Category Archives: software

software: accelerating the development of EVERYTHING

Posted on 2012-06-13 by skierpage

Draft incomplete thoughts and missing links but I just had to get something out… Marc Andreessen said software is eating entire industries, and from my own personal experience he’s really onto something. Most heard about Facebook buying Instagram for one … Continue reading →

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web: automating bits of Sprint Picture Mail

Posted on 2012-05-19 by skierpage

(The good programmer is lazy; instead of typing something over and over, she writes a script to automate the steps. The wizard programmer writes a set of object classes that model the problem at hand, and tells those objects to … Continue reading →

Posted in software, web | 2 Comments

software: the future desktop environment

Posted on 2012-03-23 by skierpage

Since Windows blew up I’m happy enough running a free Linux desktop, the KDE environment running on the Kubuntu distribution. Three big Linux environments are all chasing a new vision: Gnome Shell, Ubuntu Unity, and KDE Plasma are all trying … Continue reading →

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web: RIP Google Wave

Posted on 2012-03-21 by skierpage

Google is shutting down wave.google.com. Back in 2009 it was the most exciting piece of software to come along in years. A real-time multi-user rich document editor!! So it can be a chat window, a collaborative Word document, a scrapbook, … Continue reading →

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web: ten thousand pages about a hundred ways to do any one thing

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Developing stuff on the web isn’t hard, anyone can View > Source your work, someone made those billion web pages, and a lot of web designers promote themselves by writing about their work. In general this is great and we … Continue reading →

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web: say no to JavaScript templates you can’t try in a browser

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Dear developers of JavaScript templating systems (all 23 of you), Instead of telling me that your baby runs in a browser and even showing me canned examples, let me interactively try it out! So Handlebars.js wins over EJS, jQote2, JSON … Continue reading →

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computers: browser-based efforts

Posted on 2011-11-28 by skierpage

I wrote a year ago that when it comes to computers, I want to be browser-based — since I’m doing most of my work in the browser, let me do nearly all my work in the browser. Boot 2 Gecko … Continue reading →

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computers: reporting bugs in a sea of versions and projects

Posted on 2011-10-27 by skierpage

Someone’s post When is a bug report useful? inspired me to comment. I have two great ideas in here bug systems should be aware of my distribution, version, and related packages software projects should provide a way to test drive … Continue reading →

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How to”sign” documents so you can junk your Fax machine

Posted on 2011-09-12 by skierpage

Fax machines use a terrible scanner to send a grainy image of a page down a phone line, it’s last century’s technology that needs to die. And what is on that page? 99.7% of the time, it is something that … Continue reading →

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software: how Live CDs can close the deal

Posted on 2011-06-09 by skierpage

I tried out the some new operating systems by booting them off a USB flash drive, including Fedora 15. Fedora 15 seemed to work fine on my hardware and looked promising, but it wasn’t dramatically better in a few fumbling … Continue reading →

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