Christopher Mackay’s Blog

From the Daring Fireball post on Wired’s story on 37signals:

Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: ‘Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,’ and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else.”

Doesn’t seem so “ginned-up” from here. Count me among the lost customers.

37signals have earned their success. They get an awful lot right in their apps, from lack of data lock-in to an admirable overall level of intuitiveness.

So why have I given up on them after trying to use Basecamp for nearly 3 years?

A big reason would be that “vetoing customer requests” is standard operating procedure at 37signals. Don’t take my word for it: it says so on page 62 of Getting Real:

Don’t worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind you until you can’t forget.

Or until they go away because they have better things to do.

It’s fine with me that DHH would say “fuck you” to this, but he doesn’t get to do that and have my money.

For people looking for something, um, less simple than Basecamp (on Mac OS X) take a look at OmniPlan, recently upgraded to version 1.5.

Twittering From My Newton on Flickr - Photo Sharing!: Grant Hutchinson out-geeks us all…

I really should fire up the old eMate again…

(Via John Moltz.)

Phill Ryu has posted a YouTube clip of his 2-year-old working an iPhone. That’s pretty cool. Let’s see that with a Blackberry.Maybe if the 2-year-old was running the video camera this clip wouldn’t make you feel so sea-sick…

This story (“Web site” baffles Internet terrorism trial judge”; Yahoo.com) has been making the rounds, typically accompanied by howls of laughter.

What’s so funny?

I admit, it’s difficult to grasp how anyone — especially someone presiding over a case on internet terrorism — could be so insulated from the everyday realities of modern life. But I must say I’m really quite impressed that Judge Openshaw is brave enough to admit this. Clearly, he has the courage to do what many, many people would not. Would those laughing at him prefer that he quietly sit back and pretend to understand things of which he has no experience? How could that be an improvement?

I applaud Judge Peter Openshaw.

Link.

All I can add to this, is that I’d rather they ship a solid 10.5 than a 10.5 that makes me wish I’d stuck with 10.4.

This is very good news. Now if only there was a way to run IE6 & IE7 side-by-side on one box…

IEBlog: Details on our CSS changes for IE7

The following is shamelessly lifted from the CyberSocial email:

Greater Moncton CyberSocial, Wednesday, October 13th, 2004 at 5:30 p.m. NOTE Location change: Manhattan Bar & Grill, Westmorland St (across from the Moncton Market)

Join us before the CyberSocial for a technical seminar:

Business Uses of Social Software

Time: 5:00 to 5:30 pm

We have the pleasure of welcoming Sébastien Paquet from the NRC IIT who will speak to us about the use of the social networking systems and weblogs.

Social networking systems and weblogs (also known as blogs) have recently emerged as innovative and very low-cost ways to communicate and connect that take full advantage of the capabilities of the Web. This short talk will explain what these tools are and why they are interesting, with a particular eye to how they can be useful for businesses, e.g. in new product development, client interaction, marketing, or advancing your business profile in the industry.

Sebastien Paquet has been doing research at the intersection of social software, knowledge sharing, and eLearning for the past several years. He has contributed several articles and talks on topics in these areas. His personal weblog, as well as the Many-to-Many group weblog on social software to which he contributes, are influential sources on innovation in web-based communication.

Sebastien received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Universite de Montreal and is a Research Officer for the National Research Council’s Institute for Information Technology in Moncton.

(Seb is a very nice and very smart guy — if you can make it, you should —Chris)

Tonight’s get-together was great fun. Seb Paquet, Harold Jarche, Cameron Bales, Will Pate, Steve “the idea guy” Mallet, William Langley and I got together at Boomerang’s in Moncton.

Discussion was lively, and centred around Steve’s big, new idea concerning DataLibre and, since there were a number of Drupal fans/users/hosts in this little group, around Bryght.com, a BC-based company with an intriguing mass-hosting idea.

Tantramar Interactive clients Harold Jarche and Cameron Bales have posted a detailed review of Drupal (an open-source content-management system), based on Tantramar Interactive’s installation of Drupal 4.4.0. The review appears at Rick Bruner’s businessblogconsulting.com.

Harold Jarche has pointed out a bloggers’ get-together tentatively scheduled for mid-September in Moncton.

Check out Steve Mallet’s fooworks page for more info.