Categories
Finance

You Need a Budget

I’m no stranger to personal finance software. Hell — I’ve written about most of my experiences with them here on this blog. Moneydance, Mvelopes, Wesabe, and most recently, Mint, all helped keep track of my family’s finances for varying lengths of time and differing degrees of success. Mint turned out to be an interesting case. […]

Categories
BlackBerry

TweetGenius vs Seesmic for BlackBerry

Late last week, Seesmic released new Twitter client applications for Android and BlackBerry. Since I’m currently a happy user of TweetGenius on my BlackBerry Tour 9630, I thought I’d do a quick comparison. It’s worth noting that the version of Seesmic for BlackBerry I’m showing you is currently an Alpha release, so it’s still buggy and […]

Categories
Software

Three Great Uses For Dropbox

Dropbox is one of my favorite little pieces of software. It’s practically invisible, silently keeping your dropbox folder synchronized on all the computers you have it installed on (Windows, Macintosh, or Linux). I can’t recommend it highly enough. Because Dropbox is so easy to use, it’s easy to forget that it’s also very powerful. Here are two […]

Categories
Microsoft

Business and the Microsoft Platform

It’s no secret that I’ve had my doubts about Microsoft in the past. But since becoming in charge of everything IT at the small business I helped start a couple of years ago, you could say that I’ve had something of a change of heart. At home and with any freelance work I do, it’s […]

Categories
Books

Book Review – The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Several months ago, I received an advanced copy of Nicholas Carr’s newest book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. I immediately read through most of it while on a business trip and yesterday finally managed a few minutes to finish the last few pages. So, here’s my slightly-late review of this […]

Categories
Open Source

Thrift: Facebook Open Source Tool

Facebook released some of its home-grown software architecture as open source a few days ago. They’ve called it Thrift, and can be downloaded from their developer site for free. Browsing through Thrift’s whitepaper (PDF), I’m still trying to completely understand it. It appears to provide a consistent way for different programming languages (PHP, Python, Ruby, […]

Categories
Software

Prerequisites if You’re Creating a Desktop or Web Application

If you’re developing a web-based or desktop application and hope to have it takeoff with any amount of success, there is a different prerequisite you must meet for each scenario: If you’re creating a web application, it absolutely needs to work well in Firefox If you’re developing a desktop app, you need to make a […]

Categories
Software

My Favorite Firefox Extensions

One of my friends recently asked me what I’m using for extensions in Firefox 2, then suggested I share my list with the world. So, that’s exactly what I’m doing here. I’ll split them up by category so you can find the ones that apply to you. Improving the Firefox Interface Even though Firefox is […]

Categories
Software

Why Software Sucks

I’m in the middle of an absolutely awesome Technometria podcast with David Platt, author of the book Why Software Sucks. The episode is titled, appropriately enough, Why Software Sucks, the Podcast. It’s very much worth checking out. David has got some really good examples of what’s wrong with software today. His book blog (Suckbusters) covers […]

Categories
Software

Thinking About Software and Lock-in

I was just thinking about my recent switch from Bloglines to Google Reader. It was easy – really easy. Export an OPML file of my RSS feeds from one, import it into the other. I made the transition in less than a minute. So, what does this mean for Bloglines? Should Ask make it painful […]