I listen to Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood on the Stack Overflow Podcast and yell at the radio.
By RickMeasham | September 19, 2009
From comments they’ve made, I’m sure I’m not the only one. Here’s an open letter to them:
Dear Joel and Jeff,
You lauched Server Fault for SysAdmins, but you admit to not knowing that crowd as well as you know the programming crowd. That’s fine. But you need to find someone who does understand that crowd — [...]
Topics: Programming | No Comments »
Environmentalists have it wrong — the economies of scale and inventing the future
By RickMeasham | September 10, 2009
There’s a push on to ‘return’ to the idylic times where a man would work the farm chatting to his cows while his lovely wife baked a loaf of bread (probably with a dab of flour on her nose) while a pail of milk (direct from the aforementioned cows) stands on the bench beside her.
There’s a push on to do-it-yourself. To be handy around the garden and home. To plant one’s own vegetables and to bake one’s own bread.
But is that really good for the environment? I doubt it
Read the rest of this post »Topics: Issues, Politics | No Comments »
Geek Herding
By RickMeasham | August 31, 2009
Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. It’s been some time since I last posted to this site.
I haven’t stopped writing, but instead have been trying to ’seed’ my new site with content. There’s only so many words in my head at any one time! Anyway, it’s now ready to be revealed to the world.
A [...]
Topics: News, Programming, Work | No Comments »
Announcing a release day before you build
By RickMeasham | April 10, 2009
When there’s an idea mooted, a lot needs to be considered before going to market. But if you were to write a detailed spec for everything — including mockups for every screen and functional detail for every action — without discussing the basic concept with every stake holder, you’d often waste a lot of time.
Read the rest of this post »Topics: Programming, Work | No Comments »
High Five!
By RickMeasham | February 10, 2009
We hired a new guy at work a couple of years back (how time flies!) who started trying to give everyone a ‘high five‘. It was rather strange an uncomfortable — after all we’d never had deliberate physical contact with each other before — but the intention was pure so I joined in and high-fived [...]
Read the rest of this post »Topics: Funny, Work | 1 Comment »
Give Up and Use Tables
By RickMeasham | January 24, 2009
(If you don’t write HTML, you can skip this post. It doesn’t concern you and will just confuse you. Basically: there’s a weird bunch of people who want to avoid a particularly useful way to lay out a web page just because they hold to this notion that “tables are for data”, and the fact [...]
Read the rest of this post »Topics: Javascript, Programming, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
The Black Triangle: A name for the event described by the 80/20 rule
By RickMeasham | January 24, 2009
What Black Triangles can you celebrate this week? When you find one, savor it and celebrate it. Even if nobody else understands.
Read the rest of this post »Topics: Programming | No Comments »
Lotteries: Mathmatically speaking, they’re not really a tax on the stupid
By RickMeasham | December 30, 2008
Note: There are a lot of numbers in this post, so I’ve rounded a lot of them off, and included some footnotes. If you don’t like numbers, then consider yourself warned.
It’s been said* that “Lotteries are a tax on the stupid”. The premise being that anyone who spends money on a lottery ticket is just [...]
Topics: Issues | 2 Comments »
Electronic Voting: How is it so damned hard?
By RickMeasham | November 4, 2008
OK, so it’s the eve of the US Presidential election so I thought it was worth taking a minute to rant about how screwed up the US has gotten their implementation of ballot casting.
At first I just couldn’t understand how they made it so damned hard. Then I saw a ballot paper. For my non-US [...]
Topics: Politics | 1 Comment »
TV I watch: American Chopper
By RickMeasham | November 4, 2008
I watch a bit of TV, and often voraciously consume any new program that grabs my interest. On the Discovery Channel a couple of years back I “discovered” American Hot Rod. I think they were having an episode-per-night month of repeats. So I watched them all and then kept watching for new episodes coming out.
I’d [...]
Topics: Television | No Comments »
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