Michael Glenn

News

Nov 08, 2006

Australian copyright law vs robots.txt

04:11 PM -

News -

Apparently Australia is attempting to enact a law which acordding to Google seems to require search engines to request permission before indexing a website.

"The Australian government says the new laws are designed to keep up with the fast pace of technological change"

Here's how content providers can keep up with the fast pace of change:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Apparently adding this simple text to a robots.txt file on a corporate website is too much for lobbyists' clients in Australia.

Apr 11, 2003

Google's SafeSearch Criticized

12:18 AM -

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When you're the incumbent, be prepared to take criticisim.

Ben Edelman produced a detailed report released through the Berkman Center for Internet & Society that shows how Google's SafeSearch feature not only blocks adult material but tens of thousands of sites not pertaining to adult content.

Based on Google's description of SafeSearch they filter for keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories. Just like traditional spam filters, unless it's heuristically based, expects lots of errors. I'm sure Google would rather error on the side of extreme caution rather than have occasional incidents of missed adult content spring up on little Billy's computer screen.

Heavy statiscial analysis on each page is probably too costly for Google at the moment. A two stage filter might prove more effective. Of those classified adult material, run them through a more intensive analysis to be sure and leave a good margin of error to keep out the false negatives.

Jan 15, 2003

Spam Confab: Hackers to Rescue?

12:23 AM -

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Wired: Spam Confab: Hackers to Rescue?

The article also references Bill Yerazunis CRM114 filtering program that uses Bayes techniques for filtering. I think I'll see if I can connect it to qmail and give it a go. POPFile is good but I want something that can eventually bounce the mail back so I never see it.

Dec 09, 2002

Largo loves Linux more than ever

02:49 PM -

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Largo loves Linux more than ever - how the Largo, Florida IT department loves to save money and quiet their pagers.

Nov 13, 2002

Lawyers Pony Up to Bettors' Side

10:49 AM -

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Wired - Lawyers Pony Up to Bettors' Side

Nov 04, 2002

Wi-Fi That Follows You Around

12:30 AM -

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Wi-Fi That Follows You Around - Wired breaks news on Vivato's new Wi-Fi base station that has a range of up to 7 kilometres.

Oct 23, 2002

An ad George Bush should love

11:10 AM -

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Arianna Huffington - An ad George Bush should love

Oct 21, 2002

Oblivion awaits

12:48 AM -

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Oblivion awaits - Jack Kapica of GlobeTechnology.com provides "10 rules of e-business failure, a list inspired by the recording industry's imaginative approach".

Oct 16, 2002

New BMW Films

08:55 AM -

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BMW Films is releasing it's new set of short films starring Clive Owen. The first film, Hostage, is directed by John Woo.

Oct 15, 2002

Police confirm sniper's 11th victim

10:16 AM -

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Globe and Mail: Police confirm sniper's 11th victim

George Bush is quoted as saying "The idea of moms taking their kids to school and sheltering them from a potential sniper attack is not the America that I know"

I did some quick statistical research after I read this.

In the U.S., there were 28,874 deaths related to firearms in 1999 (crude rate of 10.59) and 30,708 deaths in 1998. The population was 272,690,813 and 270,248,003 respectively. That also means in 1999 there were on average 79 related firearms deaths per day. Source - CDC Website

In Canada we had 1037 firearms related deaths in 1997 with a population of 29,987,200 (crude rate of 3.5). An average of 3 firearms related deaths a day. Source - Canadian Firearms Centre

Oct 06, 2002

The Real Battle

09:40 PM -

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Doc Searls, The Real Battle.

Sep 27, 2002

New Software Quietly Diverts Sales Commissions

11:45 AM -

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Some P2P software developers are bundling "parasite-ware" into their products that intercepts certain web transactions such as Amazon referals and diverts the referral fees to their own company to pay for software development according to this New York Times article.

