One thing that strikes me at SIME07 is how many times iPhone is mentioned. The iPhone is not even announced here in Sweden, but still people talk about it without providing any sort of context, and this is a primarily non-techie crowd. The Blackberry by comparison was available in the US for a long time before coming to Sweden, and very few people knew about it at the time. The way the iPhone is a marketing success is truly remarkable.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
The iPhone is truly a phenomenon
Thursday, November 15th, 2007SIME07
Thursday, November 15th, 2007I am at the SIME07 conference in Stockholm. It is is a conference focusing on entrepreneurship, media, Internet etcetera, at a pretty high level. At the conferences I normally attend people speak about what thay have done. This one has a lot of “what do you think will happen” going on.
This morning there was a very interesting panel with three venture capitalists on stage, giving feedback to three companies pitches, and VC strategy in general.
Perhaps not spot on for what I do every day, but providing a nice new perspective on things.
How to show you don’t get it
Monday, September 17th, 2007In todays edition of all things gossipy in IT Sweden, aka Computer Sweden, swedish union SIF manages to make complete fools of themselves. They actually attach a physical CD to an ad supposedly containing their latest tv ads. Filmed by famous-in-Sweden director Felix Herngren no less – it says so on the cover.
SIF just spent a lot of money saying that they basically have no clue how modern communication is done (YouTube comes to mind) or that they from an environmental point of view do not mind some 50 000 cd’s thrown away.
Domain lost and found
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007I accidentally found out that all ahnve.* domains where down today. It has been three years since I last renewed them, so I had forgotten all about it. The big problem was that the contact emails where being sent to an old address, so I never got the warnings I assume GoDaddy sent out.
According to Feedburner, some people have tried to reach the site and failed, sorry about that. It is all good now. But I got quite a scare as we are about to go on vacation, which will make me internetless.
And as any good subscriber of the GeekBrief, I used Calis promocode for a 10% rebate – woohoo.
Steve Jobs and Agile
Friday, June 22nd, 2007I was listening to the podcast of the interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and this one thing struck me. When asked to predict the future, Bill Gates provided some insightful guesses, while Steve Jobs simply answered “I don’t know”. Twice. Steve’s explanation was that five years ago he would not have predicted what we have today, so therefore he does not trust himself to say what the next five years will look like.
I have previously spotted Apple to be early agilists, and Steve’s position here enforces my claim.
One important aspect of grasping agile in my mind is to accept the fact that you cannot predict the unpredictable. Instead of making detailed plans to support the illusion that you know what is going to happen, you say “I don’t know”, but then let that knowledge, that you actually do not know be the base for how you approach your work.
I have many times been faced with the quest of predicting the future, “how long will it take?”. As I have become more experienced I have learned to say “I don’t know”, of course at the same time offering an alternative iterative approach that will eventually provide knowledge for better estimation. Sometimes that is not a popular answer, and the question is forwarded to someone who will answer it. Of course, they do not know, but the illusion of control is very powerful, so their answer is better received.
I guess that many CEO are pressed to predict the future, by employees, share holders etc. And many times they probably provide an answer that they themselves do not believe in. It appears to me that Steve Jobs does not fall into that category.
Markdown
Saturday, June 16th, 2007I finally got around to installing the Markdown plugin for Wordpress, which I really should have done earlier.
Markdown is my favorite text format, clean and readable. Read up on the Markdown syntax to understand why.
Google issue solved
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve unsuccessfully tried to migrate my personal domain to Google Apps. I also blamed Google for it not working. I was wrong.
It seems that Textdrive has some nifty Apache security going on which denies the Jakarta HttpClient to connect, returning a “412 – Precondition Failed”. Big thanks to Doug for finding this out.
Spring Is In the Air
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007Spring surprised us early this year, so we are currently blessed with a mild 10ºC. As everyone who has ever experienced it knows, the early days of spring after the long dark winter are just wonderful
The photo is taken with my SE K610i, and stitched together with DoubleTake, which deserves a mentioning. I noticed today that I had lost my license for it, so I sent an email to EchoOne explaining the situation. I got a reply with my license within 4 hours. Great stuff.
