Rampage was…not good. (Warning – “spoilers” below, though honestly, there’s not much to spoil)I see you folks in the back, snickering and saying “well, what did you expect?”. Here’s the thing though – Rampage was probably the most-disappointing movie I’ve seen in the last year. It’s an onion of layered badness. Even The Rock couldn’t save… Continue reading Movie Mini-Review: Rampage
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Mergers: The Good
(intro blog post here) How to help your acquired employees succeed Out of the 6 acquisitions I’ve been involved with, two really stand out as positive experiences, both for the acquired and the parent company. Here’s what was different about those two mergers, as opposed to the ones that didn’t go so well. Integrate the… Continue reading Mergers: The Good
Mergers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
You’ve been acquired how many times? In my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked for a number of small software/hardware companies, several of which were absorbed by much larger companies. I though tit’d be interesting to compare and contrast some of the ways the various mergers went good and bad, and what acquiring… Continue reading Mergers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
That delicate line between security and convenience
A key problem, maybe the key problem in software security is how to properly balance user convenience with security. Adding additional security to a system often includes extra work, more time, or other compromises from the end-user. And reasonable people can disagree about where the line is for the appropriate trade-off. That iPhone camera permissions “flaw” There… Continue reading That delicate line between security and convenience
The "Just Smart Enough" House
Less Architectural Digest, more “This is our home” We’ve been doing some remodeling on our house, and the overarching theme of the renovations has been “make this house convenient for real humans to live in”. When we bought the house, it was “perfect” in one sense – the house is broken up into two sections,… Continue reading The "Just Smart Enough" House
Follow up: LockState security failures
I wrote a blog post last month on what your IoT startup can learn from the LockState debacle. In the intervening weeks, not much new information has come to light about the specifics of the update failure, and it seems from their public statements that LockState thinks it’s better if they don’t do any kind… Continue reading Follow up: LockState security failures
A short rant on XML – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
[editor’s note: This blog post has been in “Drafts” for 11 years. In the spirit of just getting stuff out there, I’m publishing it basically as-is. Look for a follow-up blog post next week with some additional observations on structured data transfer from the 21st century] So, let’s see if I can keep myself to less… Continue reading A short rant on XML – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Post-trip review: Telestial “International Travel SIM”
For our recent trip to Europe, Yvette and I tried the seasoned-traveler technique of swapping out the SIM cards in our phones, rather than paying AT&T’s fairly extortionate international roaming fees. It was an interesting experience, and we learned a few things along the way, which I’ll share here. We used Telestial, which is apparently… Continue reading Post-trip review: Telestial “International Travel SIM”
A brief history of the Future
A brief history of the Future Lessons learned from API design under pressure It was August of 2009, and the WebOS project was in a bit of trouble. The decision had been made to change the underlying structure of the OS from using a mixture of JavaScript for applications, and Java for the system services,… Continue reading A brief history of the Future
What your Internet Of Things startup can learn from LockState
The company LockState has been in the news recently for sending an over-the-air update to one of their smart lock products which “bricked” over 500 of these locks. This is a pretty spectacular failure on their part, and it’s the kind of thing that ought to be impossible in any kind of well-run software development… Continue reading What your Internet Of Things startup can learn from LockState
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