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From OSCON

To bog­art: To hog some­thing which is sup­posed to be shared.

The bus factor the degree to which some­thing may fail when someone gets pro­ver­bi­ally run over by a bus. Man­agers must con­sider this in their planning.

embig­gen to make bigger.

Source:How Open Source Pro­jects Sur­vive Pois­on­ous People. Or Snakes in a Project.

Man­age­ment speak is News­peak. Closely related to Sport-psychology speak, it mangles this rich tapestry we call the Eng­lish lan­guage into a flat, plastic taste­less cracker.

Today’s bad word is out­come.

Quote from Ricky Ger­vais, at the Golden Globes: “We’re not from these parts. We’re from a little place called Eng­land. You know, the place that used to run the world before you guys.” I don’t know what was fun­nier: the quote, or the lack of reac­tion from the stiff audi­ence. The best humor is the truth…

Richard Dawkins on the evol­u­tion­ary aspects of the birth of the Mac: Apple of my eye

Happy feck­ing New Year.

Going Pear Shaped — won­der­ful cock­ney phrase pop­ular­ised by The Bill is now reg­u­larly heard on Aus­tralian TV. Its gone all pear shaped, guvn’r!

More week­end read­ing: The Skep­tics Dic­tion­ary. For instance, were the Druids in Celtic times purely the nerds of a highly warrior-oriented com­munity? Any why when I think druids, I make a men­tal con­nec­tion to Spinal Tap?

Inter­est­ingly, Grace Hop­per is accred­ited with the quote “It is always easier to ask for­give­ness than it is to get permission.”

Com­pen­dium of Lost Words I’ve had just about enough of your gar­rulous blat­er­a­tion, you clod!

Sunday drive with 7 MINI Cooper S’s. Sydney MINI Cooper S Meet 16 March 03

The Word Spy lin­guistic zeitgeist.

Man­age­ment zen phrase of the day: Ideas are easy, imple­ment­a­tion is hard.

Accord­ing to For­tune Magazine, Adobe is the 5^th best place to work in the US: Adobe Sys­tems No. 5

Camaraderie is the byword at this Sil­icon Val­ley stal­wart known for its graph­ics products: fre­quent all-hands meet­ings, job rota­tions, Fri­day night beer bashes. Three-week paid sab­bat­ic­als every five years.

My com­ments: Adobe’s his­tory has cemen­ted a dicho­tom­ous industrial/company cul­ture. It is a tech­no­logy ori­ented com­pany that has a strange mix of “sales ori­ent­a­tion” (res­ults are import­ant) and “innov­a­tion cul­ture” (smart engin­eers mak­ing cool products). Out here in the boon­ies (that is, not the US) we do not have beer bashes, can­not job rotate and hope to last 5 years to get that sab­bat­ical! That said, it’s still a great place to work.

I pos­ted the fol­low­ing on Thursday, 18 July 2002. In light of today’s announce­ments by Apple: Key­note, Safari etc its inter­est­ing to see that this is start­ing to come true.

Thursday, 18 July 2002: Some­thing I remem­ber think­ing, if not say­ing, was that the whole NeXT her­it­age of easier soft­ware devel­op­ment tools was going to give Apple a sig­ni­fic­ant com­pet­it­ive advant­age with soft­ware. We are see­ing a pleth­ora of MacOS X based “digital hub” (or digital life­style) mini-applications tied to a web-services style backed (.mac) I am sure all of these, being MacOS X nat­ive, use the Cocoa (alias Yel­low Box, alias NeXT frame­works) envir­on­ment. The key to the volume of applic­a­tion production.

It is not sur­pris­ing that Apple has “cre­ated” a new browser, it wants to con­trol its own des­tiny. A browser should be a part of the oper­at­ing sys­tem and are com­mod­ity applic­a­tions. Cre­ated is an inter­est­ing com­ment, when in fact they have coopted some Open Source (Kon­queror) HTML ren­der­ing code. Expect the browser com­pon­ent to be a part of the Cocoa frame­work, too. Developers will be able to place a robust HTML ren­der­ing ele­ment into their applic­a­tions that is sup­por­ted and main­tained by Apple.

Whilst IE still has a bulk of the browser pub­lic (95% hit­ting this web site are from IE5 or greater), there is a frag­ment­a­tion of the “last 5%” into micro-marketshare browsers such as Opera, Moz­illa, Nets­cape and now Safari. Since the browser wars of the late 1990’s, there has been stag­na­tion as far as browser innov­a­tion is concerned.