When it was announced at this year’s Google I/O, the Nexus Q team took pride in the fact that people upon first observation generally had no idea what to make of the device. After playing with it myself for a couple of days, I’m not sure what to make of it either. It all started […]
Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
I admire Steve Jobs. I’ve been aware of him for most of my life, having grown up near “The Valley” and played with computers from my youngest years. However, I wasn’t particularly interested in Jobs until about when most of society became interested in him. In recent years, I harbored a secret desire to work […]
What Do Set Direction and Walmart Have In Common?
About one month ago, Walmart’s Global Electronic Commerce division (i.e., Walmart.com) acquired our entire Set Direction team–the start-up that Dion and I created in late 2010. We’re now anxiously engaged in a multi-year effort to energize Walmart’s efforts in mobile e-commerce. If you had told me six months ago this would be Set Direction’s outcome, […]
Going to Palm with Dion
Do you remember how much the Web used to suck? Not so long ago, we Web developers would have to constantly educate product managers and other business stakeholders about the limitations of HTML; we would often contrast it with so-called “rich client” technologies. Over the past few years, we’ve all watched with wonder as these […]
Return to Dark Castle
I’ve a lot of fond memories from my youth that revolve around the Mac: getting invited over to a girl’s house in the second grade… to play Dark Castle on an early-model Mac; retrofitting my 3rd grade teacher’s Lisa to be Mac-compatible; getting pulled out of classes later on in elementary school to help the […]
Speech and Sounds
When my first child starting talking, the way she said “baby” was comical: it was basically two grunts, a high-pitch followed by a low-pitch, which when concatenated sounded roughly like the word itself. As time went on, she learned how to speak with greater precision, but the funny bit was that for a while, whenever […]
New Conference Room?
Perhaps it’s time for Mozilla to get a new office space with a bigger conference room.
Short Analysis of Bay Area Peninsula Rental Market
Recently, I moved my family from Utah to the Bay Area for my new job at Mozilla. It’s a homecoming for me; I grew up in the East Bay. To keep my commute times down, we decided to rent a place on the west side of the San Francisco Bay, called simply “the Peninsula”. As […]
Thoughts on the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
For as long as I can remember, my family has spent time each year in Cedaredge, a small little town in western Colorado. During our most recent visit, I was caught unprepared in a rain shower and, seeking cover wherever it could be found, I stumbled upon a library book sale. The combination of ridiculous […]
GroupWise Source Code and Disabled Comments
I can’t keep up with the spam bombarding this blog; the Akismit plug-in is no longer working effectively. Until I have time to resolve this issue, comments by non-registered users have been disabled. I am allowing self-registration for now, but since WordPress is a big target, I’m expecting spambots to be able to self-register, and […]
Ben Galbraith 