advocacy

Caught in Apple restart hell

Caught in Apple restart hell: Oh, and if you think I have something against Apple, no I don’t. But my computer, a 17-inch MacBookPro, has already been in the shop twice. My son’s MacBookPro 15-inch has been in the shop twice and has a dead USB port now so both of our machines need to go back into the shop.

What’s ironic is lots of other computer companies would LOVE to give me free stuff (I don’t take it) but Apple is the only company that’s never raised a PR finger to help me. Instead I feel so honored to spend my money on this crap. Why? Just to have a shiny machine?

Well, sorry. The shine is wearing off. Screw you Apple.

[I really wish he hadn’t mixed these two issues… that of him having problems and the lack of PR love. The second issue shouldn’t even be brought up, especially in this context, as it makes it seem like the problem is that Apple’s given him no free stuff. Now, as far as problems are concerned, there’s nothing more frustrating than a dead machine for most of us who live on one machine and don’t have a shelf full of replacements. So I feel his pain as Apple’s theme of “It just works” can be annoying, since it doesn’t always, and despite an OK track record things still things do go wrong for everyone at times. I wish Apple didn’t claim this, since it isn’t true, but still, the issues here got mixed beyond my ability to parse them. ]
Source: Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger

DOT to Install Sleek New Bike Parking Shelters

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: DOT to Install Sleek New Bike Parking Shelters: While the NYPD, Parks Department, MTA, unnamed authorities and, of course, bike thieves, busily clip locks and cart off New Yorkers’ bicycles in great number, the Department of Transportation is making sure that not only do bike commuters have a classy spot to park outdoors, but their tushies won’t get wet when it rains. Next month, cyclists will be happy to see the first of many new public bike-parking shelters popping up near transit hubs throughout the city. Word has it there was a bit of flexibility built in to the Cemusa bus shelter contract and DOT decided to get a bit creative and try this out.[It’s about time…]
Source: StreetsBlog

Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time

Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time:Help is on the way, in the form of bytecode interpreters and vm’s for Safari and Mozilla, though the future of IE is still cloudy (still, there is a plan to bring Tamarin to IE). But if the new Browser version don’t arrive quickly enough, or if they don’t fully solve the problem of browsers crashing once an hour, then a mass migration to Opera may be the best we can hope for. At worst, content and application producers will opt for more stable non-Ajax alternatives such as Flash or Silverlight.
[I’m no so heavy a user of my browser under most conditions. I find apps that connect to the web either as services or as app specific browsers are a more compelling experience, and so many of the “web apps” I use run locally on my desktop while I have my home environment. But I can see the problem and work hard as coder to minimize the problem, would be nice if the lower level stuff made this easier and less leak prone.]
Source: Ajaxian

ZFS and The Holy Grail of Storage

ZFS and The Holy Grail of Storage:

I’ve wanted that for years, but I’ve largely dismissed it as a pipe dream, because it doesn’t fit cleanly into the drive/RAID/LVM/filesystem model that everything uses. The only thing that I’ve seen that even comes close is Drobo, and it’s supposedly fairly slow and really just too “magic” for me to trust.

[Even this isn’t what I really want… although the Drobo seems nice. I want the same sort of thing, but I want to two pools… one for the time machine backups and one for the “live boot image” type backup. I admit that in some cases that might be overkill, but not for business related stuff. I admit that it wouldn’t take long because of the “virtual nature” of so many apps to go from blank machine or disk to up and running (all my code is in repositories, schedule, mail and stuff is on the web etc., but still) but I keep a fairly up to date back up anyway, because if the failure occurs near a deadline (and doesn’t it always? Praise Murphy!) I don’t really want to be mucking about with that, I just want to get things done. Anyway, having two per machine would make it easy to have both, and having one hardware device that could do that or more would make it easier to manage. In the meantime the individual hard drives are piling up… I should add that a pair of Drobo’s per machine seems costly to me… Other suggestions?]
Source: *scottstuff*

scripteka

Prototype UI: Prototype UI is a javascript library based on Prototype 1.6 and Script.aculo.us. It's an extensive and fast growing library of UI components which can be used in complex web applications. Currently, Prototype UI provides such modules as Carousel, Modal window, Shadow and Context menu which can be used as one package or independently.”[Scripteka is collection of prototype.j extensions and libs. Excellent.]
Source: Scripteka

