need to care about DNS itself, but shortcuts are something you can see, something you can use…almost something you can touch. After improving [...]

[Read more →]

Update: I was burned by the April Fool’s Joke. If you can’t pull it on April 1, I don’t know if it counts… but oh well. The acquisition of F**ckedCompany.com by TechCrunch makes some sense. Still, Mike Arrington might want to reconsider this quote. That does not bode well for the future – there just [...]

[Read more →]