The 5 People I Hope Like Hell to Meet in Heaven. As I've written before, I don't pester celebrities. There aren't enough days in a life for everyone to be a friend to everyone else, and as much as I'd like to hang out with people like Niklaus Wirth or Garry Wills, it isn't gonna [...]

Mark debunks Steven Gibson's claims that WMF issue is a backdoor. Over at SysInternals, Mark has debunked Steve Gibson's theory that Microsoft intentiionally placed a backdoor in WMF. His results conclude: In my opinion the backdoor is one caused by a security flaw and not one made for subterfuge. You can read Mark's analysis here. [...]

Where are the .6 releases?. I hope to have the long incubated Tasks Pro™ 1.6 and Tasks 2.6 releases out next week. The software has been ready for a while now, the hold up has been finding 2 days to do all the release related stuff: set up the demos, the free trials and upgrade [...]

Liberty Increases Security. From the Scientific American essay “Murdercide: Science unravels the myth of suicide bombers“: Another method [of reducing terrorism], says Princeton University economist Alan B. Krueger, is to increase the civil liberties of the countries that breed terrorist groups. In an analysis of State Department data on terrorism, Krueger discovered that “countries like [...]

AppExchange for Dummies, for Free. Go get your free copy of Salesforce AppExchange for Dummies. Even if you're not interested in Salesforce, the Salesforce web services API is one of the best uses of SOAP out there. One of the cool things about it is that it creates a custom object model for your organization. [...]

How bad regulation is destroying US Internet. Larry Lessig points out that the history of the Internet, and the blend of regulation and laissez-faire, is being distorted by those who want to hand over more and more control to the duopoly of telcos and cablecos: The Washington Internet Daily (which apparently is not on the [...]

Career or a Job?. For those of you that are consultants… is this a career to you…. or just a job? If it's a job… all you will need to do is just 'act' like you know what you are doing and take on any jobs that come your way. If, however, this to you [...]

No Upgrade Price for QuickBooks. What's a fair upgrade price for customers who have a previous version of a software product? Intuit has come up with an interesting answer to that question by deciding that the upgrade price for QuickBooks 2006 should be 100 percent of what new customers pay. . . . [Ed Foster's [...]

Do you have WIADD?. A research team from the University of California has published the results of a research study that shows that office workers work on average for only eleven minutes before being interrupted and that these interruptions consume approximately 2.1 hours of every working day. One expert is calling this “work-induced attention-deficit disorder”. [...]

Classifying Along the Other Axis. Although I still think the blogging community should work together and create an optional controlled vocabulary for tagging, the real problem goes well beyond blogging and comes back to indexing the Web: We're classifying along the wrong axis. When used with some skill, good search engines like Google can tells [...]