Of all men’s miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and have control over nothing.
— Herodotus-
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- You are correct: westerners care more about Boston than Baghdad
- Why the law is slow, impersonal and obsessed with details
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Category Archives: Rants
You are correct: westerners care more about Boston than Baghdad
There’s two reasons why. The first is novelty. Bombings in Boston don’t happen very often. In countries torn by sectarian violence and in which each sect has bottomless supplies of suicide bombers, bombings are common. So as time goes on … Continue reading
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Why the law is slow, impersonal and obsessed with details
About a decade ago, as part of a long period of depression, I took up the study of law. Eventually I gave it away in favour of programming computers. But law can be fascinating in its own right. Software development … Continue reading
“Dear Northern Territorians …”
“… fuck you”. This is the essence of today’s announcement by the Prime Minister that she is going to parachute Nova Peris into the #1 spot on the ALP’s Senate ticket. The electoral calculus means that this will guarantee a … Continue reading
On Selling To Consumers
The software industry is a funny thing. For all of our heroic examples (Gates, Jobs, Page, Zuckerberg etc), it is difficult to tell whether we worship them because they are software-y types like us or whether we only do so … Continue reading
My experience with WPEngine (tl;dr, they sucked)
Today I read this by Jason Cohen. It’s an advertisement for WPEngine, masquerading as a missive about sustainable companies. In it Jason tries to talk up his company by virtue of the halo effect, comparing WPEngine to companies like HubSpot, … Continue reading
Posted in Rants, Site News
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The two faces of Amazon.com
Amazon is a marvel of the modern age. Cheap books, shipped worldwide at ever-cheaper rates. Very cheap indeed if you bought a Kindle (I have a DX. I love it). There’s one problem: sometimes you don’t actually buy the book … Continue reading
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Cooking and Coding
Sometimes, when we programmers sit down to explain programming, we resort to the hoary old cooking metaphor. “Programming is like cooking”, we say. “We write recipes, and the computer carries them out”. And sometimes methodologists apply it to our work … Continue reading
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iWork Numbers 2008 can’t deal with time durations
A very annoying discovery. One of the common complaints about the Personal Software Process is that there’s a lot of data-entry and number crunching. The data entry I can’t do too much about (though compare Hackystat), but number crunching is … Continue reading