gods wear hats

I’ve been using iCal on Snow Leopard for about three months or so (I was on the pre-release program) as a replacement for Entourage. My company uses Microsoft Exchange for mail and calendar, and I thought it would be valuable to record my experiences with using Mail and iCal. I’d been using Entourage [...]

After a year of working at my current job, I have received 15,000 emails. This doesn’t include any automated ones (which I delete), spam, etc. I don’t feel like I get a lot of email, so I worked it out:
365 – (2*52) – 10 = 251 working days per annum
15000 mails / 251 [...]

Took me forever (well, five months) to do it, but I finally signed up for an iTunes account today. Now I’ll be able to put some apps on my iPhone (apart from ones that I wrote myself).

I got promoted to CTO today. Exciting stuff.

[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Garak: It’s vile.
Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Garak: It’s insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.

- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – [...]

In virtually everything to do with software, there is often some kind of metaphor used to describe it. Often, these are taken from the building or manufacturing industries (even some of our titles are taken from these: Architect, Engineer, etc.) and many times different metaphors seem to suit different situations better. If you [...]

I’ve been playing with Google’s App Engine as part of their beta and I started thinking about what benefit Google got from it. Presumably, there will be some kind of monetary payback as those apps which exceed their “free” limit then start paying, but at the prices they are charging it seems unlikely that [...]

MJ recently wrote about the Wise Fool, as a contrast to the Wisdom of Crowds. However, I’d like to ramble for a bit on why the Wise Fool is a great thing to have in a software development team.
Developers solve problems. This is their raison d’etre. If you have a technological itch [...]

MJ writes about the iPhone for games:

The tools for building are readily available and free (though there’s a £50 charge for the certificate)
Due to the App Store distribution, the customers are accessible and many of them are looking for new software to load
The hype machine is already built

.
I think this outlook on the existing mobile [...]

MJ recently blogged about identifying one’s own strengths. I thought it would be useful to share a tool that I’ve used over the last seven years as a herder of cats (read: software development manager). I call it the self-development window (or the career development window, as I often use it for that [...]