November 2004 Archives
Robert Scoble talks about how he's reading approx. 1000 Feeds.
You're clicking an awful lot, Robert. I'm reading only 275 feeds at this time, but it looks like I'm somewhat more efficient. NetNewsWire allows me to read all my feeds just by hitting the space bar on my keyboard. No clicks. No labouring with Fitt's law. Plus, the space bar is pretty, uhm, easy to hit.
Every time I'm hitting space, NetNewsWire advances to the next unread post, scrolls entries which won't fit on a page etc. Very efficient. If I encounter a post which I would like to comment on or read more in-depth, I press "->" and the post will be loaded in a separate tab.
The feeds are organized by relevance, which means I will read our companies internal feeds first, then feeds related to software development in general, usual suspects etc.
I'm pretty sure NewsGator allows for keyboard navigation, too (although this would pretty hard on a Tablet PC, wouldn't it?)
When you're working with a tool, someone owns the keyboard, and everyone else is an observer. It's easy to develop the habit of "check the database" instead of "talk with each other". It's easy for a manager to think that he's managing the group when he's really looking at his screen.Excellent thoughts.
Lie to the customer until the techs make it true.
No offense. ROFL.
Made in USA - why americans make good software, and good movies, but bad places to live, and bad cars. (Via Small Values of Cool.)
At least in software, learning by doing is way more efficient than theorizing about something for ages. To rephrase my former Kyudo teacher: "Doing it is more important than thinking about it".
"If a sentence is unclear, do not fix it by adding more words. Fix it by splitting it into two sentences. Then maybe add a third."
Great post on writing/revising. I still like bullet-lists, though. Especially if we're talking articles on technical topics. They get a lot of information across for easy digestation.
ZX81.
The very first computer I bought. It was a great piece of engineering, using only 4 chips to create a full-featured computer. Interesting enough, the CPU (Z80) was even responsible for screen refresh. That's why there was a FAST mode, which suspended screen refresh and allowed for faster processing.
There was a chess program fitting into 1K of RAM. I wrote a shoot-em-up piece of software for the ZX81. Software was saved/loaded via a tape recorder.
Those were the days. We had stones for lunch every day. Every other day, there weren't even stones.
...by Volker Weber.
Very cool. For mass adoption, phone/pc integration is crucial.
For quite a while, I was reluctant to use Skype because of the founders legacy (Kazaa), but I've finally gotten around to using Skype and it's just a great piece of software. The sound quality is incredible. Works on multiple platforms. In terms of sound quality, it runs circles around iChat AV.
Worth a read even if you're not a Cocoa/Objective-C programmer:
- The war on bugs (Brent Simmons)
- Effective bug reports (Brent Simmons)
- Painless Bug Tracking (Joel Spolsky)
The developers of the Audion MP3 player comment on the products history, working with Apple, AOL etc. A lengthy, but interesting read.
Anti-grain - A High Quality Rendering Engine for C++. Open Source. Commercial use permitted. MacOS X Carbon, Win32 and other platforms.
Hmm. Sounds too good to be true. Got to dig into that one.
(via Don Park's Daily Habit.
Keith Ray: Debate instead of dialog - Many people in the software biz respond to an attempt at conversation with a rebuttal. This isn't dialog, it's debate.
Hmpf. That's me. I got to work on that one.
Lots of great music in the Magnatune catalog. Interesting business model, too. You can try the complete album before you buy.
(Via IT Conversations.)
If you needed a proof that democracies are lacking a strict voters license (much like a drivers license), you got it today.
