Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

ProjectForum looks like a powerful Wiki-like server: „ProjectForum provides a powerful but easy-to-use solution for flexible workgroup collaboration and coordination of projects and teams over the web. Build an intranet or project site where everyone can actively and directly contribute, without complex software or a full-time administrator getting in the way. Use it for project…

Eric M. Burke and his readers discuss Microsoft Word versus Wiki software for the purposes of project documentation: „I believe tools like TWiki offer an excellent alternative to Word documents for many kinds of documentation.“

An ancient classic – I’ve got to re-read it from time to time: The Unix Philosophy book by Mike Gancarz is nicely summarized by David Calvert and Christian Weisgerber (the latter being written in German).

Philip Greenspun: „A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl.“ Back in 2001, Paul Graham wrote a very nice related essay, Java’s Cover: „Over time, hackers develop a nose for…

Tim Berners-Lee lists his principles of good design: „Again and again we fall back on the folklore of the principles of good design. Sometimes I need a URI for them so this is started as collection of them. I have written about some in many places. Principles such as simplicity and modularity are the stuff…

Alertbox: „Usability can save time by helping you quickly settle arguments in the development team. Most projects waste countless staff hours as highly paid people sit in meetings and argue over what users might want or what they might do under various circumstances. Instead of debating, find out.“

In his Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen lays out his visions on software development: „Just as Francis Fukuyama was wrong in predicting „the end of history,“ it would be wrong to predict the end of IT innovation. We still need some new features; hopefully they’ll emerge more slowly than in the past, and be more solidly designed…

Nice summary of the „Joke“ Conversation Thread in which the 🙂 Was Invented by Scott E Fahlman in September 1982…

Tim Bray: „Computers are amazingly, remarkably, unbelievably fast. When you’re executing compiled code that’s running around structures in memory (and they actually fit in memory), you can do stupendous quantities of computation with no perceptible delay. It’s easy to forget that now; there are so many layers of database and application server and virtual machine…

Finally, someone else realises that there’s a nasty bug in Microsoft IE related to Adobe XMP as written by Photoshop 7. Steven Frank writes: „Windows versions of Internet Explorer, mostly 5.5 and 6.0 get thoroughly confused by a file that identifies itself as .jpg but contains XML. When you try to load one of these…