Friday, August 12, 2005

The Matrix Online has been bought out by Sony Online Entertainment. I consider that a bad sign, considering the way they screwed up Star Wars Galaxies. 11:45:40 PM    comment () Clean Up After Your GlobalWarmingMobile. For those worried about the carbon dioxide emitted by their global warming machines (aka automobiles), Terrapass offers guilt free driving.... [Hit and Run] It's pretty funny that some ecofreaks are adding the sale of indulgences to their religion. 12:01:24 PM    comment () Technical Debt. Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. [Martin Fowler] This is something I run into pretty often at work. In fact I recently finished up a project to "pay down the principal" on something that's central to my job. (Thanks to Mark Bernstein for pointing out this article.) 9:54:38 AM    comment () Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs. Before Apple can bring computers featuring Intel processors to market, hackers get the company's operating system running on generic PC hardware. By Mark Baard. [Wired News] That didn't take long. Of course, it's still pretty far from a release version. 6:31:51 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:05:44 PM.