New Job in Startup Land
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007I almost forgot to mention it, but I have a new job. Again some might say.
After being a consultant for 1.5 years with Valtech Sweden, I am back in startup land. This time it is really, really startup. We registered our domain last friday, we do not have a web site yet, we are all sitting in one room on broken chairs. Ok, one broken chair. Mine is actually the good one.
It has only been three days, but boy, it is a lot of fun. The fact that you get to call all of the shots means that you can have things just the way you want them.
I look forward to this spring with a sense of excitement, that I will be part of building something that actually means something to me. That means a lot.
Gourmet Web Hosting
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007I am trawling for a hosting company and came across this gem of a web page:
The page won’t load at all if Javascript is disabled, has no doctype, won’t render umlauts in Firefox on Mac (and this is Sweden, we actually use them.)
The final nail in the coffin is that it states “Web hosting for gourmets”.
Funny Foxtrot
Thursday, November 9th, 2006Todays Foxtrot reaches new levels of geekiness 
.
Shuttle Launch Seen From ISS
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006If you haven’t seen these, you’re in for a treat.
Could we please stop using “www”
Monday, September 25th, 2006Why do so many organizations still demand that you add “www.” in front of their domain name when browsing their site?
People, it is so 1997. Typing is boring. Stop using it.
Different worlds
Thursday, June 29th, 2006I am reading Cal Henderson’s Building Scalable Web Sites. It covers a lot of topics, some of which I am closely familiar with such as version control.
Cal does however have suggestions for situations I have never been in, in particular I do love this quote from the part on how to handle hardware platform growth: “When you get to the point of having a few thousand servers [...]“. Never been there.
XP2006
Monday, June 19th, 2006I am currently in Oulo, Finland, attending XP2006. I have so far attended really excellent tutorials by the Poppendiecks and Mike Cohn. I am writing this waiting for a session on DSL to start.
This is by far the most social events I have been to, which probably is helped by there only being 200+ people here.
One of those days … ?
Thursday, June 15th, 2006On the train to work this morning I proudly realized that my PowerBook had an uptime of 30 days. The fact that Macs can do this is so weird to my non-mac colleagues that they almost don’t believe it.
Well, the God of Failing Computers saw me in my hubris, and promptly crashed my computer, just like that, and would not let it restart. It finally showed some signs of life when I got to the office and plugged it in.
I am a big fan of geektool, and use it to display console.log. This was a good thing because I noticed a whole lot of lines saying that the /tmp directory was missing. When I looked into it, /private/tmp, which /tmp symlinks to, was indeed missing and that caused a lot of mayhem.
I recreated the directory manually, and things have been smooth since. But it was quite a scare.
After that my day has, shall we say, not been smiling at me. Let’s really, really hope that this is not an indicator for tonights big game against Paraguay.
Upgraded and imported
Friday, June 2nd, 2006After upgrading to the latest WordPress release, I realized that I could import my early blog posts from the FreeRoller days using RSS. It was a lot of fun to read some of the old ones again and remember what was discussed four years ago. Prevayler anyone?
Least wanted feature of IntelliJ 6.0 announced
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006IntelliJ IDEA 6.0: Built-in Struts Support: “Starting from release 6.0, IntelliJ IDEA will provide Struts support out-of-the-box. The functionality is added by Struts Assistant plugin that is now bundled to IntelliJ IDEA. So you’ll get it without any additional download and installation” Why?(Via IntelliJ IDEA Blog.)
Dan North: How simple is too simple?
Monday, May 29th, 2006Dan North: How simple is too simple?: “Kent Beck advises us to do ‘the simplest thing that could possibly work’, but this is often mistaken for ‘the first thing I could possibly think of’ or even ‘the only thing I know’”
Well put.
(Via Planet TW.)