http://www.davejenkins.com Salt Lake City | Washington DC | London | Stuttgart | Tokyo | Seoul | Park City | St Louis Sun, 28 Sep 2008 23:26:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Posit: All software becomes commoditized over time.  Either the original developing company reduces its price point to maintain market share or extend into ubiquity (MSWindows), goes freeware to maintain format hegemony (Adobe PDF), or more often-- gets reverse engineered and released into the wild by those communists in the Open ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/09/28/social-drupal-is-the-new-word-press/ Well, I told ya so.  The iPhone isn't doing so well in Japan, and has an uphill climb ahead of it.  As reported in a poll conducted by the Nikkei Business, 59% of respondents had "no intention to buy", and another 26% had "no interest."  That left 2.5% who intend ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/08/19/iphone-in-japan-meh/ An old college roommate once took a job somewhere in the South, where Dixie was certain to rise again.  He sent us a postcard showing a statue of some confederate general on his steed, sword raised defiantly about to charge into glory.  The only thing my friend wrote on the ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/08/06/the-war-was-over-long-before-it-began/ Most IT execs try to boil down their decisions to simple dichotomies: build vs. buy, distributed vs. centralized, minimum ante vs technology leadership, good vs. oracle, freedom vs. microsoft. This pattern repeats amongst the developer crewmates: visual studio vs. rational rose, DOM vs. script, cron vs. UP, and the ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/07/29/this-vs-that/ We all get attachments from vendors via email: proposals, MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, Ammendments, Contracts, etc.  Some people leave these attached to their email-- trusting that the email server won't go boots up.  Some people download attachments to their desktop, which soon fills up the entire screen (unless you can arrange ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/07/16/pet-peeve-naming-file-attachments-poorly/ So, we've all disparaged Waterfall software development as overly cumbersome and simply undoable in today's go-go world.  Agile came along and promised to tighten everything up, but in reality most people just say the words 'agile' and they really mean 'cram waterfall methods into 2 week segments'.  ("Manifesto"? Really? The last ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/05/15/the-fractal-method-of-project-management/ Well, I've been here in Tokyo a week, and have yet to go sing karaoke. As it is, I've been back and forth between Japan, Korea, and China for 20 years now, and I've only been to karaoke 3 times. Here's how it usually goes down: someone ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/05/09/karaoke-dos-and-donts/ As goes Tokyo, so the rest of the world will follow. This is hard to swallow for women's fashion, but it certainly holds true for cell phones, personal electronics, and violence comics. I'm in Tokyo, and here's my prediction: the laptop's days are numbered. People want portable computing, no ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/05/04/the-laptop-is-an-endangered-species/ Thanks again to my friend Matt, we now have a consistent basis to rank mediawiki sites on www.wikindex.com. The score is essentially a combined log(10) of the daily updates, number of articles, and user count. The philosophy guiding the score is that a successful wiki is really reflective ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/04/09/wikindexcom-with-relative-rankings/ The Average American moves every 7 years. Some people stay in one place their whole lives, which means that some of us move every three or four years or more. Within that group, some of us skip between countries. I admit to that wanderlust. I admit ... http://www.davejenkins.com/2008/03/07/mintcom-is-pretty-cool/