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Category Archives: technical

Technical topics.

Adobe software is useless and must be uninstalled everywhere, now

I had cause to use ‘Adobe Digital Editions’ today because of an epub file that would not be added into iTunes (DRM? who knows?). So I open up the Adobe Epub reader which is somehow installed on my Mac to read it. But, it won’t run. It insists I have to install the “latest version” [...]

Postbox 3 anachronisms

Yesterday I wrote about Postbox 3 as a Mail.app replacement. I’m still using it, and liking it, but I’m starting to develop a good sense of where it still has rough edges; Alert sounds. Sometimes it plays the alert sound for no discernible reason (I think because new mail has arrived in a sub-label/sub-folder, but [...]

Apple Mail.app replacement – Postbox 3

My regular readers (all two of you) will know that I frequently thrash about looking for an Apple Mail.app replacement. I am a regular and long-term Gmail user. Its search is amazing, the filters powerful (although lacking a filter-power-user feature to help manage the dozens of filters I have actively running) and I quite like [...]

Air France stops maintenance in China after screws missing from plane

This is why I don’t trust off-shoring of aircraft maintenance. The same reason that poisonous substitutions are made in toothpaste or cheap lead paint used on a children’s toy; it’s the whole idea of taking something based in complex skills and knowledge-based engineering and buying on price, which ends up in a business environment like [...]

High-performance system design by declarative specification

“I want to get from London to New York in 12 minutes.” “Ok, we will have to design and build some sort of ICBM or buy one, that will cost a lot of money. Also, I’m not even sure you can get an ICBM that’s fast enough for that distance. And have we thought about [...]

The Frustrated Architect

An interesting set of slides by Simon Brown from a talk he gave about the role of the architect. A PDF is attached to the linked post or you can view the slides online. Wish I had heard the talk (see below). The Frustrated Architect: Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of [...]

Mac Mail.app and its local cache of messages

Why is it that yesterday Mail.app decided it did not have a local cache of my imap mail boxes anymore and it must refetch every one? Maybe I should switch back to Mailplane.

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog): You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in [...]

case “String” : still FAIL

You know, just because Java is going to gain a switch statement that works on java.util.String still doesn’t make it right. It’s still a code smell for an OO design fail. Although the diamond syntax and lambdas are way overdue (see article). Java is not the new COBOL | Craig Tataryn’s .plan: A switch statement [...]

Gmail redesigned, app coming to the iPhone?

In a nutshell, yuk. Everything moves! Drag it about! Ultimate customisable universal everything! Drag the divider for Chat and Labels up and down (but how about “Hide Chat”?)?! God, how I miss the old beta Gmail. I’ve stopped using the actual Gmail interface in recent days, when I sued to enthuse about it. Now Apple’s [...]