It’s a place where some hicks still proudly fly a flag from a war they lost in order to keep their slaves.
Archive for January, 2007
The South
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007Nationalism
Saturday, January 27th, 2007I think nationalism is a disease and it’s a disease that has really hurt the world.
Nicholas Negroponte
New post at Valleygeek
Monday, January 22nd, 2007go check
The action is somewhere else
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007Posting here is going to be even more infrequent. Check valleygeek.org to see what I am upto.
Scenario, simple and Fast
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007
In Steve Job’s keynote yesterday there was a mention of Jim Allchin’s desire to buy a Mac. Today the context in which Allchin made that statement has been revealed. In his email Allchin keeps reiterating “scenario, simple, fast’. Any software developer should take these words to heart. The order of these three words is also significant. The most important thing for any software is it’s usage scenario.Usage scenario help in making the right tradeoffs while designing software. But for the few lucky people who write device drivers and are constrained by the operating system interface on one end and the device interface on the other, all other software developer need to pay a lot of attention to the design of the interface that their software presents. As far as the user is concerned the interface is the software. She does not care how extensible, modular the software is. Nor is she bothered if it uses the latest technology or is Web 2.0 compliant 
. All the users want is to achieve their goals with the minimum effort.
More definitions
Wednesday, January 10th, 2007from the Union Square Ventures blog on Founders and Management. What is a business?
it’s a collection of people who have been organized in attempt to profit from offering a product or service to the marketplace.
From the Apple keynote
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007A quote by Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software you should make their own hardware
On Programming
Monday, January 8th, 2007I am reading a fascinating book, “The Bug” by Jesse Ullman, these days. It contains a description of programming with which I completely agree
Programming starts out like it’s going to be architecture – all black lines on white paper, theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head. Then, right around the time you have to get something fucking working, it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing.
…
It’s more like you’re hired as a plumber to work in an old house full of ancient, leaky pipes laid out by some long-gone plumbers who were even weirder than you are. Most of the time you spend scratching your head and thinking: Why the fuck did they do that?