UI and XP design and development are undeniably a big deal, but they’re only part of the problem. What size part? That depends on your sales model. For a consumer product designed to sell itself via the web, it’s well over half of the problem. UI and XP are pretty much the only differentiators for smartphone social media…

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Every internal technical email list I’ve ever been on has had one of these conversations: A) module XYZ didn’t work by itself, what’s up? B) superstition and voodoo, XYZ will EAT YOUR SOUL. C) did you remember to click the button? A) seems to work okay when you click the button, but maybe I’d better…

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http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit has me thinking about a conversation I had with a friend last week… The gist is that easier entry levels mean lamer entrants. Oh, we can spin it so many ways… cheaper entrants! Entrants who aren’t wasting their time on unimportant details! Or we can question what they know if they go from throwing…

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Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants was a pretty good read, but I found myself disagreeing on a fundamental point… I don’t like that it treats technology as something separate from humanity. Perhaps I’d feel differently if I hadn’t read The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution first, but I did. That book’s argument that humanity…

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I’m not impressed by much in the virtualization space… they’re all done with their two valid use cases and are trying to expand into unnatural places. The valid use cases are the obvious data center centralization and what I’ll call general geekery. Data center centralization is a backlash against the common sysadmin practice of one…

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Companies, like individuals, have an inverse relationship between money, time, and age. When your company is young, you have lots of time and little money. Although it feels like there’s very little time at all because you’re continually struggling to prevail in the market, there’s actually a great deal of time available for problem-solving, and…

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Law the First: People Suck. This is nothing about particular types or roles of people, it’s just a statement of fact. I am people and I suck too. We’ve got brains hard-wired to look for free gravy and four-leaf clovers, and we spend way too much time doing it wrong, doing it over, and bickering over…

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The oldest site on the Wayback Machine is my first Zope site, from early 2002, but I’ve had a website and a home server since 1998. I’m pretty sure I registered the domain name in 1999 or so, but can’t find any records. From Slackware through Red Hat through Mandrake through SuSE to Ubuntu, served…

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Through embracing and extending our valued employees, we will functionally evaluate and thereby perform thorough analysis, quantification, and optimization of all interactions, self-initiated or otherwise, between lower, hairier members of the primate family and assorted forms of pasta (including but not limited to the Italianate and Sino-Asian families of wheat, rice, and soy flours). We…

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