One foot is by definition 0.3048 meters. If you write feet = meters * 3.28; instead of feet = meters / 0.3048; Why, other than sloppiness? I mean, both operations take the same number of clock cycles, but the former is numerically wrong.
Why Is Venture Capital Under Assault? Generally I don’t post political commentary in this blog (I do that elsewhere), but, um, ah, most of the people in Silicon Valley voted for President Obama despite knowing the sort of critter they were voting for. You get what you pay for.
Way back in June when I started working for the startup I’m working for now, I made an observation about how people will use their smart phones–a fact which was ignored, and which I believe is hurting our app now. And it reflects how we use different computing form-factors in general. A desktop is not [...]
I was having a conversation with a co-worker, where I complained that the biggest problem with some of the code we’re working on is that it was over-engineered. I reminded him of Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also [...]
One of the most interesting comments I ever read in any documentation was something I encountered years ago in Apple’s documentation. It was a technical note discussing using the Apple Macintosh Toolbox, and the key point was essentially that you should not just follow the rules, but you should go the extra step and follow [...]
Someone I’m working with told me that you can load a NIB on the iPhone in the following way: TestViewController *c = [[TestViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@”TestNib” bundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]]; [self presentModalViewController:c animated:YES]; However, this doesn’t appear to work. When chasing down the code, by the time TestViewController -(void)viewDidLoad gets called, self has changed; however, deep inside the [...]
That way I can beat people to death with it. Gall’s law
Why don’t designers and developers have more power at many companies? The thought arises from the observation that newspapers could be saved if designers had more power. I think the answer is fairly simple: there is (or rather, there should be) a clear difference between the functional requirements for a project, and the artistic and [...]