Havoc's Blog

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Diagnosing the tech industry

According to an an article in today’s paper Clayton Christensen took a stand for design over megapixel in last month’s Harvard Business Review. I’ll have to find a copy. Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen is trying to shake up the marketing establishment with a deceptively simple proposition that flies in the face of […]

Tripleverb anthology

tripleverb.com goes live! Already there is controversy. Does a quad-verb count? What if you have a verb-bar, like View Publish Connect Communicate? What is a tripleverb anyway? (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005–12.html#31)

December All-In-One Super Blog Bundle

Up to all sorts of things this month, but apparently not writing blog entries until today. Intelligent Design I haven’t been following any of the media coverage of Intelligent Design, since I generally have better things to do (not good things mind you). Tonight though I found myself (for example) trying to burn up moldy […]

?

I think this is a debate I didn’t intend to start — I concur that yes, there are lots of formats you can send over a socket and you can wedge most use cases into most of the formats if you try hard enough. A meaningful discussion of protocols though would recognize that “could possibly […]

SOAP

Miguel, that’s cool, I know SOAP (with a library) doesn’t involve a ton of application code. My point is more that (to me) it’s just not worth learning about for this sort of thing. If you want to get a couple of pieces of data on an Amazon product you just do “get url contents” […]

Theme Systems

Regarding GTK+ themes, I think the metacity approach to themes worked out pretty well. You could definitely improve on the details (inventing my own little expression language was kinda weird, and there are lots of feature requests for the format). But metacity themes are “just data” rather than code while remaining reasonably flexible. Arguably you […]

Adventures in Web 2.0

Over the holidays I thought I’d play with the Amazon and eBay web services APIs. What a contrast! I got Amazon working in a couple of hours, and eBay… well, it’s two days later and I’m starting to feel stupid. For Amazon, to get information on a product you just register to get an ID […]

iPod

Ben, interesting that Europe has different sales numbers. For purposes of thinking about product design though, to me the $50 flash players are a distinct product category from the iPod or the Toshiba. People buy the small solid-state players for different reasons (and at $50, the reason need not be as compelling as the reason […]

Music in color?

It blows my mind that you can go to Apple’s web site and just read what makes the iPod a better design than most music players, but their competition can’t seem to figure it out. So Apple continues to crush them. It’s just not that complicated: the iPod lets you listen to all your music. […]

TextView algorithmic complexity

Thinking about Morten’s comment, one of the main goals of GtkTextView was to keep everything better than O(n), because I’d seen so many posts to gtk-list where people inadvertently wrote quadratic code with GtkCList and the old GtkText. (Those widgets also had the evil freeze/thaw convention, where you could “freeze”, do stuff, and “thaw” and […]