Category: observations

Ceiva

The internet picture frame: a high-quality LCD screen, a little bit of code that can dial out, retrieve image files, and display them. All you need is a phone line and AC power.
Continue reading “a useful internet appliance”

The temple across the street has inaugurated wedding season, from what I can gather. The bands invariably set up their PA equipment to bathe my house in frenetic klezmer music: OK in the afternoon, but when they start at 8 -9 PM, it gets old fast.

I’m a java skeptic. The promise of write once, run everywhere has morphed into write once, suffer everywhere. The whole notion of java applications, given that your code will only perform as well as the virtual machine, meaning your OS vendor, permits, has never really caught fire. Applets turned out to be a bust: CGI and Flash can do much the same thing in a more platform-agnostic way. It has always struck me as a solution in search of a problem.
Continue reading “how tools come of age”

Revenge of the Nerds

If you start a startup, don’t design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow. And if you don’t, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were.
Continue reading “suspicions confirmed”

<-Relevare | Bringing the right information, to the right people->

I decided to learn more about a robot I logged. But their website is content-free unless you have Flash.
Continue reading “we don’t really want *you* to see our website”

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Backlinks

Occasionally, there’s an idea so simple and powerful that you have to drop whatever you’re doing and implement it immediately.

Only on Southwest Airlines . . . . .

A mother and her 5 year old boarded a plane, and he asked why there were no baby airplanes. After all, he knew there were baby horses and baby sheep and baby dogs and baby cats: why not baby airplanes?

“Why don’t you go ask the flight attendant?” suggested the mother.

So off the boy goes, and puts his question to the flight attendant.

She takes a breath, smiles and asks, “Did your mommy say you should ask me that?”

The boy nods his head yes.

“Well, you tell her it’s because we always pull out on time. Ask her to explain that to you.”

one hundred of these little nuggets. I never imagined I would reach 100 entries but it does seem to scratch an itch.

Thanks for reading.

UNIX Porting Guide

For years, power users and developers have recognized the strengths of UNIX and its offshoots. While UNIX-based operating systems are indispensable to developers and power users, consumers have rarely been able to enjoy their benefits because of the perceived complexity. Instead consumers have lived with a generation of desktop computers that could only hope to achieve the strengths that UNIX-based operating systems have had from the beginning.
Continue reading “Power, stability, simplicity, and elegance”

mozdev.org – chimera: index

Of course, there are some benefits to the Mozilla project. Galeon for Unix, and now Chimera/Navigator for Mac OS X.
Continue reading “the fruit of mozilla”