PUBLIC MARKS with search blame

Perhaps the bookshops themselves are partially to blame. We've been thinking hard how to turn things around, and haven't avoided being self-critical of the work we do.

Research in Motion, which makes Blackberry phones, issued a statement in which it promised to work with the authorities. It pointed out that, like other telecoms companies, it complies with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which allows law enforcement to gain access to private messages when they relate to the commission of a crime.

A fixed priced project, with big design up front, full specification/conception/development/test phases with IBM or Accenture is what everyone does. If it fails nobody will blame you. But if your short/agile/TDD/web like project fails it will be your fault.

Shifting focus

Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 ~ 4:54 PM

This is the last new post that I'll be making on this blog. I decided a while back to shift the focus of my web activities, and thought it was time to formally close things off here.

Why stop posting here? Mostly just a feeling that I needed to shake things up a bit, to put some serious effort behind a few other ideas that I've wanted to work on for a while. Making a clean break just felt right.

There may still be some activity on this site as I back-fill some old posts from other blogging platforms. My goal is to eventually have this as a (more or less) complete archive of my personal blogging from early 1998 to this year. That's a background project of mine that I plan on allocating a bit more time to in 2010.

A huge thanks to Karl Dubost for hosting this blog for so long. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Karl has supported and inspired me in more ways then he may realize. That you are reading this today is due in no small part to him, so you can thank (or blame!) him.

In many cases start up dialogs represent some form of failing, ranging from a failing of engineering (unable to find or implement a cleaner solution), a failing of design (unable to determine the best approach) or a failing of security (delegating a decision so that we can blame the victim). In all of these cases the dialog itself is simply the manifestation of a larger problem that we need to attack.

It is very important to report the WTF to the developer who produced the code. Subversions “annotate” or “blame” function provides a means to blame someone for the existence of a specific piece of code. The best way to report this back is through an informative and educational discussion, where everyone could be involved. The factoring should preferably be done by the developer responsible for the code, perhaps with the assistance of the developer who reviewed it. As a result, quality awareness will have improved within the development team.

When I needed heart surgery in 2002 and the doctor told me my life was over if I didn't get it, you might say he was being insensitive, but he was telling me something that I knew was true that I needed to hear. Three days later after the surgery, recouperating, the surgeon told me if I resumed smoking I would be dead in three years. Again, insensitive (he said it with a smile on his face believe it or not), but I'm glad he said it. The way he said it made it easier to quit. Sometimes the truth hurts. You can't blame people for saying things they believe, even if it hurts you to hear it.

…many things are hard to hear, for some reason. They are true.

It's always been easy to blame the media for preferring to cover a local hot-dog roast rather than a distant war. But when distant nerves fire off pain signals that can reach anywhere, there will be no excuse for looking away. We're going to discover just how good we are at ignoring the throbbing.