Products include LimWire, Morpheus, Kazaa, and Bearshare. I use BearShare that uses the SaveNow program by WhenU which, I deleted from the Windows registry. To remove SaveNow and.doxdesk.com provides removal instructions.

Sep 23, 2002

New Glenn Group Site

02:25 PM -

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I launched my father's new pharmaceutical consulting site, The Glenn Group, today. It uses the same content management system that my own site uses and employs the new Flash text editor, has industry news feeds, and a client document management area. The technology was a perfect fit to make editing posts easier. I'll be adding new features such as a calendar and hopefully smoothing the graphical look in the next few weeks.

Sep 20, 2002

Green light for twin towers sparks outrage

11:03 AM -

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The Ontario Municipal Board has approved the construction of the Minto YE Inc. 51 and 37-storey twin towers at Yonge and Eglinton. Construction is to begin next summer.

Sep 16, 2002

The Smaller Picture

09:43 AM -

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Typophile is running an interesting collaborative experiment in which users collectively participate in building a bitmap font by choosing one bit at a time, black or white. The Smaller Picture

1512At first I thought that it would only be a matter of time before the letters and numbers were formed albeit, slightly deformed. However, this is assuming that the group all share the same goal. If a significant percentage or participants have the goal of not creating a readable font, the project will never succeed.

15121512I also noticed that there are measures in place to prevent you from trying to manipulate a single glyph. The system keeps track and only allows so many alterations over a given period. I assume clearing your cookies would defeat this though.

Sep 12, 2002

New York lottery winning numbers: 9-1-1

01:18 PM -

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This is quite a coincidence.

Sep 11, 2002

September 11, One Year Later

08:39 AM -

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Canoe, Canada.com, CTV, CBC.

Mozilla Rising

09:06 AM -

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Salon article on Mozilla as a platform.

Jul 16, 2002

GM's Billion-Dollar Bet

09:09 AM -

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A Wired articles on GM's new hydrogen car via Slashdot. As with all Wired articles it sounds very optimistic, though incredible if it ends up making it to market.

Jul 11, 2002

Strike's Over

05:56 PM -

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The Toronto public works stike is finally over. Just in time too. When I was down on Queen St. at Tortilla Flats yesterday afternoon someone lit a pile of garbage on fire destroying someone's car in the process and ruining quite a few people's mood at dinner.

Jul 08, 2002

Sites bow to Microsoft's browser king

12:39 AM -

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Only an AOL client using Mozilla's Gecko engine will prevent a further browser monopoly. Sites bow to Microsoft's browser king. We must remember that building a better mousetrap won't have the world beating a path to your door. Good marketing does that.

Jul 04, 2002

Cable Modems: Less Boon Than Beast

03:25 PM -

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Good points by Andy Oram on the negative effects of cable modems.

Jul 03, 2002

Hot Town, Smeller in the City

11:23 AM -

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The Toronto Star has summed up recent days quite nicely today. They cover all the important city issues including weather, garbage, pending inside workers strike, and power shortages.

Do the Math, Mel

11:54 AM -

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My father's letter to the editor was published in The Toronto Star last Friday.

Celebrate Toronto Street Festival Cancelled

03:03 PM -

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I knew it would happen sooner or later to a major summer event. The Celebrate Toronto Street Festival was cancelled today.

Jun 20, 2002

Beyond DVD - holographic storage

03:44 PM -

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InPhase Technologies seeks to be the first real commercial player in an industry that some think will eventually replace DVD--and that many others think is probably a pipe dream. - Beyond DVD - holographic storage @ CNet

Jun 06, 2002

Mozilla 1.0 Release

05:47 PM -

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4 Years in the making. Mozilla 1.0 has been released.

May 23, 2002

Kazaa Folds

08:37 AM -

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"Kazaa, the company behind a popular file-swapping Web site, said it will fold because it cannot afford to defend itself against copyright infringement charges brought by the major studios and labels." - SF Gate

May 15, 2002

Why Is This Man Smiling?

