Matt Blodgett recently twittered about developers and private offices.  “I wonder if mgmt knows how bad they are killing productivity by doing that? Are they ignorant, or just stupid?” was a followup twitter I got from him, and I started replying.  Twitter’s too limiting for what I was trying to say, so I’ll say it [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, Software 13 Comments »

Got an interesting reply from Mikeal Rogers on the subject of copyright, open source, contributor license agreements, and such.  His post was in reply to a recent podcast from codemash on these subjects.  It’s a bit much to reprint here, so I’ve linked to the forum post.  Lots to think about.
 Did you like this [...]

Posted in Business, Development, Ideas, Law, Software, opensource No Comments »

Picked up from Reuters:
The more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes, a study by California researchers has found.
Researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the California Institute of Technology found that because people expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, they trick themselves into [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Personal 3 Comments »

I’ve had two frustrating phone calls with directv today which brought to the fore all the things I hate about dealing with phone services.  Every time I call up places that I regularly call, I’m forced to
1.  Press “dos” if I “desea espanol”.
2.  Tell the friendly attendant robot what my needs are, like “tell me [...]

Posted in Business, Ideas, Personal, Society 3 Comments »

I’m currently tracking down license texts and interpreting them for a client.  I’m not terribly surprised by, but certainly frustrated at, the lack of clarity in licenses in general.  Additionally, things that you’d think would be easy to license and allow for redistribution - database drivers - are my current bugbear.  Specifically, I’m trying to [...]

Posted in Business, Java No Comments »

I just found out today that I’ll be in the UK next week.  London, as far as I know right now.  I’m looking to swing an extra day to myself there, which would be next Saturday, November 10.  If there are any area PHP or webdev groups going on, please give me a holler.  If [...]

Posted in Business, PHP, Personal, Travel, Web No Comments »

Clients hire web developers (or their firms) because we are the experts. When I call someone in to fix my air conditioner I don’t let them work for awhile and then tell them they are doing their job wrong and I know the problem is the compressor. They are the expert, not me. When a [...]

Posted in Business, Design, Development, General, RefreshTheTriangle., Software, Web 6 Comments »

If you’re in the Raleigh area and are looking for a job in the web development market, give me a holler - I’ve had recruiters calling night and day.  AND they’re not all calling with the same position.  That used to happen once in a while - I’d have calls from three recruiters that were [...]

Posted in Business, Job, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, Web 5 Comments »

I’ve been with Open Source Risk Management for about 2 months now, and it’s been quite interesting so far.  The issues and risks that the integration of open source code raises, and how different companies respond to these risks, is probably the crux of the interesting stuff, at least for me.  It doesn’t necessarily seem [...]

Posted in Business, Law, Software, Tools, opensource 4 Comments »

The founders of the Groovy and Grails projects have formed a new services and support company around Grails and Groovy - g2one.com.  Certainly early days for the company (just a few I think) but it looks like good news for both communities.  Having a ‘real’ organization - someone you can pay - will no doubt [...]

Posted in Business, Google, Grails, Java, Software, opensource No Comments »