IT and Project Selection

I’ve just read an article from Harvard Business Review called Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology. I’m not familiar with Andrew McAfee’s work, but according to his biography he has a background in mechanical engineering and management. I’m not sure what level of involvement he has had with implementing… Read More

Cancel The Account

Wow. I’d heard about ‘Customer Service’ people trying to hold onto customers through all kinds of nefarious means, but for a graphic example of how not to treat your customers, check out this recording of an AOL customer service person giving one of their customers grief because they want to… Read More

Corporate Censorship

I read a couple of interesting articles in the last 24 hours that highlight something I have personally observed: self-censorship by companies. Yesterday I read about a Sun employee, Tim Bray, who posted on his personal blog that Sun’s Blackbox datacentre-in-a-shipping-container project was “just totally drop-dead fucking cool”. Tim works… Read More

The Moral High Ground

Things seem to be rather mental over there in the US of A. I just read this story in the Boston globe. Apparently the Republican NRCC has set up an automated phone system to call people and purport to be calling about a Democrat candidate. The recording doesn’t announce up… Read More

On Licensing

I have recently had cause to re-evaluate the license I use for a piece of software I wrote a few years ago. BEEPy is a Python network communications library I wrote to teach myself Python several years ago. Well, when I say wrote, I mean wrote to the point that… Read More

seafelt 2.1 Progress

I’ve made a lot of progress with seafelt 2.1 lately. I managed to implement the TCP polling framework with some working examples in a frenzy of activity over two weekends and about 40 hours all together. The big bonus for me was really learning how Jim’s backend framework actually works.… Read More

The Terrorists Have Won

If you still need proof that the terrorists have won, you need look no further than the way the latest threat has been handled. It’s an utter fiasco. Apparently there’s a plot to blow up a plane, probably involving liquid explosives, probably going from the UK to the US. Lots… Read More

The Deadly Things Zone

I laughed heartily when reading this thread over at MetaFilter about all the wondrous deadly animals, plants, and so on that we have here in Australia. I was particularly amused by this: I spent the first 11 years of my life inside the Deadly Things Zone. :) Read More

Chopin and The Internet

Two basically unrelated musings for today. Last week The West Wing episode on ABC was ‘Han’. It was a story about a North Korean pianist who was in the US on a goodwill visit, playing concerts, promoting better diplomatic relationgs between the two countries, that sort of thing. He wanted… Read More

I Don’t Like Perl

The transition is complete. I am now a full blown Python weenie. I’ve recently had cause to write some Perl, something I haven’t done in several years and I’ve come to the conclusion that Perl is ugly. Once upon a time I was a Perl weenie. I relished in the… Read More