The agile disease

Luke Halliwell recently wrote an exceptional piece titled The Agile Disease. And, as someone that pushes this disease in various forms, you might be surprised to hear that I agree with just about everything he’s written on the topic, save a few points. For example, the commercial trendiness of Agile and its “manifesto” is just [...]

Hear hear

“This isn’t about yelling, this isn’t about politics, this isn’t really just about proposition 8.” This is about humanity, and those of us who don’t have enough of it.

Hear hear, Mr. Olbermann.

Tell me thrice

In certain military contexts there’s the concept of “tell me three times,” a form of checksum that eliminates error by introducing redundancy. This is something I’ve been meaning to write a meaningful piece on for a while — and this diagram is at the root of it. It’s an integral part to any complete process… [...]

Defending elitism

Oh my god, I haven’t been writing much lately. My apologies. I promise to amend the situation in the near future, but in the meantime here’s some excellent writing from Sam Harris published in Newseek:

…You can learn something about a person by the company [Palin] keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, [...]

Save the Constitution

I wish there was more I could do to support Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s recent motion to impeach our so-called President. I understand why Speaker Nancy Pelosi would rather not support any action to impeach. She’s dead wrong. Mr. Bush has violated so many laws (35 by Kucinich’s account) and broken our Constitution. Do we really [...]

Modern data visualization

Smashing Magazine has catalogued some of the most amazing visualization technique available today. I’m particularly fascinated by the spacial navigation and visualization models. As technology catches up with the processing capabilities of humans, we’ll be seeing more and more technology like this. We don’t think in folders and files–we think in relationships, proximity and “likeness.” [...]

Omnifocus inbox aka getting things done

After reading Charles’ inbox hero post, I thought I’d take a whack at describing my own process. Charles’ technique works; I can attest to it, because it’s essentially how I managed to stay on top of my own email (which, at times, pours in at the rate of a few hundred messages a day). [...]

Cell phones are bad

From 1983 to 1989, Dr. George Carlo, PhD, headed the telecommunication industry’s research into cell phone safety, with the ultimate goal of proving cell devices safe. The industry funded his project to the tune of $28 million dollars (U.S.) but his findings were so startling that he turned on his employers. Now involved with the non-profit Safe Wireless Dr. Carlo is telling the truth: Information-carrying microwave radiation, such as that used by cell phones, is harmful.

Contextual interfaces

The debate regarding the effectiveness and wisdom of contextual user interface design has been getting more heated over the past decade. As program complexity expands and users developer greater technical savvy, contextual interfaces seem inevitable. But are they a good thing, or just a way to obfuscate already complicated systems?
Contextual interfaces are no easy thing [...]

Leap

I’m trying to decide whether I like Leap or not. On the one hand, the Finder has been overdue for a major overhaul for years. On the other, it may not be major enough.

A lot of what Leap tries to do has been in the back of my mind for quite a while. I keep [...]

Finding strategic learning funds

Training Industry Times recently published some rather disappointing statistics: Over 92% of surveyed business have experienced pressure to reduce their training budget in 2007. Worse, 56% reported that the pressure to reduce or altogether cut training costs were “significant.”
Is this attitude regarding education part-and-parcel of the declining attitude toward education in the United States? More [...]

Whiteboard-space to wall-space (WBS/WS) ratio

Patrick Wilson Welsh has a great little rant on this really incomprehensible trend. I think the root of the problem is that too many companies still think of software development as an industrial, assembly line process and too few have really embraced the idea that it’s a creative effort. That might be why it’s called [...]