Tech conferences are incredibly expensive, and not just in dollars. Even free conferences like BarCamps incur the expense of the attendee’s time. Taking time off from work or family is a hassle at the very least, and it’s time that isn’t billable. The draw of the conference boils down to those 45 minute sessions, and speaker and attendee alike should make the most of it.Speakers often start off by wasting time. They front-load the presentation with worthless information. If you are a speaker: I don’t care what company you work for unless it’s somehow relevant...

Books on parallel programming theory often talk about such weird beasts like the PRAM model, a hypothetical hardware that would provide the programmer with a number of processors that is proportional to the input size of the problem at hand. Modern general purpose computers afford only a few processing units; four is currently a reasonable number. This limitation makes the development of highly parallel applications quite difficult to the average computer user. However, the low cost and the increasing programmability of graphics processing units, popularly know as GPUs, is contributing to over...

This has been a rough year for Mozilla and its Firefox team. Once the darling of the Web and the champion of the oppressed against Microsoft and Internet Explorer, Firefox is facing stiff competition from its primary benefactor and backlash from users. Chrome also seems to be the preferred browser of Web developers. Naturally, this means speculation about the future of Firefox. Has Firefox had better years? Absolutely. Does this mean that Firefox is "doomed"? Not so fast. Google Will Probably RenewLet's start with Firefox's potential revenue problem. If Google doesn't renew, Mozilla could be f...

It’s everywhere. XML Abuse. From Domain Specific Languages to Data Serialization, XML is the most commonly abused data format I’ve ever encountered.XML is perfectly fine for (because it was designed for this):First of all: XML was designed to be written by humans and read by humans. Nearly all generated XML I’ve seen sucks badly. I think this is because XML cannot efficiently represent common data structures found in programming languages.XML is good for representing trees. If you imagine the outline of a document, you see that this is definitly a tree....

As a freelance web developer, I’ve seen and used my fair share of open source web applications (and desktop software), and I’d like to point out something that I see all too often in open source projects: the user interface almost always lets the project down. Let me explain…The ProblemI’ve used a considerable amount of open source software (web-based and desktop), and I feel that a large portion of them are let down by their UI. The functionality is brilliant, the code is great, and the product is useful, but the user interface often just lacks the smoothness and le...

I was recently having one of those “life, the universe and everything” conversations with a close industry (web) friend.Mid-conversation I dropped that I’d identified three kinds of stress that we face as creators – it felt somewhat poetic at the time, so I thought I’d take some time to describe it.Physical, the kind of stress you’re under when you’ve been eating poorly, drinking too much, exercising too little, or working too long. We’ve all been there but for the most part, it’s manageable.Mental, you’ve got things floating ...

The ongoing argument about whether the Internet is a boon or a bust to civilization usually centers on the Web’s abundance. With so much data and so many voices, we each have knowledge formerly hard-won by decades of specialization. With some new fact or temptation perpetually beckoning, we may be the superficial avatars of an A.D.D. culture.David Weinberger, one of the earliest and most perceptive analysts of the Internet, thinks we are looking at the wrong thing. It is not the content itself, but the structure of the Internet, that is the important thing. At least, as far as the destr...

I got a call from a friend of a friend the other night. It was a fellow with whom I’d talked 11 months ago about a project he and his partner were looking to start. We established then that I wasn’t the guy for him, that I was likely too expensive for their big-dreams, small-means budget.Fast forward to present day: their project is still not launched, it’s still not right. They’ve paid for something between 600-700 hours of development with a firm in India, and they should have launched 6 weeks ago.Sure they’re only being charged $14/hour for that work, but ...