02:54 PM -

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"'Most modelers forget about the meniscus and, as a result, something just doesn't look right.' This is a typical sort of comment among animators, who marvel both at the tiniest of details and at the human capacity (nay, propensity) to notice those tiniest of details." - from Wired.

May 14, 2002

Copy-Inhibited CDs

11:25 AM -

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Via Slashdot, "MacUser is running an article about how the new Celine Dion CD A New Day Has Come with copy protection mechanisms to prevent the CD from being played on a PC not only won't play on an iMac, but it will lock the CD tray (so it can't be removed) and fubar the firmware (so the machine can't be rebooted), effectivley killing the iMac." ... "What was first thought to be an April Fool's joke, now appears to be true. Some Audio CD protection schemes such as Cactus DATA Shield 100/200, KeyAudio, and perhaps others may be defeated by invalidating the outer ring of the CD with a black marker or post-it sticky note."- Slashdot Posting
1512
1512"Mac users may want to check the labels on their music CDs twice, as copy-protected audio discs flooding the market may lead to serious problems when they are played on some computer systems." - Cnet News.com1512

May 02, 2002

Fourth Annual Masturbate-A-Thon

02:35 PM -

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"Come As You Are encourages everyone to touch themselves for a good cause. The fourth annual Masturbate-A-Thon is a weekend of solo sex to raise funds for women's health organizations." - A good cause I'm sure, but I don't think I could ask friends, family and especially strangers for masturbation money.

Site Barks About Deep Link

12:45 AM -

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"Now Adelman is locked in a battle against the Belo media corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, which sent him a legalistic letter this week demanding that BarkingDogs.org remove all "deep links" to the DallasNews.com site." - Story at Wired.

Apr 24, 2002

Kerr's first win

11:06 AM -

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I thought this was going to be in poor taste yesterday but it's too funny not to link to. After winning the LPGA Longs Drugs Challenge Cristie Kerr is caught in a rather suggestive photo.

Apr 23, 2002

Graph Browser

02:42 PM -

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Martin Spernau has harnessed the power of the Google API to come up with Graph-Browser. Be nice about using it so you don't burn out Martin's Google key.

Apr 18, 2002

Mozilla RC1 Released

07:41 PM -

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Mozilla Release Candidate 1.0 is out. Get it while it's hot!

Apr 17, 2002

Riding a Segway

11:52 PM -

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Dan Bricklin provides a detailled account of what it's like to ride a Segway. One interesting thing I didn't know about them is that they can run on snow. I had originally thought this a limited device for northern dwellers. Way to go Dean! There's video of riding on snow at the Segway web site.

Netscape, not IE, put on new CompuServe

11:56 PM -

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CompuServe has jumped on the Mozilla bandwagon and has launched it's latest version 7.0 with Netscape as the default browser. Story at CNet.

Apr 12, 2002

Google API

09:56 AM -

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Google has made a significant contribution to the web and provided their search engine as a web service. Google has released an API set that allows users to perform up to 1000 queries per day with a maximum of 10 results per query. It's only been a day and already people like Simon Fell and Dave Winer are busy working away at examples and practical implementations.

Apr 10, 2002

Inventing the Future

12:41 AM -

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Via Evan Tim O'Reilly lists the current development and charts the future of the net. It's nice to see an emerging market that so far seems to have enough competition yet still be based on standards.

1512I'll be the first to admit that I jumped on the web log bandwagon (though I rolled my own) but until recent articles like Tim's I hadn't viewed my creations through SonicBoomerang as part of new emerging markets. There are business models out there, as SonicBoomerang is slowly proving but like any good viable business it takes time. The .com boom may be over, but the fun is just starting.