The $8 billion story/scam or Gift cards are for chumps

The $8 billion story/scam: Last year, more than $8,000,000,000 was wasted on these cards. Not in the value spent, but in fees and breakage. When you give a card, if it doesn’t get used, someone ends up keeping your money, and it’s not the recipient. People spent more than eight billion dollars for nothing… buying a product that isn’t as good as cash.

If I were a creative non-profit, I’d start marketing alternative gift cards. They would consist of PDF files you could print out and hand over to people when you give them cash. It could say,

“Merry Christmas. Here’s your present, go spend it on what you really want. AND, just to make sure we’re in the right holiday spirit, I made a donation in your name to Aworthycause.”

Stories come and go. It’s up to marketers to spread the good ones.

[Right on! Spread the meme: Gift cards are for chumps!]
Source: Seth’s Blog

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL

CSS 3: A Giant Serving Of FAIL:

In my “Standards Heresy” talk I noted pretty bluntly that CSS 3 is a joke. A sad, sick joke being perpetrated by people who clearly don’t build actual web apps. If the preponderance of the working group did, we’d already have useful things like behavioral CSS being turned into recommendations and not turds like CSS namespaces and CSS Print Profile. And I’m not even sure if the “Advanced” Layouts cluster-fsck should be mentioned for the fear that more people might actually look at it. You’d expect an “advanced layouts” module to give us hbox and vbox behaviors or a grid layout model or stretching…but no, the “answer” apparently is ascii art. No, I’m not making this up. It’s sad commentary that you can propose this kind of dreck at the W3C and get taken seriously.

Beyond what’s obviously wrong with the avenues being (inexplicably) pursued, there’s a lot to read into what’s not being worked on. Namely the serious and myriad problems with the basics of how CSS rules are written and applied.

[We were discussing this just yesterday… CSS is really a mess. I wonder if the browser folks could be talked in to supporting something more grounded in people’s needs?]
Source: Continuing Intermittent Incoherency

Ask 37signals: Is formal education important?

Ask 37signals: Is formal education important?: What we care about is intelligence, curiosity, passion, character, motivation, taste, intuition, writing skills, and the ability to make smart value judgements. A few of these qualities may benefit from exposure to higher education, but we feel most of them are better learned through practical experience. Further, we don’t believe taste can be taught—you either got it or you don’t. We believe taste is one of the most important qualities in anyone we hire. [Amen.]
Source: SIGNAL VS. NOISE

Luke on Chris Donnan on Agile and Humilty

Luke says:

At one point in his writeup, Chris notes that this was the “YEARS MOST IMPORTANT deliverable for many, many people”. This is a big neon warning sign. Part of the strategy of iterative delivery in Scrum is to avoid this situation. In a well-functioning scrum organization, releases are a non-event. In fact, Jeff Sutherland was recently telling Ken and I about his weekly releases at PatientKeeper, where there is little fanfare, just an automated deployment, and if the phone doesn’t ring from the customer, the release was a success.

There are plenty of reasons why iterative delivery might not have been viable in Chris’ particular situation, of course. Still, when a situation causes you to re-evaluate your approach to building software, it’s a good idea to look again at the decisions where you strayed from the ideal and ask yourself what you can do differently moving forward.

[My addition: One of the reason’s for “constant releasing” is because releasing is often hard. The only way (IMHO) to make hard things easy is to do them over and over and over again. You slowly (and iteratively) get better at them. In fact, it is a favorite technique of mine for places that can’t seem to grasp iterative development. Say something along the lines of “This is really hard and we’re not doing it well. We’re going to do it once a week (or whatever) until we have it down.” After that it’ll take care of itself… So while this may not have helped in this situation, which I know next to nothing about, stick in your pocket as a technique for when it can be applied. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get it workin’]
Source: Luke Melia