If you’re a fan of O’Reilly (the book publisher, not the obnoxious lout on Fox who is discounted by nearly everyone), you should check out the big sale on O’Reilly books at BookPool. They have over 500 O’Reilly published computer books on sale for 43% off. Though I already have more books than I could… Read More »
It has come to my attention through my website reports that some of you are stil using Internet Explorer. Are you mad! Good god, my dear person, won’t someone think of the innocent computers, i.e., mine, that are subject to spam and hacking zombie attacks caused by people who use IE and have their computer’s… Read More »
Congratulations to a former colleague, Wojciech Matusik, for being named to Technology Review’s list of 100 top young innovators. I wish I could link directly to the article, but you have to either pay to access the articles or have a paid subscription. The article was in the October 2004 issue. I hired Wojciech in… Read More »
Neil Harrison and James Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development was released this summer and was reviewed today on Slashdot. I worked with Neil at Avaya, and I can attest that he was one of the many smart men and women with whom I worked during my tenure there. Neil was very knowledgeable… Read More »
I was quite surprised this afternoon to see a story on Slashdot announcing that a group at ARL:UT (Applied Research Labs : University of Texas) had open sourced GPSTk, “a cross platform library and set of applications that provides both fundamental and advanced GPS processing algorithms”. I worked at ARL:UT for five years while I… Read More »
I had run across the online demo of the AT&T Natural Voices TTS engine quite awhile ago, but seeing a reference to it in an article today on Slashdot reminded me of how cool it is. You enter text in a text box and choose a voice from a list of thirteen. The list includes… Read More »
The Buy.com website is officially lame. If I hadn’t found the video cables I needed for 25% cheaper than at Amazon, I would never have tried to purchase anything there. The Amazon site is ten times better in virtually every way, and is often not much more expensive. Just not this time. Not only is… Read More »
After a fellow DreamHoster posted on the DreamHost discussion forums about troubles getting MoinMoin 1.2.3 to work, I decided to upgrade from 1.1 to 1.2.3. Things went relatively smoothly, at least compared to when I installed 1.1. I did discover a mistake in my instructions for installing MoinMoin on a DreamHost website, though. I fixed… Read More »
Polite computers win users’ hearts and minds [New Scientist] A study by Jeng-Yi Tzeng at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan suggests that computer users would be more tolerant of software programs if the programs were more apologetic, or at the very least, less likely to always blame the user. This is especially relevant… Read More »
If you use Gallery for your online photo album, be sure to upgrade your install to Gallery 1.4.3-pl2, which was released June 1. Fortunately, upgrading Gallery is very simple if you haven’t modified the base PHP files. After you transfer the appropriate install file to your web server, follow the standard Gallery upgrade instructions. Be… Read More »