Two kinds of innovations in tech
Kevin Kelleher, writing for ReadWriteWeb in How AT&T & Verizon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Data Hogs about AT&T’s new pricing model, nails the conclusion in regards to the carriers in the USA:
There are two kinds of innovations in tech. One that is often celebrated – the creation of great new things people will gladly pay for – and another that few companies will brag about – finding new ways to get people to pay for something they already have. The top two carriers are innovative in the second way.
7 Reasons Why I Can’t Do “Free”
Sharon Hayes clearly explains why she does not work for free in 7 Reasons Why I Can’t Do “Free”, check it out.
- It Zaps My Creative Juice
Each of us has only so many truly productive hours in a day. In my own case, I can get in about 5 solid productive hours on a typical day. It’s like a bank for me. Each day, I start off with this reserve of 5 hours. As I do work through the day, the reserve gets depleted. But it gets depleted at a faster rate when I have to shift gears more frequently.
Software will always trump Hardware
Shawn Blanc reviews the Nexus 7 tablet in Thoughts and Impressions of the Nexus 7, and concludes with a great point:
For me, when it comes down to it, software will always trump hardware. When I’m using a device like the Nexus 7 I want to know where the details are. Where is the magic? The fun? The incredible 3rd-party apps? It is because of these elements that the iPad is more than the sum of its parts while its competition continues to remains less than.
International Terpstra Day
One of the nicest things I have ever seen for one of the nicest guys on our corner of the internet. It’s Brett Terpstra’s birthday today and all his friends have taken the time to celebrate him and his works, including:
- David Sparks at MacSparky: International Terpstra Day
- Gabe at Macdrifter: Terpstra Day
- Frederico Viticci at Macstories: Terpstra Day
- Dr Drang at LeanCrew: Brett Terpstra day
- Michael Schechter at A Better Mess: Celebrate Terpstra Day
- Eddie Smith at Practically Efficient: Terpstra Day
For the few of you who do not know of him, Brett is the developer of Marked.app that I use every day for preview and export of markdown files, he’s the developer of nvAlt which I recommend for all your notes, he writes as part of Read & Trust, has a new Podcast called Systematic, and he gives away huge numbers of free tools and scripts.
Octopress Post and Publish
Since this site is getting larger and it’s running on Octopress, the rake generate and rake preview processes are getting slower. Enter rake isolate["x"] to isolate the site down to the selected post. But isolating requires me to note the file name down, there is too much to remember and type and I am lazy.
So have created two macros and a script to speed this process up.
Note: You must run these commands in the root of the Octopress folder, else they will not work at all!
Estimating Software like it is
Software estimates are hard. Clients expect things to take little time (see It Should Only Take You a Few Hours…) and cost little money. But the reality is that software is hard, there is lots to do, lots of work over and above just programming and it takes a lot more time and money to make good product. Most people underestimate the work to be done, or try to make the estimates look good, so most projects run over time and over budget because of this.
Kinds of Files in a Project Folder
In preparation for a client call, I wrote a quick and dirty script to count the kinds of files in a project folder to show them what’s involved. I wanted a nice presentation, and the files grouped into categories. I also added parameters to exclude certain folder patterns from the counter.
The command is
$ ~/Scripts/cfile.rb ~/Projects/Kifu/code/kifu log tmp doc versions
The output is
Project File Counter v0.1 ©hiltmon.com 2012 https://hiltmon.com
Project: kifu
-------------------------------------------------------
Text Files:
Markdown : 1
Plain Text : 1
-------------------------------------------------------
Code Files:
CoffeeScript : 7
CSS : 10
ERB : 251
HTML : 3
JavaScripts : 10
Ruby : 265
SCSS : 10
-------------------------------------------------------
Data Files:
XML : 1
-------------------------------------------------------
Image Files:
GIF Images : 2
Icon Images : 1
PNG Images : 168
-------------------------------------------------------
Configuration Files:
Configuration : 3
Rackup : 1
YML : 4
-------------------------------------------------------
Other Files:
Unknown Kind : 6
.eot files : 2
Locks : 1
Rake : 8
.rdb files : 1
Fonts : 4
-------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL : 760 Files
-------------------------------------------------------
It aint pretty, as it was written very quickly. The script in a gist is:
TextExpander in Terminal
I spend a lot of time in Terminal.app mostly running Rails or Git commands. I am also lazy, so I like to use short macros instead of typing in the same thing over and over again. I used to use bash aliases or functions, but I mostly use TextExpander snippets now because I like to be sure they don’t conflict with internal UNIX commands.
In this post I will show you
Cheap programmers cost more and ship less
I’ve been programming for 22 years. When I started Noverse two years ago as a professional software design and development company, I knew I would be competing against younger, cheaper programmers and masses of very cheap outsourced programmers.
A lot has happened over the past two years, and this article is about my own observations regarding the nature of this competition and how things have worked out for a lot of people I have spoken with who have chosen cheap.
Kifu v1.0 Released
Note: The Kifu website (kifuapp.com) is no longer active. This post is preserved for historical reference.
Noverse LLC (my company) and the Shukai Company LLC, is very pleased to announce that Kifu v1.0.0 has shipped. And our first customers are already happily using Kifu in production. We want to thank all our beta testers and beta clients for testing Kifu and helping us make such a great product.
Kifu is an intuitive, easy-to-use software product for small non-profits and community organizations to easily manage their community and its events. Kifu has a comprehensive people database and implements membership, communications, billing, statements, payments, and donations, all in a single integrated environment available on the web. For more see the Kifu web site and play with the demo.