I'm hating Symantec. Well last night I was REALLY hating Symantec, I've since cooled off a bit. A friend of ours purchased, and then tried to install, Norton's System Works 2006. She thought she had a successful install, however when she restarted her computer, her new System Works immediately went into red stop sign mode, [...]

Less templates, more user experience.  One of the things that needs to change in 2006 (which will undoubtedly be the year of the web-application) is the care for user experience and usability. Many managers and business-people need to change their perspective and hire the right people to take their web-businesses to a new level. We [...]

A conversation with Windows Vista Kernel Team. This is Channel 9’s Christmas Present to geeks everywhere. A candid conversation with the team that’s building Windows Vista’s kernel. I even ask if they wish the registry had never been invented. But, Charles Torre did most of the interviewing. Being in a room with these guys for [...]

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report. The volume of information harvested, without court warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged. By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN. [NYT > Home Page]

Heating aid slashed; N.E. faces burden. WASHINGTON — The federal program to help poor families heat their homes got cut to less than half the amount originally promised by Congress, because of a flurry of late-night maneuvers on Wednesday that could leave tens of thousands of New England families struggling with skyrocketing heating bills this [...]

New 37signals targets for Rails extraction. 37signals has announced two upcoming products: Campfire and Sunrise. This is significant for Rails development because all 37signals applications has historically been the main source for new features in Rails. Sunrise has already spawned a good number of features for 1.1. There are the polymorphic associations and join model [...]

Freezing your Rails when you deploy shared. If you’re running a Ruby on Rails application on a shared host, it’s super-double-plus recommended to freeze your Rails. Freezing your Rails means putting the framework into vendor/rails instead of floating with whatever gems that are installed on the host. Because if you do so, you’ll automatically be [...]

Sunrise: 37signals' CRM tool for small business is coming soon. Hot on the heels of the ambiguous Campfire announcement, we want to be a little more specific about the other application we’re working on right now. Great progress is being made and we expect to show the product at the Getting Real Workshop in January. [...]

Dividing with 'such careless honesty'. Slashdot is an awesome view into the minds of a very varied population of programmers. Granted, such a sight is often befuddled, obscure, or, well, downright stupid. But its real and there's a lot of insight to be had when watching from a sober distance. Take the announcement of Rails [...]

I had a great time at A Christmas Carol at the North Shore Music Theatre tonight.