I was looking through some PHP code from a third-party vendor recently, and saw something that made my jaw drop. It’s pretty innocent-looking, at first. Here’s a somewhat anonymized and genericized version of the code, but the thing that bothered me is still intact. It’s not really a bug, per se; the code will function as [...]
Author Archives: Kai MacTane
A Single Context for All Social Interaction: Merely Quixotic, or Dangerously Misguided?
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 – 8:31 pm
I recently read a blog post by Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer, entitled “Why do we have so many lives?” In it, Mr. Widrich says: We have a private life, a public life. We have a work life, a school life, a party life, a love life and I am sure you can name lots [...]
A Failed Goal
Saturday, December 31st, 2011 – 2:26 pm
Near the beginning of this year, I published a piece called “Ada Lovelace Day Is Not Enough“. In it, I noted that only 8.69% of my 2010 posts had been marked with the “gender” tag, and it would be nice to increase that percentage. (But it was still an improvement over 2009′s 4.76%.) I said: So [...]
Are We Always New At Everything?
Saturday, December 17th, 2011 – 4:20 pm
The trend in Microsoft’s products for the past 15 years or more has been toward making things easy for the people who have never used the software before. Of course, as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer of those people. The Ribbon is introduced in the Help file thus: And if you’ve used previous versions [...]
Can You Strike it Rich in a Startup?
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 – 9:21 pm
Startups are known for being places where people work really hard, often at unsustainable paces. “Work hard, play hard,” is the oft-invoked slogan, and there are usually foosball tables, game consoles, and other signifiers of fun lying around the office. (How often they get used is another story; the reality can easily be more like “work [...]
When Your Computer Catches Fire
Sunday, November 13th, 2011 – 2:12 pm
Occasionally, I amuse myself by reading Not Always Right. I really shouldn’t, as it’s always bad for my opinion of humanity, but sometimes I just can’t look away. And occasionally, it clues me in to a teachable moment. Like this one, which recently appeared there: Caller: “My computer is a fire risk.” Me: “What makes you say that?” [...]
Say It Short
Friday, October 28th, 2011 – 7:12 pm
Remember when the movie 2010: Odyssey Two came out? There was a simple, easy way to say it: We all called it “Twenty-Ten”. And for a few decades, folks like Terence McKenna have been warning about what might happen in the year 2012, and we all thought of it as “twenty-twelve”. These things are short, [...]
Her Name is Skud
Friday, October 7th, 2011 – 7:24 am
Skud has been involved in Open Source, and in activism and advocacy, for years and years. She does a little of everything, having coded, written docs, managed developers, and spoken out on important topics. She has been, or is currently, a contributor to projects ranging from Eureka to Perl to Xen to HTML::Mason. Way back in [...]
What Are We Giving Up With E-Text?
Saturday, September 24th, 2011 – 3:19 pm
Engineering is about tradeoffs, and each technology has its advantages and drawbacks. Whenever we leave one technology behind and adopt a new one, we’re sacrificing something. We may be making a terrific trade, getting a hundred times as much cool stuff as give up — but we’re still giving up something, and we should be aware [...]
A Follow-Up on Pronounceability
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 – 2:11 pm
Late last year, I wrote about making sure your domain name is both spellable and pronounceable. Well, I just encountered a site that technically gets it right, in that its domain name is exchangebitcoins.com. But as soon as you look at their logo, which presumably tells you what they actually want to be called? At that [...]