• Finished a Program 29 Years Later

    Posted on November 19, 2013

    My parents were getting ready to sell their house a few months ago, and while I was there I grabbed a few super old computer books from when I was a kid. Nostalgia I suppose, and I figured they would be cool to have around. What I didn’t expect was... [Read More]

  • Firefox OS with App Manager

    Posted on October 28, 2013

    One of the nice things about getting FFOS 1.2 on my device is being able to use App Manager instead of the simulator plugin to do development. Given that the App Manager replaces the Simulator Dashboard in the newest versions of Firefox, it seems like the kind of thing developers... [Read More]

  • FirefoxOS 1.2 on ZTE Open

    Posted on October 24, 2013

    I picked up a ZTE Open Firefox OS device a little while ago. Given that developer hub says it’s a “powerful device aimed at developers and early adopters worldwide” I figured it would be good for some hackery. I read the specs, so I knew that “powerful” should be pretty... [Read More]

  • knife-block for Chef Testing

    Posted on September 19, 2013

    A few weeks ago Nathen Harvey was kind enough to stop by and give us a critique of how we do Chef automated testing and some workflow suggestions. We had been using chef-solo to do some of the recipe development and automated testing, but all our real deployments were done... [Read More]

  • Scaling Technology

    Posted on July 14, 2013

    A few weeks ago Arte and Mario asked me to swing by to chat with folks participating in the Momentum accelerator to talk about scaling technology. While we were talking I pointed folks to a few posts and videos of talks I consider to be some of the root nodes... [Read More]

  • Consistent Test Methodology for Inconsistent Projects

    Posted on May 28, 2013

    How do you start introducing some testing if you have a huge group of existing projects, for the most part all implemented using different languages and technologies? That’s the problem I’ve been poking at recently. The first issue is that none of the technology choices were made with testability in... [Read More]

  • Why I Suck at Angel Investing, and My Plan

    Posted on March 9, 2013

    I’ve done a bunch of angel investing over the last few years. And I’ve decided I’m no good at it. The market, so far, seems to agree with me. Most of the investments I’ve done are nowhere, frequently not even making it to launch. That’s okay actually, not a big... [Read More]

  • Use of Time

    Posted on February 6, 2013

    I love the idea behind social media services, helping to connect people and strengthen relationships. However I don’t think most are actually fulfilling on that vision. Sure, you can stay connected with friends. But your goals and the goals of the social service itself frequently aren’t aligned. The desire of... [Read More]

  • Resurrection

    Posted on February 4, 2013

    This blog has been dormant for a long time, but I’ve decided to start it back up. I created the site cause I wanted a Wordpress install I could test my PalmOS based mobile blogging client against. But once I had the site up and running I started tossing all... [Read More]

  • Ubuntu - Sun JDK Graphical Install Only?

    Posted on September 20, 2006

    I was just installing the Sun JDK on my workstation at the office, and when I tried the obvious: apt-get install sun-java5-bin got an error message about not being able to find a license. Interesting, thought I, “there must be a higher level package wrappering this whole thing that deposits... [Read More]