Technology

Last Night I went to a few WWDC after parties. This being my first year in the SF bay area, I wanted to make an effort to meet more Apple people, and while I couldn’t quite afford attending WWDC, I wanted to make it down there to meet some of the people. Mike was planning on attending the Webkit Party yesterday, but as the day wore on, he was less and less definite about his attendance, as he was already tired from a wild Monday night. So that left me with no one to go with. Now, I’m not overly shy, but I always like having a starting point in a crowd. Without Mike, I felt it would have been difficult to find that point (He works for Apple and therefore knows a bunch of people at webkit). ...

I recently finished reading Head Rush AJAX and would like to share my comments on the book. This book is written by Head First Labs and is the first of the series I have read. I picked it up because of a recommendation from a friend. I remember looking with disdain at the books in the series when I had seen them on the shelf. I remember thinking, “They look so elementary, we don’t need another ‘For Dummies’ series”. I, like most computer people, have picked up and read a “For Dummies” book, but after you get through your second, they really loose their allure. My first three technology books were from that series, and I have never committed to reading another one. ...

Getting Things Done (GTD) has become increasingly popular in past few years. There have been many attempts to build an application that integrates with the whole framework. As a mac user I have been aware of a few, but the big one of the past was Kinkless GTD. This application consists of a bunch of applescripts meant to work with OmniOutliner. There was a lot of hype surrounding the application, and for good reason, it was one of the best options out there. The problem was, it wasn’t good enough for me to get really committed. You had to hit this “sync” button ever couple of seconds to make sure everything was up to date, contexts were confusing, and sometimes the kinkless page would go down for days at a time. Others shared my concerns and now there are several different applications that aim to fill the same gap that KGTD left open. In this article I will be comparing OmniFocus and Things. ...

I found the best gadget. Amazon just released the Kindle and this thing looks great. Its an ebook reader with some additional features that distinguish it from the rest. Firstly, this device has a EVDO built in. What does this mean? No need to find Wifi to download a book, Kindle connects like a cell phone to the amazon store to get your books. Actually, Amazon even opens up Wikipedia access so you can look up articles on the go. Secondly, this device is created by amazon. They are a company in the right position to see that a large quantity of their books make it to correct format for this device. One complaint, so far the price of the technology books is still prohibitively high. These books are still greater than 20 dollars, which I still see as a large amount to pay for an electronic document. Can’t wait to see this thing in action, though. Maybe that will change my perception of the cost. ...

I was having a conversation with a couple of friends the other day, when the topic of Software Engineering came up. I have been working in the software industry for over two years. I do not consider this to be a large amount of time. Nevertheless, I have learned a significant amount of software engineering. Let me back up. In college, most computer science students take a class on how to design and build software, titled Software Engineering. In this class they give you a textbook and teach you the different “models” of software engineering. They present this Utopian view of the software engineering process that I have never seen implemented in the real world. Most of what I see is similar to this graphic I found: ...