Where you will find my (documented) thoughts, worries, concerns, and issues
Topic
44 posts tagged with this topic.
Senior Developer Shiny Object Syndrome (noun) ˈsiːniə dɪˈvɛləpə ˈʃaɪni ˈɒbʤɪkt ˈsɪndrəʊm A condition wherein a developer, usually far too proud of their own abilities, uses technology and/or tools inappropriate for the …
You’ve heard me rant about software patents before. Today’s stupid thing comes from a news release that Nikon is buying RED, which has been making excellent digital film cameras for years, now. The news …
I suspect that in the decades to come, 2023 will be noted as the year that AI started to take over the world, and humanity both embraced and recoiled in horror at the possibilities. It was no longer science fiction that …
Tired of these yet? So I ran into a weird problem with my V3 site. I decided I had too many pages with no introductory text and it was proving to be awkward to use. Because of the way I had set up the Hugo site, I also …
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Holy cow, Artie couldn’t have been more right. So last night, whilst gathering together more pictures to populate my new and …
You might recall that I tried to make a simple photo sharing site. It worked, but … it wasn’t enough. When you’ve built as many websites as I have, you recognize features almost at a genetic level and …
A few lifetimes ago, I had a rather sizeable Flickr library. It grew over many years, from many vacations, many photos of my growing kids and extended family, and more than a few company events. I liked what Flickr did …
Just over two weeks ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. There is no part of this that makes any sense. How anyone can justify a sum of money greater than the GDP of 56% of all (current) nations to acquire what …
I do truly mean this: I hate it when I’m right. I have to give credit to Zuckerberg for trying, I do. But when you are so utterly blind on a vision without understanding the very audience you’re trying to …
Let’s be clear on one thing before we begin, here: I’m not advocating for widespread death and suffering. If it were possible to have a pandemic without all the pain we’ve collectively endured for the …
Today I had a call with one of our vendors who helps find developers and other technically-skilled contractors that we’ve employed in the past. It wasn’t with Marlene, who’s been my contact with this …
A few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg stood in front of a large audience and declared the presence of the Metaverse, at the same time rebranding his company to “Meta” because it was so darned important. (And …
This morning, I got into a bit of a debate with my friend Duane, the result of a comment about how we need to find a way to tone down the rhetoric and prominence of racist shitheads and state-sponsored lies that are …
You might be one of those unfortunate souls caught in the debacle where a singular developer decided to intentionally hobble open source libraries to spite corporate users. To you, regardless of where you work, my …
For those of us who live on Apple-brand devices, there’s rarely an OS release that goes by without a rush of excitement that should normally require followups with a physician. While the majority come in the iOS (read: …
I have a pet peeve with WordPress. (Actually, I have a few, but we’ll get to the rest later.) This one, I’ll admit, is limited to those of us who develop with WordPress. In short, WordPress hard-codes domains in its …
I’m getting a little tired of this topic. I was tired of it about a day after Steve Jobs first showed the iPad to the world, and the infamous blue LEGO appeared where a Flash plug-in should have been. It wasn’t really so …
At the moment, IE6 still holds about 20% of the market (according to today’s metrics from NetMarketShare). That’s far too large a share for a 8.5 year old browser, especially one that has been superseded by successive …
I was sitting at my kitchen table, poring over recommendations I’m writing for my client (partially communicative, partially CYA), when I had one of those sudden thoughts: I need tea. While I was drinking my tea — a …
The late 16th Century was the dawn of the British Empire. England had triumphed on the seas, and had set its eyes on colonising the New World (before its enemies did). Patents were issued, companies were founded, and …
There’s been a massive upswelling of support for eliminating Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the much-maligned former-heavyweight and former-saviour of the world that now lies as one of the worst pieces of web browsing …
North Americans are relentless at wanting things as cheap as possible. This drive is what has led many companies to look at using less expensive resources from other countries help bring down the costs of products and …
You may have come across a URL for a webpage that is (effectively) building a petition to Microsoft to correct HTML support in Outlook — and if you haven’t, just click on the link. The petition’s purpose is quite simple: …
I saw an interesting Tweet this morning from Mathew Ingram, a columnist for the Globe and Mail. He had just used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to update his install to version 2.7. Being a couple versions behind …
When it was first proposed that I would come to Costa Rica and start up a new office, there were a lot of questions about how all this would be done. Starting a new office means running without the infrastructure that …
I have to chalk this one up to network oddities, which is about the only thing I can think of. Everything seems fine now, and I’m humming away as usual. Still, odd.
