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  In 2012, let’s stop talking web design and start talking product design

“My hope for 2012 is that some of the old guard of well-respected web gurus stop talking HTML and CSS and start talking serious development. I love the way many of the old guard write and evangelize, but I’m tired of discussing basically the same stuff we were in 2006.” I wasn’t specifically referring to Jeffrey Zeldman, but he (somewhat arrogantly) assumed I was, and responded with a sarcastic, “And a merry Christmas to you, sir.” ...

   Web design,Model,Module focus,2012     2011-12-26 08:49:03

  7 big mistakes that make your layout a disaster

Even though the web design field has become a real industry, building a website is part art, part science. The design of a website may attract people but it may also make them run away, it depends on the work of the web designer. The experience, the talent and the capacity of endeavor are the greatest tools of a web designer, a good layout is based on all of these and, besides that, it is a very time consuming activity.Making a good layout is difficult and judging its value is subjective, a desi...

   Web design,Mistakes,Content,White space     2011-11-24 03:36:23

  Siri in Practice

Some quick comments on using Siri in practice—for things other than asking it to open the pod bay doors. Siri’s voice recognition is very impressive, and the scope of what it understands is very good given the difficulty of what it’s doing. But it has a lot of trouble with certain sorts of names—Irish names, for example, which often are not written as pronounced. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”—it’s a very popul...

   Siri,Apple,Practice,Artificial Intelligence,AI     2011-10-15 15:01:13

  Eight C++ programming mistakes the compiler won’t catch

C++ is a complex language, full of subtle traps for the unwary. There is an almost infinite number of ways to screw things up. Fortunately, modern compilers are pretty good at detecting a large number of these cases and notifying the programmer via compile errors or warnings. Ultimately, any error that is compiler-detectable becomes a non-issue if properly handled, as it will be caught and fixed before the program leaves development. At worst, a compiler-detectable error results in los...

   C++,Compiler,Error detection     2012-04-08 09:55:20

  Fujitsu CTO: Flash is just a stopgap

Flash is a necessary waystation as we travel to a single in-memory storage architecture. That's the view from a Fujitsu chief technology officer's office. Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, is that office-holder, and – according to him – flash is beset with problems that will become unsolvable. He says we are seeing increases in flash density at the expense of our ability to read and write data. Each shrink in process geometry, from 3X to 2X and onto 1X, ...

   Flash,Memory,Bottleneck,Limitation,Futur     2011-08-12 07:31:34

  The price of information

SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998,...

   Information,Price,Value,Facebook,Social network     2012-02-07 06:24:53

  Becoming a Better Developer Part 3: Enjoy the Panorama

If you're trying to grow your startup you've come to the right place. Get my 170-page ebook on how to grow a startup and join thousands of self-funded entrepreneurs by subscribing to my newsletter at right. I’m writing this while sitting on a beach chair overlooking the Gulf of Guinea near Cape Coast in Ghana, West Africa. Although it’s slightly overcast the view is amazing, with whitewater stretching out in both directions as far as my laser-corrected eyes can see. Bein...

   Developer,Tips     2011-06-29 08:41:33

  Redesigning the Technical Hiring Process

Since my last post on technical interviews, I’ve been fairly involved in hiring at Pulse as we grew our team from 6 people when I joined last November to 14 full-timers. In my previous post, I suggested that technical interviews, in the conventional sense, are not especially effective (by technical interviews, I mean the traditional 45 minute coding-at-a-whiteboard and algorithm puzzlers interviews). Those do a great job of telling you how well a candidate is at acing those types o...

   Career,Recruitment,Process,Developer,Ski     2011-09-14 12:01:37

  When to use STDERR instead of STDOUT

Every process is initialized with three open file descriptors, stdin, stdout, and stderr. stdin is an abstraction for accepting input (from the keyboard or from pipes) and stdout is an abstraction for giving output (to a file, to a pipe, to a console). That's a very simplified explanation but true nonetheless. Those three file descriptors are collectively called 'The Standard Streams'. Where does stderr come from? It's fairly straightforward to understand why stdin and stdout exist, however ...

   UNIX,STDERR,STDOUT,Difference     2012-01-14 12:07:43

  Speed Hashing

A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. In reality the usable space is substantially less; you can start seeing significant collisions once you've filled half the space, but half of an impossibly large number is still impossibly large. Back in 2005, I wondered about the difference between a checksum and...

   Speed hashing,Security,MD5     2012-04-07 10:35:15

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