Apr 06, 2002

Rogers now carrying Treo

02:57 PM -

News -

Rogers is now carrying the Treo. Now I'm hard pressed between the Treo and the RIM. It has all the same features as a RIM, GSM/GPRS as well. But it's got some more features as well. 16MB of memory, runs Palm apps, has stylus in addition to keyboard (no graffiti input with keyboard though, as there's no room to write), handsfree, regular phone, and speaker phone. Probably a lot of little differences as well. The biggest shock though is the sticker price. $850. Ouch. I don't think I'll be buying either of them soon. Check out this review by Dan Bricklin. Rogers isn't listing the new Blackberry yet so I'm not sure exactly how much it will cost. Probably similar but slightly less than the Treo.
Update: The Treo will support GRPS with a software upgrade. Note to Treo: GPRS is here. Make it available already. I've used a Blackberry 5810 over GPRS in Toronto so perhaps Rogers is holding off on deploying them officially until it's fully tested and scalable.1512

Apr 02, 2002

1xEV: 3G To The Max

07:35 PM -

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Via Slashdot, an awesome article by John T. Kleint detailing Qualcomm's new 1xEV technology. I dogged 3G a while ago but devices like these make me drool. 2.2 Megabits per second. Yeah, I can deal with that over cellular please. John covers all the basics in this must read techno-lust article.

Apr 01, 2002

Waterlogged Camera Turns Magic

10:20 AM -

News -

After playing with my grandfather's Nikon Coolpix is was interesting to read this article from Wired on a photographer that droped his Coolpix into a pond and was surprised to see the destructive results when the camera was finally dry. Personally I would have been a little more that upset at my Coolpix taking pictures like this but Farrell seems to have gained quite a bit of attention with the results.

High-profile anti-Unix site runs Unix

03:11 PM -

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Via Dave, from the "isn't that ironic" department; News.Com is reporting "A Web site sponsored by Microsoft and Unisys as a way to steer big companies away from the Unix operating system is itself powered by Unix software."

Mar 15, 2002

AOL switches from IE to Netscape in beta test

01:03 PM -

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AOL switches from IE to Netscape in beta test

Mar 11, 2002

AOL to switch to Mozilla engine

11:05 AM -

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NewsForge reports that AOL will use the Gecko rendering engine used in Mozilla. "A browser shift by AOL is going to leave an awful lot of companies that assume their Web sites only need to work with Explorer scrambling to rewrite their code so that they don't lose AOL's 30 million-plus subscribers, or about 30% of all U.S. Internet users.1512" Time to bring some balance back into the force and hopefully get all the designers back to standards.

Mozilla 0.9.9 Release

10:55 PM -

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Waiting on baited breath. Mozilla 0.9.9 is now released.

Mar 04, 2002

New Blackberry 5810

10:26 AM -

News -

RIM has just officially announced the release of their new Blackberry 5810. Integrated cell phone and it runs the Java micro OS. I want one!

Google Bombing

11:39 AM -

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Via Scripting news, John Hiler at Microcontent News explains what is Google Bombing. John also presents ideas on how to profit from Google's ranking algorithms. Technically it's easy to take advantage of Google's system. But can you work out the pricing model? Sounds like an exchange model. Perhaps some ex Enron employee would like to crunch the numbers?

Wireless Mesh Routing

11:54 AM -

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A while ago I mentioned that the only barrier I saw to Wi-Fi overtaking cellular usage was node switching, or rather the ability to stay on the network while moving between transmitters. John Markoff writes about mesh routing in this NY Times article. This is grass roots Internet at it's best. Done properly, it can reduce the digital divide for those who don't have access to broadband or who cannot afford it by current means due to their location.

Feb 24, 2002

Canada Wins Gold!!!

07:21 PM -

News -

1512Fifty years to the day. Canada wins gold in men's olympic hockey beating the U.S.A. 5-3. Just for the record the goals were Paul Kariya (Chris Pronger, Mario Lemieux), Jarome Iginla (Joe Sakic, Simon Gagne), Joe Sakic (Ed Jovanovski, Rob Blake), Jarome Iginla (Steve Yzerman, Joe Sakic), Joe Sakic (Jarome Iginla).

1512There are thousands of Canadians partying on the street tonight. Car horns are still going outside my window with Canadian flags flying proudly.

Feb 20, 2002

Sweden's Out!

