Simon’s Blog

Peter Quinn, CIO of Massachusetts, has resigned his post; effective January 9, 2006. He has been at the centre of the debate surrounding the Massachusetts decision to adopt the OpenDocument format for Office applications, in favour of the Microsoft Office document format. He says he was neither asked nor forced to resign. […]

Comment spammers are interested in one thing: money. They have been able to make significant sums of money from pushing up the rankings of their affiliate porn and gambling web-sites on search engines. They do this by putting links to their web-sites in their comments.
Now, I’m not surprised comment spammers do what they […]

And, seeing as we’re on the topic of predictions…
It was October and the Indians on a remote reservation asked their new Chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Chief in a modern society he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the […]

If my solitary prediction for 2006 isn’t good enough for you, you might like to start at Robert Scoble’s blog as a jump-off point… Or, see predictions that have recently been blogged via Technorati.

When it comes around to this time of year, bloggers like to make predictions for the coming year. However, most, like to make many predictions - say between ten and twenty, with the hope that at least some might come true.
However, I’m going to make just one prediction for 2006, and it’s this: 2006 […]

A couple of day ago, I wrote about my favourite programming languages over the years - and talked about the reasons why. The common theme was each subsequent “favourite” language had properties that increased my sense of freedom to think about the problems I was trying to solve, compared to the previous one. […]

There were over one trillion SMS text messages sent globally in 2005. That’s over 1,000,000,000,000 messages - or, on average, over 150 messages for each person on the planet. It’s easy to see how the numbers add up - I’m not a particularly heavy SMS user, but even I send around […]

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to post something about programming languages I’ve learnt over the years, and how and why I switched to having new “favourite” languages. James Gosling’s latest blog entry reminded me me about why I wanted to do this. So here goes…
I’ve learnt a fair […]

It’s notoriously difficult for start-ups and other small companies to sell Enterprise-class software into the Enterprise. Even if you have an influencial internal champion in the large company, it’s hard for that company to choose your product over more established competition.
Quite a few years ago, my team had developed what we thought was a pretty […]

Tim Bray made a good point today about the usability of icons, or rather the lack of usability. If you want to think about usability of interfaces some more, I really recommend the book I cited in a previous blog entry.
Why does it matter that graphical icons are meaningless? It’s […]