Fubaredness Is Contagious

I am currently reading “How Life Imitates Chess” by Garry Kasparov, after I saw a great review of the book by Baron Schwartz. Great book and I highly recommend it.
It’s got many lessons for software engineers as well. For example, in chapter 9 “Phases of the game” Kasparov talks about inexperienced players blindly following openings [...]

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This is a semi-serious, semi-joking post.
Earlier this month, Seth Godin, one of the leading thinkers of our digital age, wrote a post titled Do ads work?
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if [...]

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… And it’s not only because it’s often cheaper to own or use, but also because it raises the bar for every single piece of proprietary software – they no longer can get away with poor user interface or limited features like they used to. Proprietary software now has to beat and exceed open source [...]

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Designing a distributed application to be fault tolerant is one of my favorite things that I often get to do at work. First of all, it should never fail under normal circumstances. Don’t believe people who tell you that circumstances are never normal – if it’s the case, a fault-tolerant design is the least of [...]

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Those of us who [still] have a PalmOS-based device and use its Blazer browser will probably know that Blazer may take some time to render complex pages, and the end result might not even be readable on a small screen. I recently found a solution to this problem that works great, at least for me.
On [...]

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I was under assumption that when a site moves to a new domain or URL space, the best thing to do from SEO perspective was to put up one’s site at a new place and set up old site to do HTTP 301 redirects (Moved Permanently).
I did it a couple of weeks ago when I [...]

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Today I would like to continue my never ending quest of finding parallels between IT and economics and social sciences. I will start with a preamble, but if you are already familiar with a concept of “operations alert” in context of IT, you can skip it.
Preamble
I have spent a big part of my career in [...]

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Today I discovered that Firefox 3 will refuse to display a site over HTTPS if its SSL certificate is revoked. And even though I am not questioning merits of this decision, I still would have preferred to have this behavior configurable, either somewhere deep in Preferences or at least via about:config (quick scan of the [...]

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http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/19/21FE-startups-intro_1.html and http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/19/21FE-startups-winners_2.html

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What we in IT call a “bad state” (as in “application ended up in a bad state and needed to be restared”) in economics is called “bad equilibrium.” Here is more on General Equilibrium theory.

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