What can I say about the author Dan Brown? His books (I’ve read The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons) are both exciting if perhaps slightly predictable – but they are written like shite. I know how hard it is to write decent prose, I have a 20,000 word novel draft gathering dust on my hard drive. I can’t even bring myself to look at it. But this guy is a professional right? There’s a noticeable difference between The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons – Mr Brown may have been attending a writing course. Ms Natasha recognised the similarity between Da Vinci code and The Genesis Code. Does that mean if I can pay ‘homage’ to a story by referencing it in the title I can change some of the names around and use it for my own novel?
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Mr Spolsky is a cool dude
I’ve just about finished reading my debut amazon purchase, ‘Joel on Software’ . It has changed some of my work habits (which were pretty bad to start with) and made me think about development in a new way. It is also easy to read and f-ing funny. We’re about to interview for a temp at work, so I found this article of interest. Joel elaborates a little more in the book and offers this gem:
The worst kind of interviewer is the blowhard. That’s the kind who blabs the whole time and barely leaves the candidate time to say, “yes, that’s so true, I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Hmmm, seems familiar to me for some reason.
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Home wrecker of the week
“If we legitimize same-sex unions, we will make ourselves even more of a target for terrorists.”
Say wha…? Found at I Do, which I found via Civic Space, which is what the Spread Firefox site runs on.
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Firefox becomes a superfast millonaire
Wow – Firefox has been downloaded more that a million times in 100 hours. I am really happy about that, as to be honest I thought that a million downloads in 10 days would be pushing it. Big ups to the sfx team – perhaps I should help?
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Spread Firefox
I’m told by George (no link for George) that the Spread Firefox is ‘b0rking under the load!’
But before all this popularity could go to our head, it went to our servers—and they struggled. Please bear with us through outages and slowdowns as we work to manage the load; we hope to have the download counter updating more frequently when we get our site functioning better under this massive load.
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Please don’t let this be another Netscape
OK – I’m a big Mozilla Firefox fan, and that’s why I’m going to have a small gripe.
Far be it from me to complain, but I have a two small issues with PR1 of Firefox.
1. Mail options in menus that only work (I assume) if you use Thunderbird. So why are they there?
2. Spread Firefox link in the Tools menu
OK, strike that one, I swear that at 8:35 BST that the link wasn’t working, and that it actually crashed my newly installed PR1. They must have just uploaded it.“Two tiny problems, who cares? It’s a just a preview release”, says Tom Bungalow, the most apathetic of my many personalities. Well, I reply, when it is the main download link on the homepage of Mozilla.org and it’s this close to the real deal (ie, version 1) one doesn’t expect these kind of issues. It also makes me look like a obscure-software-evangelising-freak recommending broken software to my buddies who are quite happy with IE.
AND, if we’re promoting this thing with Spread Firefox (hope the link works), it’s got to be sharp. No use talking it up (you know, “The Browser you can trust”) if it does silly things, no matter how trivial they are, as anyone that has built any kind of application will know.
And for those who are upgrading, I don’t think that this is emphasized enough: when you upgrade, start with a new profile!
Windows users: Start > run > “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe” -p
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Amazon
Another step into the 21st century the other week. I ordered a book ( Joel on Software ) through amazon and it arrived on Monday. And I thought that they’d just charge me and not deliver….
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On the tube
Living in London, I spend a hefty percentage of my time on the underground. Generally I hate it, but I also realise it’s one of those things that I will really miss about London when the time comes to leave.
The next train is for High Barnet. Barnet is British slang for ‘Hair’.
