Thank You for Beta Testing Our Products. That's what Apple should say to its paying customers about its software releases, which are known to have bugs severe enough to warrant a fast and critical update. I suspect this will be true with the new operating system, OS X Tiger (10.4). As always, the usual folks [...]

OpenLaszlo 3.0 released.  I am pleased to announce the official release of OpenLaszlo 3.0, previously known as Laszlo Presentation Server. The new name is in honor of Laszlo's commitment to its open source platform. Since the initial release, which allowed folks to download the source in a zip file, you can now find… – source [...]

Visa/Mastercard security requirements for small vendors. Phil Windley says that Visa and Mastercard are starting to crack down on small merchants, requiring them to meet some sort of minimum information security standards or lose the ability to accept Visa or Mastercard purchases online. This is clearly a good thing. He lists 12 basic requirements: Install [...]

Ars Technica Tiger Guide. Ars Technica’s John Siracusa has posted his writeup on Tiger. I haven’t had time to read all of it yet, but the first half is an amazing piece of work. There’s a ton of content in there that is entirely new to me, like the writeup on launchd, Apple’s new open-source [...]

Cisco buys Sipura. This isn’t exactly new news, but Cisco bought Sipura yesterday. Sipura makes a number of VoIP products, including the SPA-841 phone that I’ve been using for the past few weeks. They’re generally considered to have the best SIP implementation of any of the cheap vendors, and they make good, solid products for [...]

Designing from the outside in. I was talking with Jason Fried of web design firm 37Signals recently. He believes that contrary to the normal expectation that applications are built on top of frameworks, applications should always be designed “from the outside in.” That is, at 37signals, they try to design the usability and function of [...]

Choosing a daily GTD action plan.  high octane moron: Revolving workflow strategies I employ an informal Getting Things Done action strategy that’s similar to the one Chris lays out in his post. I often have a theme for a given day, where I choose an approach that’s suited to my mood, my energy level, and [...]

A Bishop and a Reverend walk into a bar. Last weekend I ported the Reverend bayesian classifier from Python to Ruby (thanks Jon for the original pointer to Reverend). What I didn't realise was that Lucas Carlson was, simultaneously, working a similar library… ah well, there's a good chance we'll roll my work into his [...]

Stemmer gem. The unreleased version of Bishop uses Ray Pereda's port to Ruby of Martin Porter's word stemming algorithm. I've used this code before and I noticed Lucas uses the same code. Despite it's size it made sense to us to package it as a RubyGem so that others could make use of it without [...]

The Case of the Missing COA. Isn't it wonderful how easy Microsoft makes it to be one of their customers? All you have to do is find a reseller or OEM who can be trusted to supply you with “Genuine Windows” software and pay your money. And then activate it, of course, and you'd also [...]