Month: December 2001
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Documentation = Sales
The need for good software documentation is obvious for people using the product. But its value is less clear for prospective buyers. Many websites maintain a wall between marketing/sales information and user documentation (which falls under the rubric of “support”). The marketing people don?t want consumers to see all the bugs and functionality problems with…
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Cracking Passwords
Here?s a New York Times article about passwords. The task of maintaining passwords can be a real bear. Every mom and pop website seems to require a user name and password. Ever since I forgot a root password 6 months ago (requiring me to reinstall the OS), I vowed more diligence about the matter. I…
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Jukebox Challenge
For Christmas I burned music CD?s for friends and family. I also was able to experience firsthand the maddening challenges of maintaining an MP3 collection and the usability problems of Music Match Software. Now that I have started to download mp3?s like crazy, I have realized what a bother it can be. Most of these…
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Insomnia and Politicians
Well, today, I used a great blogger template and css from ww.glish.com. The glish site really does amazing things with style sheets. Please indulge me with the changing colors. One needs a little bit of frivolity sometimes. I had an interesting civics lesson yesterday. About 2:00 in the morning I went to the apartment workout…
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Linking to Friends
It?s hard to get noticed these days. In preparation for the launching of my site, I wrote some simple pointer pages on geocities. These pointer pages (such as this one) would eternally point to the most recent version of my web site. Why is this necessary, you ask? My ISP has blocked port 80, causing…
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Insults engraved in cyberspace
Today I passed along a private email exchange to a few good friends. It was something frivolous and trivial, but I knew it would be a good email discussion topic, and indeed, in only the last hour I received two responses. I’ve noted elsewhere that email discussions are a clumsy way to have a real…
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Online Job Searches
I?ve spent the last day or so doing online job searches. I had done it two years ago with some success, and thought I had mastered it. Since that time, all the job search services have undergone several facelifts and are more aggressively pushing their services (an all-too understandable occurrence in this competitive world). While…
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Remembrance of Old Posts
Well, what do you know–I found a post I wrote last year. I completely forgot I wrote it. Actually I I wrote a longer more formal version of the same article later. Here is the text The oft-repeated complaint about bad Linux documentation doesn’t seem to apply anymore (although it was still true as long…
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Total Email: 8256
And that’s after I deleted most of the outright spam. Maybe someday I’ll go back and read it. I read an excellent article (no link–sorry) about the value of letter writing. The main drawback to email is that a person rarely reads email more than once. With physical letters, the letter is always around cluttering…
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Alternatives to Stealing Music?
Yesterday Slashdot.org had a good online discussion about kazaa, a file sharing program that is the napster of today (and by the way, it is being sued by music companies, with major fines on the way). The discussion is here (if you follow this link, be sure to choose the option to set the threshhold…