Software
Handy Backup - backup made simple
Last month, Erik gave me a hard time about my utter failure at back-up, and concluded by saying that “I hope to convince Rick to back up his data.”
I’m happy to report that I’m now backing up my entire hard drive on a regular basis, and it couldn’t be simpler. In the past, I’d passed […]
The Brain
Had a thoroughly engaging dinner last night with Ross, Jerry Michalski, and Peter Kollock. Peter asked Jerry for a demo of Personal Brain, a personal mind mapping kind of product that is quite interesting. (Jerry advises TheBrain Technologies Corporation, the company behind The Brain.)
I had heard about the product before, but never seen it or […]
Skype is much better
Just spent over an hour on a Skype call with Matt this morning. Wow. The first time around, I had several significant complaints about Skype — I was in the minority at the time, but the sound quality for me was terrible. I had several drops, a couple cases where it would go several seconds […]
Everything you need to know about internationalization
It’s rare that Joel Spolsky writes on a topic that it doesn’t immediately become one of the best articles written on the subject. This week’s article — on internationalization — is no different.
While I’m not a programmer, I do work for a software company and issues of interationalization inevitably arise. Customers are often as misinformed […]
Techie question - VMWare
We use VMware to build virtual machines for our sales demos. It’s a great solution — we can bundle entire demo environments on a single DVD (the environment includes the OS, the database, the applications, etc.) and get them out to sales people.
But there’s one flaw in the system: the environments all have the same […]
Upgrades gone bad
I’m an Expensable user — it’s an old Quicken product (now owned by the ominous-sounding “One Mind Connect”) that manages expense reports. About two months ago, it produced an expense report that printed out all expenses as “miscellaneous” even though all were properly categorized in the program. It took days to figure out what had […]
Subscription services: Look for dialtone
A few weeks ago, the whole family went to a wedding in Boston. (Though I really, really want to, I’m going to refrain from telling that story.) We walked in the house, and I noticed the panel on the ADT alarm system was not on. Now, you’d think that if there were a problem with […]
Homegrown development stats
I’m looking for some statistics about the costs of homegrown development. A firm I’ve been talking to is fighting a battle with their IT department – the IT department insists on building every application themselves, while marketing and management are now leaning towards buying us (a fully-built CRM system tailored to their market).
What I don’t […]
Usability (ahem)
I find it more than a touch ironic when the search results for www.useit.com all show an incorrect date.
For those that don’t know, useit.com is the online home of Jakob Nielsen, the gold standard in website usability. I’m sure this is just a minor glitch (I’ve sent them a note to let them know about […]
Zen and the Art of Data Restoration
Zen and the Art of Data Restoration Standardization is elusive, even though there are so many standards to choose from. Or perhaps because there are so many. Nevertheless, for many years I have been pursuing an elusive goal of digitizing, standardizing, and archiving all of mydata. In this chapter of the journey, I ended up […]
