Posts by John Williams

[ April 9, 2010 ]

Be Wrong

Here's a secret: I'm often wrong. I'm wrong many times a day. In fact, like most programmers I am so often wrong I have automated processes that tell me just how wrong I am. That's a pretty heavy frequency of wrong-ness.

I have (with some difficulty) come to terms with the fact that I am often wrong. It's an important step on the way to being right. In his book iPhone SDK Development, Bill Dudney describes writing software like this:

  1. First your code won't compile.
  2. Then, it will…
[ July 1, 2009 ]

Subway’s New Sandwich Experience

I went into a Subway for the first time in many, many months yesterday. The new touch-screen was a surprise to me, although Subway has apparently been installing them since 2006.

I am not with the program.

The ordering experience was both better and worse than the standard standing-in-line module. On the one hand I was not delayed because another customer is indecisive over bananna peppers. Nor did I have to worry about getting tongue-tied making my order, taking too long, or misunderstanding…

 
[ April 23, 2009 ]

Guest Lecturing at Radford

Somehow I had to make this interesting.

Somehow I had to make this interesting.

Glenn and I visited Emanuel Arnold's Web design class at neighboring Radford University Monday evening to talk about what our web development and production processes are. After about a thirty minute overview of what it takes to design and build a web site, his class surprised me with just under an hour of insightful, interesting questions. I hope Glenn and I were able to answer most of them.

One thing we weren't able to do right away was…

[ April 7, 2009 ]

What you’re selling vs. what they’re seeing

Deane of Gadgetopia has written an excellent post on one of the communications / sales pitfalls of content management systems. Clients and sales prospects probably don't understand the difference between what a CMS gets you naturally and what you have to custom-develop one to do, so it can be dangerous (concludes Deane) to sell a CMS to a client by demonstrating a full-fledged, battle-tested live implementation, and he suggests an alternative.

Deane has posted several things recently on…

 
[ February 18, 2009 ]

How to delete backups from Time Machine

A few weeks ago I tried to use my Time Machine-managed backup hard drive for manually backing up a hard drive that was dying on me. But to copy those files over, I needed more space. So I grabbed a handful of months-old backups and deleted them. You know, via the "Trash Can -> Empty Trash" method.

Turns out that this was entirely the wrong thing to do. Don't do this. It's bad. I had to format my Time Machine backup drive completely and start all over. Time Machine and the Trash Can don't…

[ February 12, 2009 ]

What does “impossible” mean?

How do you respond when someone tells you nothing is impossible? Does it help you see limits as mere obstacles to overcome? Does it encourage you to try things you would have never tried before? Does it revitalize your creative spirit and bring you back up?

Maybe you react the other way. It kills your morale. You might feel insulted, or you might immediately begin listing things you know are impossible. And you respond — either directly or within the privacy of your own mind — with anger and…

 

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