My sleek mac is more like a Jaguar then a chevy. Yes it is in the shop. My machine and 4 of its cousins left our office last week for an undisclosed service center for an indeterminate amount of time. I’m using a Dell laptop. The dell hardware is really solid as is the wireless connectivity. The operating system is windows on top of full drive encryption so the software experience leaves something to be desired. When I unplug the wire it immediately hops onto the corporate wireless network, something the mac can’t do (yet). ...

Due to an unfortunate series of work related events I find myself writing php code. Not only php code, but wordpress php code. That however is the topic of a later post (as is plugins that edit core code using regex based searches) I did the work in textmate but decided to spin up my new Netbeans 6.5 in order to test the subversion functionality. Immediately I noticed that Netbeans picked up a tag mismatch and highlighted it nicely: ...

My girlfriend’s mom bought her one of those inexpensive ‘wireless’ notebook mouses. It is not even bluetooth enabled, it requires a USB adapter. I used it over the weekend and found it much better then my hip Apple mouse. Although I can’t squeeze it ( www.apple.com/mightymouse/ ) it is much easier to use. The tilt wheel concept is more precise then the little ball on the apple and the optical sensor works across any surface. This mouse works on my office desk where the apple mouse fails (and a dog did eat my mousepad) ...

Sun released version 1 of javaFX today - http://www.javafx.com/ Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter. Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me. As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design. ...

I found an interesting article today. A House With No Front Door It is written by a product marketing professional lamenting about dealing with ‘resource constrained’ engineering teams. Seeing as how I come from a resource constrained engineering team I thought it was an interesting read. The premise of the article was the disconnect as described: Perhaps it is my job to get this perspective across to them, and I try to do that, but the gulf between the “feature triage” perspective that many engineers have, and the “holistic” customer or market perspective that is needed is enormous. ...