The case for global cooling

About a half degree anomaly over a one-year sample means nothing statistically. I’m interested in the 50- and 100- and 500-year trends. My own conclusions from studying them, be they right or wrong (I’ve no idea which, really): Global warming is happening. And, it probably has little or nothing to do with human activity. And, therefore, while we might be able to influence it doing so would be very, very hard…

Continue Reading...

My new, favorite CM tool

I recently started looking into Seapine’s Surround SCM as a potential solution to our Software Configuration Management problems at work. Specifically, we were looking for a good suite of tools that provide state-of-the-art source code and document control, and does so with an interface that’s easy enough non-technical people to use. Oh, and it has [...]

Continue Reading...

Earth friendly digital mail

We’ve all heard about the promise of going digital, forever after to shun the use of paper. But it seems like a whole industry out there trying to go in the other direction—at least, that’s how I feel every day when I sift through half a dozen advertisements, flyers and other junk mail to find [...]

Continue Reading...

When you’re boss doesn’t listen

I was recently approached by someone asking for advice dealing with a boss that won’t listen to the engineering team, and who doesn’t believe in methodology, testing or quality assurance. Statements such as “QA would just find a lot of bugs and keep us from making release dates” raised. This is a lousy place to [...]

Continue Reading...

A tale of two laptops

I agree with everything Wayne MacPhail has to say on the new super-thin Apple Macbook Air. And comparing the new, $1,700 low-power eye-candy laptop to an actually useful and meaningful technology (meaning the XO that Wayne contrasts with the Air) is spot-on. Let’s face it, the Air is a frivolous computer. It’s too expensive, it’s [...]

Continue Reading...

Airport and time machine

For those of us that have an Airport base station (especially the new one with 802.11/n) there’s a bit of good news if you were hoping to use an attached disk for wireless Time Machine backups: A simple hack will enable the feature. However, I should point out that there is a good reason Apple [...]

Continue Reading...