Month: April 2004

Happy 40th birthday to my sister Jennifer!

I.B.M. Plans to Build Servers That Act Like Mainframes. I.B.M. plans to introduce server computers, priced as low as $1,500, that behave more like mainframes. By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Technology]

Zombies at Starbucks. This particularly ghoulish scene from the movie Security Scenarios from Hell has three actors: WiFi, Zombies, and Spyware. Perils of WiFi are well known and well publicized (i.e. Wireless Networks are in Big Trouble, a classic Wired from 2001).  If you are a geek, here is a more technical version of the same… Continue reading Zombies at Starbucks

Radical software customization. The always-interesting Sean McGrath has a great column this week about software customization. He says, in part: In order to stay sane, most programmers concentrate on the part of the problem they are working on today. As a consequence, their view of what pieces of the functions under development need to be… Continue reading Radical software customization

Jared Spool: The InfoDesign interview. Jared founded the world's largest research, training and consulting firm specializing in website and product usability. We ignore the evidence, such as Rolf Molich's amazing CUE tests, where he asked different usability teams to simultaneously evaluate the same design. Not surprisingly, every team came up with completely different results with… Continue reading Jared Spool: The InfoDesign interview

The 'Harvard experience' redefined. A Harvard College education should include more science, more personal contact with professors, and some time spent outside the United States, according to the committees charged with overhauling Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum for the first time in a quarter century. [Boston Globe — Front Page]

Wired: “The unacknowledged father of Apple's iPod is engineer Tony Fadell, who created the gadget as an independent contractor. Apple wants the story kept under wraps, but little by little, it's leaking out.” [Scripting News]

Ed Foster: “The spread of spyware is becoming a major headache for many IT organizations.” [Scripting News]

Update: Tasks Pro 1.1. The web-based, multi-user task manager adds time tracking, file attachments, support for themes, iCalendars and RSS newsfeeds for each task, and other improvements. [MacInTouch]