From the category archives:

General

Coding Kihon

February 2, 2010Developers

I loved Sara Ford’s thoughts about coding katas. Yes, most coding should really be referred to as coding kihon (as you practice daily), and coding kumite when you’re deep in a project. Nice one. I also enjoyed Steve Andrew’s post on Shotokan Development that Sara linked to.
Oh, and good luck in your new [...]

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Predictably Irrational

October 6, 2009General

You’ve probably heard of Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational by now. It seems to be garnering a cult like following of late, and will likely be one of those books that everyone has an opinion on (along with The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Purple Cow, and of course Twilight )
Aaron Wall put me on [...]

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New Generation workers and Email

January 4, 2009General

I had to shake my head when I read this Accenture survey on the demands of the Millennial Generation. The usual ‘demands’ of wanting to choose their technology, insisting on state-of-the-art technology, not wanting to seek corporate approval, requiring new communication channels, etc all came up.
It seemed odd that a survey like this would [...]

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Outliers

January 4, 2009General

Malcolm Gladwell is a great story-teller, no doubt about it. I loved his latest book Outliers.
And whilst I agree with Joel Spolksy that the book is little more than cleverly strung together anecdotes, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. For example, Gladwell’s chapter on the necessity of hard work (you must do your [...]

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Adobe Infinite Images and Deep Earth

December 22, 2008General

Adobe has been experimenting with it’s own image navigation & stitching together technology, and Infinite Images is the latest demonstration of it (see here for the ReadWriteWeb article).
You, me and every other Microsoft watcher will immediately see shades of Deep Zoom and perhaps a little Photosynth in this.
What’s cool about the the Adobe system [...]

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Werner Vogels – Chief of the Year 2008

December 22, 2008General

Amazon’s CTO – Werner Vogels – has been awarded the Information Week Chief of the Year title. He’s quickly given the credit to his team of course, legend that he is.
Now, it’s easy to be cynical of awards – it seems that sometimes companies/twitter abusers/magazines/etc just create them as a marketing device – but [...]

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When the chips are down… people play games

December 17, 2008General

Should we be surprised by this Gartner report outlining the second year on year decline in PC chip sales (they’re predicting a 16.3% decline). Intel and AMD must be doing it hard, like, ahem, just about everyone in the IT industry.
Well, not quite. At least games are doing well, with sales of game hardware [...]

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WordPad Zero Day exploit

December 17, 2008General

OMG, panic! But don’t be distracted by that other zero day exploit (you know, the Internet Explorer one), here’s where your security gaze should be firmly focused: WordPad.
It turns out that WordPad has a significant exploit. And by significant, I mean it affects at least one person. I strongly recommend WordPad users (both of you) [...]

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Google Chrome leaves beta

December 12, 2008General

I’ve been using Chrome a fair bit lately. Why? It’s fast.
And although people point to its lack of basic features, plug-in architecture (although that is in the works), cross platform support and it’s lack of market share, I for one don’t care, as long as it is fast for browsing. I use Firefox when [...]

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