Glib beats insightful
Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.
The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on. (more…)
MySQL: what is the problem?
at 11:50 am on Saturday, 19 April 2008
MySQL’s decision to produce proprietary add-ons to its highly successful open source database has been widely misunderstood, and in some cases spun to produce the impression that it is a failure of open source. (more…)
Websites do not need to support Internet Explorer?
As much as I dislike Microsoft Internet Explorer, and as much as I wish that people would make their own lives and those of website developers better by using better web browsers, I have always taken supporting it as a necessary evil. It is bundled with Windows and most people take whatever it suits MS gives them. (more…)
Wired’s open source myth
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
Who downloads Linux
at 10:23 am on Monday, 18 February 2008
I noticed that most people downloading Mandriva One using bit torrent were using Windows clients, but almost everyone downloading Arch Linux seems to be using Ktorrent. The latter is to be expected, but the former surprised me. (more…)
How to make customers buy
at 11:26 am on Sunday, 11 November 2007
Suppose customer A buys a product combination X + Y, and hires B to install the product for them. Suppose you are the vendor of Z and had hoped the customer would buy X + Z. It looks like you have lost the deal: but someone came up with an ingenious solution. (more…)
Modx light document tree
While moving Money Terms to Modx CMS, I found that, though Modx is otherwise quite wonderful, the manager (admin interface) was painfully slow, and my (shared) server could not cope with the load it created. The main problem was the extremely heavy document tree that the manager displays, I was forced into finding a solution. (more…)
The software trap
at 1:08 pm on Friday, 10 August 2007
Software companies have long ignored piracy most developing Asian countries, as a way of building market share. They are now starting to crack-down, and Adobe have apparently started on Sri Lanka. A friend of mine asked me what a business faced with a sudden increase in its costs (licences for some of this stuff are expensive), could do by way of switching to open source. This is my reply. (more…)
Switching back from (K)Ubuntu
at 6:31 am on Saturday, 21 July 2007
I used Ubuntu and Kubuntu for over an year, but I recently switched back. Ubuntu has its strengths, but its fans forget its weaknesses. Software installation with Synaptic is superb (the best on any OS), as is the range of packages available. However, other admin tools are lacking. (more…)
Analyser for Google Webmaster Tools link info
at 7:51 pm on Tuesday, 1 May 2007
I have written a simple program to provide a slightly more convenient summary of information in the CSV of incoming link information you can download from Google Webmaster Tools. (more…)
