A friend posted on Facebook this video of a baby using an iphone with the tag “If there was ever any doubt that the iPhone interface is so intuitive that a baby could use it, here’s proof.”
I replied “The problem is the UI doesn’t mature beyond that age group”, to which she replied “Why should it?”
The answer is, because babies using iPhones to play music and look at pictures doesn’t imply that UX can lead to super productive tools for more demanding needs that grownups have.…
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Couple of Hacker News/proggit articles worth combining today: “where my mouth is” and “RBS Mainframe Meltdown: A Year On”. The first article is about a long-time LISP guy who has bet his company on using Clojure. The second is about how the Royal Bank of Scotland has had a complete computing meltdown with their ancient mainframe running COBOL and is going to be spending half a billion pounds trying to fix it.…
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There’s been a ton of flap about some presentations made at TechCrunch “Disrupt”, deservedly so. The “Titstare” presentation has generated the most backlash. There’s also the “Circle Shake” presentation. ValleyWag has the details on them both, in case you haven’t heard already.
Enter these into the annals of now dozens of “tech” conference presentations that were inappropriate or, even worse, misogynistic, homophobic and otherwise prejudiced. There are even serial inappropriate presenters, such as Matt Van Horn (google search).…
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Once upon a time, long long ago – i.e. 1995 – rotisserie chicken was a huge business.
The trend was started with Boston Chicken (now Boston Market). The idea was making a healthier, classier, more expensive alternative to fast food. The original founder of Boston Chicken bought the idea and franchised it (not unlike Ray Kroc) because the owners were ringing up an average of $13.75 per bill.
Many clones popped up in the early-90s.…
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A couple days ago on Hacker News, the thread about Chrome’s security for stored password erupted and culminated with one of Chrome’s security mavens posting responses. Within that chain, he posted this quip:
I appreciate how this appears to a novice, but we’ve literally spent years evaluating it and have quite a bit of data to inform our position. And while you’re certainly well intentioned, what you’re proposing is that that we make users less safe than they are today by providing them a false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior.…
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I’ve been known to say silly things like “everyone must learn to code” and “STEM education trumps all other education”. BUT, hear me out on this one.
The future is pretty clear: the knowledge-worker economy. In the future, people are never cogs. We’ve automated everything cog-like, long ago. The people who do that automation – who facilitate it, create it – those people are gold. Their knowledge and ability to create is what empowers the companies that employ them.…
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In the wake of the PRISM scandal, many have wondered about the trust we give to corporations that mine data. Do we trust AT&T with those same phone records? Do we trust Google with the knowledge of everything that’s in our mind (by way of evaluating our searches?)
I feel fairly confident that corporations will try to act in a responsible way with that information, at least within their own corridors (maybe not when forced to give it to the government).…
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There’s been a lot of talk about technical interview questions and such on the interwebs. Google has concluded that brainteasers don’t work. There are libraries of interview questions out there, Glassdoor keeps a record of interview questions, etc. etc.
You know what? Technical prowess matters, but there are much, much easier signs of whether someone will be a great engineer or not. I wish I had the hard numbers to back this up but for now you’ll have to take my word for it.…
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Since we announced our funding at Radius on Wednesday, just about every recruiter and recruiting website in the Bay Area has spammed me because we’re hiring engineers (yes, we are hiring).
When negotiating terms with them, I’m being fairly aggressive though. I’m only offering about half of what they’re getting from other firms. Why is that? Because I challenge this notion that programmers are a scarce resource that they somehow know to tap into, or that their website has cornered the market on.…
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One of the bittersweet things about using Java is that there’s a library for everything. The good is that if you need to do something, there’s a library. The bad is that the documentation is typically terrible, and it can take hours (or days!) to figure out how the hell to make something work. Today’s lesson in this is testing Jersey services when you’re deploying on Embedded Jetty and Spring.…
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