04:51 PM -

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It's been a while since I've posted, but this is news! Belarus beat Sweden 4-3 in the quarter final in the last few minutes with a bizarre goal scored after Vladimir Kopat popped a shot from between the red and blue line off Tommy Salo's mask. The puck bounced over Salo's head and trickled into the goal. Belarus battled in the last two minutes to keep Sweden from evening it up and that was all she wrote. Sweden's out of the tournament and we wait for Canada to face off against Finland tonight.

Jan 26, 2002

Code Cleaning

03:06 PM -

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Joel spends a lot of explaining why you should never do a complete re-write of your code. In his latest posting Joel gives an example of code cleaning as the viable alternative.

1512This gets me motivated to clean some code of my own!

Jan 07, 2002

Fire and Motion

11:36 AM -

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Joel Spolsky's article Fire and Motion lets me know that I'm normal. Well, normal for a programmer anyway. Joel lets us in on a little secrect that we all hide. In a normal day most programmers don't program that much. Oddly enough, this article was motivating.

Nov 30, 2001

Danger HipTop

02:50 PM -

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The Danger HipTop puts the functionality of a RIM Blacberry, Palm, and cellular phone into a single device. This is the type of device I've been looking for. Now I wonder which networks this can work on?

Nov 22, 2001

Mozilla 0.9.6 Released

01:35 PM -

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Version 0.9.6 of Mozilla is now released. Get it while it's hot.

Nov 13, 2001

FBI: Microsoft IIS most vulnerable

07:35 AM -

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Via Ryan Price from Abstract Design. It seems IIS is still a big security threat. We could use more audit software with operating systems. I've used one from Microsoft to test Windows 2000 for general security threats. Very helpful.

Oct 28, 2001

The biggest DJs you've never heard of.

10:00 PM -

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I'm bouncing through my un-filed bookmarks and found an article from the UWO Gazette on my friend Jonathan. "Jonathan Coe is the biggest DJ you've never heard of."

1512I also remember a Gazette article on AndyCapp, ah here it is.

Tim Berners-Lee on Compatibility

01:40 PM -

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"I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.1512" - Tim Berners-Lee on Microsoft's Latest Browser Tricks.

Oct 16, 2001

RIAA Wants to Hack Your PC

10:50 AM -

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Everyone else is linking to this and after reading it I thought I'd point to it as well. Wired is reporting a failed amendment to a new U.S. anti-terrorism bill by the Recording Industry Association of America that would make it legal to hack into a persons machine for the purpose of upholding copyright law. The amendment failed to pass but the RIAA still wants similar measures put in place. 1512

1512This is one virus update I'll make sure I download.

Sep 18, 2001

Ernie Coombs / Mr. Dressup Passes Away

02:15 PM -

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I felt a little bit older today and memories of my childhood slip farther away when I learned that Ernie Coombs (Mr. Dressup) passed away last night due to complication from a stroke. I still miss Casey and Finnegan too. Story at Canoe.

Sep 17, 2001

Limbs of no body

03:55 PM -

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Dave Winer posted the article Limbs of no body by Mohsen Makhmalbaf on Scripting News. As the intro states it is a long article by web standards but is an incredibly vivid description of Afghanistan1512 from a first hand account.
1512
1512I believe that before we decide to go to war against Afghanistan because their self proclaimed government protects terrorists we should at least be aware of who we're going to war against.

Sep 16, 2001

An Afghan-American speaks

01:40 PM -

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An article from Salon via Evhead. "You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants."

Aug 10, 2001

Aeron as a Symbol of the Boom

03:13 PM -

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Found via Slashdot, Salon has an article profiling a symbol of the .com spending glut, the Aeron chair from Herman Miller. I had an Aeron chair when I was on contract at Sympatico Lycos. Very comfortable.

Jul 18, 2001

Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To It.

06:45 PM -

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Joel Spolksy is back from vacation and puts up another good article for the software industry. "Good software, like wine, takes time."