Software Archive
These posts are all in this one category.
I downloaded Skype when Scoble first blogged about it on September 12, 2003. I didn't use it because I was afraid - it came from the same team that brought us the spyware/adware hell called Kazaa.
At Gnomedex I was one of a few people that didn't use Skype. Arieanna Foley of Blogaholics and BloggingHelp said she gets all of consulting jobs through Skype. KK+ of Bryght asked me what my Skype address was. That was it. I finally installed it.
My user account is dylan_greene.
Then things went bad... I was going to have it import my Outlook 2003 contacts, but instead I got this fun error:
Access violation at address 00BD3F80 in module 'Skype.exe'. Read of address 049BC000.
What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?
I'm going to try this (conflict with DEP - Data Execution Prevention - the only match on Skype's suppot site), but it requires a reboot, which I don't feel like doing. I already rebooted once this quarter.
Skype (or Windows, not sure who is really responsible for the error message) - can you make your error text a tad more understandable? Thanks!
Bugboard.com's latest entry is another classic: "I hate computer abuse!"
Readme files. Does anybody actually read them?
What you may not realize is the amount of effort that goes into the creation of these rarely seen beasts.
Link: 28 Steps to Yak Farming
After reading that, you might put a little more thought before skipping the readme.
Google requires employees spend 20% of their time on something unrelated to their real work, but that will still benefit the company. It's created some great new projects, such as Orkut and Google Suggest.
Atlassian, the company behind the awesome bug-tracking tool JIRA, adapted this strategy as well. Here's a great blog entry of what was created using 20% time.
I don't use their software, but this makes me want to.
Joe Beda, who left Microsoft's Windows team to join Google, has a great post about 20% time as well as a follow up.
The Starving Artist was the first place I saw this.... Here's the scoop and his take on it.
From Slashdot:
"Apparently Intuit thinks it's okay to share information about taxes with third parties. According to this article, Intuit is using a third party tracking technology on all tax forms submitted to the IRS. "We could capture your name, your Social Security number or any other information that you willingly pass to a Web site," acknowledged Matt Belkin, who serves as vice president of best practices for Utah marketing giant Omniture, which tracks the online activities of people using Intuit's TurboTax. The IRS disavows any knowledge of this, saying "The IRS does not take a position on Web tracking tools." Makes you wonder where your tax information is going..."
Is this okay?