Now, a name belongs inside each of these circles and it’s the name of a specific role on your team. The traditional titles for these roles are engineering manager, product manager, and program manager, but I don’t want you get to get hung up on titles. I want to you to think about the person who is best qualified to make a decision regarding the bits, the features, and the truth.

via Rands In Repose: Bits, Features, and Truth. Rands on redefining the common argument between time, quality and features with what really needs to be considered, the bits, features and the truth.

Let's forget that the statement ignores the fact that there are plenty of businesses built on the OSS model (RedHat, WordPress, Canonical for starters). But beyond that, it seems astonishing to me that anyone should imply that simply recommending open source products – products that can be more easily tailored without infringing licensing rules – “undermines” anything.

via When using open source makes you an enemy of the state | Technology | guardian.co.uk. Cory Doctorow tries to make sense of a loss in logic by the IIPA.

The other thing I neglected to mention, and I think it’s important, is that this is all taking place at the executive and upper-management levels. The engineers — at both companies — are neither prepared nor relishing this. I have sources at both companies (more at Apple than Google, unsurprisingly, but more at Google than just about any company other than Apple), almost all of whom are engineers and none are “executives”, and the word that keeps popping up regarding this situation is “weird”. That there’s a meeting at Apple where Google comes up, or vice versa, and the managers are talking about waging war — vicious, angry talk.

via Daring Fireball: Generals’ War. That jives with my intuition of those companies.

Until then, here are a few notes and impressions I collected during my fondle-time with the iPad and a sober morning after a full night’s sleep:

via Hands-on with the Apple iPad – it does make sense :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko. This is the most complete review of the iPad I’ve read thus far.

For the fact is, even bulletproof and mo’ bulletproofer @font-face CSS syntax aren’t really bulletproof if we care about looks and legibility across browsers and platforms.

via 24 ways: Real Fonts and Rendering: The New Elephant in the Room.

For all the advances that have happened with regards to font rendering through the browser, it’s a long road to achieving what a print designer can do in five minutes. Someday we will be able to edit fonts and scale them up and down, and know that it will look the same on every computer, every device, every where, every time. That time is not today and probably not in the next few years.

It's one of the first things a visitor to our office notices. It's one of the reasons we call our company a Town. Standing there in the middle of the office, surrounded by desks, chairs, printers, filing cabinets, all the trappings of the typical modern workspace, is a house.

via Developer Town – Developer Town Blog – Why houses?. As I said on Twitter, I so want to work out a mini-house now.

Flickr photo from tinyfroglet

All this points to one thing: Open source is an infrastructure. Just like the roads in the city that automobile manufacturers are interested in, software companies want access to existing infrastructure to build their own products upon and make money, instead of having to re-invent the wheel everytime. It’s a win-win situation for all companies. Paying Microsoft to get Windows to support their products can be an expensive affair. So making an operating system a commodity is in everyone’s interests (well, except Microsoft’s). The web browser is another example of a commodity today. Everyone’s interested in a good, conformant, open platform on which to develop their web applications on.

via Modern thoughts on open source | Artagnon’s Presence.

Apple’s first genuine hit was the Macintosh with a graphic user interface that made it easy for everybody to understand how to interact with a computer and see what was going on. What sparked Ebay’s first real success ease of access, selling was quick and painless. If you didn’t sell well who cared it was junk anyways. YouTube lowered the bar towards sharing videos online, Flickr photos, Google searching, Obama to donate and get involved, the list goes on and on. Why is MasterCard adding the ability to pay with out even pulling out your card, ease of access towards that card. The easier it is to use your MasterCard the more likely you are to use it.

As a business you should not create artificial barriers towards letting your users interact with your business/product. This means provide lots of free samples, make it easy to get in touch with you, make your web site easy to navigate and fun to use.

If you are a software company make you applications easy for your customers to get their hands on and use. Interfaces should be clean and easy to grasp. Limit preferences, most of the time the defaults are just fine, the more settings you have the more chances you have to confuse your customers. If a customer can’t grasp an interface the user doesn’t need to be educated the interface needs to change.

I don’t know if the bar can ever be low enough or if it ever is too low, but the lower you make the bar the more likely you are to attract people to your product (be it software, hardware, food, information, skill, or even yourself) means that many more potential customers.

Thanks to Matt Cutts for the inspiration of this post based on his review of the Google Voice Search iPhone App. Specifically “The easier/faster it is to search, the more I searched.”

I need to do a post about the election and how people who want to run away from the results should seriously grow up. Along those same sort of lines, I want to do some research into do countries become more liberal over time or is that something that I think occurs? Personally I feel the answer is yes, as do the majority of people that I’ve discussed this idea with. I have yet to find a good book/paper to back me up though, I could be making it up however. Research is needed, any commenters know a good resource or some facts to prove it?

I need to set aside time to do more things that I want to do such as blogging, reading my piles on piles of books, and writing code for myself to scratch my itches. Sure maybe when I’m out of school or at least I go to being a part time student. 24 hours in a day, and I getting into the bad habit of sleeping for more than 5 of them, need to stop that.

I have a new project that I am starting with a friend or two. It has a lot of potential and currently is really really early. I can’t reveal yet where that is going or what is happening, but be looking for information about software engineering, project management, etc, floating across here.

Along those same lines I re-read Getting Real by 37signals. I forgot what a great book it was with regards to software engineering, project management, and shipping software. Really good to read, both with my side project and for work where I am now having to manage more than just myself. It reflected a lot of things in both projects and software that I want to occur in software projects that I can influence. (Defiantly should be a later blog post.)

Some other last minute blurbs. Most of the billboard ads I saw in the car ride from Love Field to my hotel where for goverment/state programs or agencies. I wonder why, is the advertising slump starting to already hit DFW, are the billboards simply where these groups are advertising now. I certainly don’t remember quite the same percentage last time I travelled, but I could be wrong.

One of the ad’s was for the Texas Lottery and had a background picture of 5 or so stop lights all green, with the words “Maybe it’s your luck day”. Clever as much as I don’t like advertising for the lottery (tax on the poor/stupid essentially), it was still a good ad.

My Christmas list has been worked down to four things: iPhone, MacBook Pro, Sony Cybershot and MediaTemple Grid Service. Sorry current host, but you just do not work out (especially the whole still running on Apache 1 and PHP 4, like seriously???).

That’s kinda a purge of my brain from today, here are some photos from the hotel room. Night, I have to leave the hotel at 6:30am tomorrow.

The project has a client and a server app. The client plays a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, and as the game progresses sends messages back to the server via a TCP Stream of messages about the state of the game. These messages are then written to the console of the server. After the client exits the server shuts down.

Some possible future ideas, including making this a GUI application, including a compute based opponent and allowing two different clients to connect via the server and play against each other. All of these would be good ways for this project to move forward.

Hope you like the code.