Gah. Did the upgrade. Images busted. Things broken. Admin panel might be toast. Gonna be a bit weird for a while. Sorry, folks.
Sigh. There’s nothing more frustrating than watching Apple come so close to finally tying the knot, only to leave threads dangling. I speak, of course, of yesterday’s Let’s Rock event where the apparently-not-dead (but …
Not 45 minutes ago, Google released their latest contribution to the internet: Chrome. This effectively ended years of speculation that Google was writing a browser, that it would throw its hat into the ring and kick off …
A few years ago, I went off to Japan to visit my friend Chris. I took along my (at the time) fancy digital camera: a Canon Pro 90 IS. Fancy in that it was big mega-pixels (for the time) and had an image stabiliser …
Le sigh. I had this problem [[WordPress 2.2.1 broke my site!|when I updated my WordPress to 2.2.1]]: WordPress and K2 stopped talking. Sort of like a bad relationship. Given, the two products are made by entirely …
You’ve probably noticed a few posts about Microsoft on this site. Most of them are rants. And, indeed, there are those who’ve noticed me picking on Microsoft on Experience Matters as well. (Certainly, Neil‘s noticed it …
So recently, I went on a little experiment. I’m an Apple fan-boy, I admit it. I love Apple stuff. I want a Mac. I want to be one of those cool people. I have a Dell. It’s very business-oriented. It’s not fancy. It has no …
Critical Mass is a service company. We don’t produce anything physical that we can sell — it’s all time. We build websites, yes, but it’s the time it takes us to make them that counts. Shortly before I started at …
Back when I started with Critical Mass in 2000, the browser wars were still hotly contested but it was already clear that Netscape was losing. Standards were slowly (finally) creeping into the mix, and Netscape was on …
Those of you reading my RSS feeds have probably noticed a wad of older articles and photo pages showing up lately. Not really a lot of new stuff. No, my blog ain’t broken — I’m just tidying up a bit. Over the last year, …
It kind of came to me this morning, as I sat on the #2 heading down 17th Avenue. I’ve been on the internet for over 15 years. Rapidly approaching half my life online. I’m that old fart you see sitting in the corner, …
This was originally posted at http://experiencematters.criticalmass.com. The site is no longer active. Microsoft was a little late to the internet game, that much isn’t new. In 1993, Bill Gates said “we’re not …
[Warning: Objectionable language within.] I can’t really think of much more frustrating than to find out that two days — 16 hours of hard thinking — has suddenly vanished before your eyes. Not because someone stole your …
It takes a big person to admit that they’ve made a mistake. Companies, regardless of how large they become, were reticent until recent years to come clean with their blunders. Microsoft ain’t one of them. They still …
To add to my existing woes, I thought I might be “smart” and update to the new K2 to try and fix some of the issues that the new WordPress brought down upon me. At least the annoying bug with the WordPress …
Nurtz. This doesn’t happen often, and until now hasn’t happened at all. But the most recent upgrade of WordPress has officially broken my site. My biggest problem is that I’m using the K2 package, which doesn’t work …
How much do I have to give praise to Askimet? This little plugin has allowed me to go back to using WordPress without the fear of my database being choked up with a million spam comments. Back when I was using WordPress …
The weekend past was the August long weekend. Well, it was the long weekend for most people. For me, it was one of three things: painting the house, spending time with family, or being at work. Four things, if you count …