Category: Technology

Life would be so dull and sad without the soft, gleaming red glow of the power button, and the high-frequency hum of a switching power supply.

  • (anti-) Social Media

    A funny thing happened on the way to the internet. As the world got more and more sucked into social media, I began reading Cal Newport and Alfie Kohn and gradually crawled out of them. But I’ll confess that I sort of stumbled, kicking and screaming, into SM sobriety. […]

  • Unwanted logo changes

    Unwanted logo changes

    Why must quality bankable podcasts change their logos?

  • development gotcha: incorrect data types

    The other day I ran into a code bug that took a while to figure out.  It was so unique (to me) that I thought I’d write about it.

  • The broken engineering interview process

    The broken engineering interview process

    Imagine yourself in an interview, sitting in front of 5-10 others of your field. Midway through, the group’s questions drift from the personal and work experiential to the assessing and cross-examining.  They ask you to step up to The Whiteboard, marker in hand, and prove what you know.  Never mind that you’re not fresh out…

  • Ukrainian Outsourcing

    Ukrainian Outsourcing

    I had the most bizarre confrontation last year in my gym locker room — a place that is supposed to be a bastion of privacy, comfort, sometimes camaraderie — from which I haven’t really recovered. Charles is a jovial sort of guy.  He’s in his mid to late 50s.  He’s gregarious and extroverted, often seeking…

  • Mishandling errors

    For the past 3 years, I’ve been working full-time as a software engineer.  This has been a substantial, if not calculated, change for me.  I’d been an hardware engineer for longer than I care to think about. Perhaps the biggest, while subtlest difference between the two career paths that I didn’t see coming is this: determinism.  I…

  • Simulated Power Fail Test

    I ran across this little humorous easter egg the other day, buried deeply in a software development kit manual: To begin the test, pull the power plug from the UPS. The first time that you do this, psychologically it won’t be easy, but after you have pulled the plug a few times, you may even…

  • From iOS to Android, part 2: ecosystem shock

    From iOS to Android, part 2: ecosystem shock

    Last time, I talked about two key aspects of technology that tend to make loyal customers: platform ecosystem and user experience. It was a natural transition from owning Macs for the better part of a decade to iPods and then finally iPhones.  Apple has done well to keep the user experience very fairly consistent between…

  • online IDEs

    I love IDEOne.  It’s a fully debuggable online compiler for a bunch of software languages.  And there’s no need installing a plugin to format source code correctly on my blog, when this service offers embeddable links.  Like this: By the way, this isn’t compiling. Anyone have any pointers? See what I did there? Pointers?

  • The collision of Boxes

    The collision of Boxes

    I’m a big fan of Dropbox.  I (and the rest of the internet) have been using it in free mode for quite some time.  I probably don’t need to tell you what it is .  What I particularly love about the cloud is that it kills two birds with one stone: Syncing your files painlessly…