Introduction

Welcome to the blog of a philanthropist, astrologer, japanophile, webdesigner, proud ICT generalist and student aiming for a masters degree in work and organisation / occupational health psychology. Discover my world, some of the things that keep me entertained, how our minds work and how our minds are put to work.

2 Sep 2009

Interesting tech news

I ran into a firefox addon called ‘Pencil‘ today through Smashing Magazine (a must read for every self respecting webdesigner). The tool Pencil is basically handy if you want to do a quick sketch of a website design. As a 400kb install, I didn’t pass that one up. There’s some tutorials on how to do wireframing in Illustrator but I don’t see much use to that.

There apparently was another gmail outage. After reading that story I thought “well, sounds like your typical shitty day at the office” and “so typical”. You do something to prevent something else from happening or make it better and it backfires. t_t.

Here’s another story: some guy made a uTorrent monitoring iPhone app, and Apple refuses to have it in their store. Because “well bittorrent and such is used for copyright infringing”. Um not necessarily (1), it’s monitoring (2), and they have nzbindex applications in that store (3). Way to go Apple… /sarcasm.

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2 Apr 2009

Seeing discussions on open source

It just appeared on a Dutch IT site. Apparently some guy said “it’s not suitable for large releases”. Want my advice on open source? Don’t fuck around with it and it literally costs you nearly nothing to maintain. However, if you have customers that specifically want this and that, be prepared to have a headache when it comes to upgrade time. Because then, of course all your customized programming needs to be adjusted too.

I work a lot with WordPress for websites and to tell you the truth, I never touch the core to change files. I’ll forget what I did anyhow and it starts to fail when I want to upgrade. Not a very good idea. Also, keeping third party plugs to a bare minimum is recommended. Usually they start to fail too with an upgrade, though I have to say WP has good policy when it comes to this. Every large software vendor would be out of business if open source would be enough for our customers. Unfortunately, repetitively not the case. The closed source sector always lags behind, and our customers are getting smarter. This usually means they want things they’ve seen on open source, which closed source can’t keep up with. So yay. What a mess.

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