After the initial joy of joining Facebook and playing around with it a little, I find myself entering the website less and less. Applications always seemed annoying to me (some of them are nice, but very few are useful.) I didn’t want to post anything too personal on Facebook because I have this blog and [...]
Even if the following were motivated by business interests, they are still good things: Lowered Windows Vista’s price (I already switched to Ubuntu Linux) Opened “high volume” Microsoft software specifications (It’s still not a good idea to try and implement a “perfect” Office clone) Decided that Internet Explorer 8 will be standards compliant by default [...]
What makes good software? I always felt this question was too big for me to answer, never seeing myself as astute in the software development business as the big guns like Herb Sutter, Raymond Chen and the likes. However, this is a blog and as blogs go you can post something today and say the [...]
In a recent post I wrote that I installed the non-free driver for my video card on my new Ubuntu Linux installation. A friend asked me why I had to pay for the driver. I didn’t. The word “free” has two main meanings in the software world: Costs nothing (also known as “Free as in [...]
Scott Adams announced that he will write less on his blog from now on. He kept a one-post-per-day schedule for over 2 years, which is big even for a writer. Scott’s blog was one of my favorite daily reads and since I started reading the blog over a year ago, I haven’t missed even one [...]
I was looking today at a post on Engadget called “Desktop Evolution: Windows and Mac OS Visual Comparison Through the Years” and expected to see how, over the years, the desktop became more and more beautiful and usable. But I was extremely under-impressed. Windows Vista looks nice but nothing really exciting (also, I can’t ignore [...]
Social networks are the big thing these days. Recently I joined two social networks: LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network, was fun to play with at first. I, too, joined the “add your friends” race and added as many as I could find (I didn’t just add anyone, though. Only people I actually [...]
One of the latest most talked about “wars” in the software world is the office document formats war. Both formats are XML based, and both are used to describe the miscellaneous office documents like Word and Excel documents. The OpenDocument format was developed by a committee and is already an ISO standard. OOXML, on the [...]
Every once in a while someone comes to me asking if I want to participate on a new idea. I guess everyone wants their “million dollar exit”. Naturally, so do I. Unfortunately I haven’t made any progress lately with ideas, but I’m not pushing it – when the right idea comes, I’ll have all the [...]
The old toilet seat “fight between the sexes” will probably always be a mystery to me. While I always return the seat to its previous position when I’m in someone else’s place, I wouldn’t mind lifting it and lowering it back as much as needed in my own home. Having said that, it turns out [...]