tech

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian Computing: This isn’t working. We’ve been stuck for years, the backlog never goes away, and we fight the same old fights with a new generation of management. The Enterprise is too complex, too turbulent, too confused, to be a fruitful place to study the craft of software. We don’t know when it’s right. Yes, we sometimes know when it’s wrong, when we can’t even deliver the software. But what is success? Praise from a self-interested manager? An incremental improvement in corporate throughput? A pile of surveys filled in by our students? A nice writeup in The Journal?

I propose that enterprise software is a hard problem that we can understand only after we solve an easier case, one that lies close to hand. Before we can tackle the enterprise, we need to write software for people. Not software for everyone, but software for you and for me. [Awesome piece. Not to be missed.]

A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac

A Few Steps For Shoes On A Mac:

Will Larson: Stacks are containers that build downward, and flows are containers that build rightward and then downward. Flows are like words in a book. Stacks are like entries in a log file. The main Shoes window is a flow, and a stack or flow can have any number of stacks and flows inside of it.

This blog post here does a good job of getting people around some of the foul smells in the last Shoes build for OS X. I’ve still got to wrap up the video object for Mac before releasing the next build, which I hope will fall into place before the week’s end.

And, well, I could really use some Leopard users on the Shoes list.

[Interesting stuff.]
Source: hackety org

Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift

Gmail gets a JavaScript facelift: As one small example, one team member reverse-engineered jscript.dll to figure out how its GC algorithm worked, and was horrified to find that it had hard-coded, arbitrary limits on how many objects could be allocated before a GC would occur. This led to an insane amount of effort optimizing the code to reduce the number of allocations in core code paths. [More good info in the article and links.]
Source: Ajaxian

Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker

Jackass of the Week: NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker: NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker claims Apple “destroyed the music business in terms of pricing”. As John Paczkowski points out, the going rate for digital downloads pre-iTunes was zero. Zero.

So while they sit around until hell freezes over waiting for Apple to voluntarily just start sharing iPod hardware profits with entertainment companies for no good reason whatsoever, that’s what they’re going to get for video now, too: zero.

[There’s a lot of entrenched thinking around “content”. More here. Disclosure: Oxygen, the company I work for was bought by NBC Universal.]
Source: Daring Fireball

Eye-Fi Releases Wireless SD Memory Card

Eye-Fi Releases Digital Camera Wireless SD Memory Card | Laughing Squid: Eye-Fi has just announced the release of their new wireless SD memory card for digital cameras. The card, which they have been beta testing over the last year and a half, connects your local wi-fi network and automatically uploads photos stored on the card to your computer or to one of 17 online photo sharing services and social networks. The 2GB SD card is now available and is priced at $99.99.[Nice. I’ve been waiting over a year for this product to be released… now to see if they got the details right…]
Source: