All posts in category Uncategorized

The Finder is still broken, people.

Right. So over the Christmas break, some Mac OS X geeks were obviously in a reflective mood because developer blogs exploded with the meme that Apple software just ain’t what it used to be. It all started here, and the best-of-breed collection o’ links is here. Gist? Apple software may be suffering from a bit of a […]

A bunch of journalists really wish…

…they could cover a mind-boggling once-in-a-lifetime story like the iPhone launch. That’s why so many of them are crapping so often on the “lack of innovation” that’s supposedly not happening these days, despite the fact the clear evidence (as given by the many who disagree with that premise) is that in fact innovation is streaming along quite nicely. […]

I swear I haven’t changed a thing

So I maintain an internal site used by teachers and students all the time. So I also hear a lot of complaints. I can’t blame them, I certainly have my own complaints as well. One of the fascinating things about the development process is that under-the-hood you do need to constantly iterate; you know, tweak […]

Never use template files for a workflow

Report writing season is coming soon, and it’s also the season when I want to point out something about what an effective report-writing workflow looks like. I once worked in a school that tried its damn-dest to make a fool-proof Word template file, and give that to the teachers to use to write the school […]

Great stories are contagious

I read this at work and it literally made my day. So great. I have been asked to tell the following story many times, and it became so famous that I was even asked to record it for NPR. I worked for a high-tech company when high-tech was just starting to make an impact on […]

Conventional wisdom

This has been true for a long time now, basically since the Bush presidency, but the showdown shutdown brings this to bear: The conventional wisdom in American politics used to be that Republicans followed their leaders while Democrats were barely unified enough to be considered an organized political party. Today, the reverse is true. Democrats […]

LM Investment Victims

I’ve started a site “purely for the voluntary effort to collect details and stories about each other to enable further collective action and understandings” for persons who have been affected by LM Investments.

Breaking software on purpose is evil

Just this week I was making a portal of commonly used links for teachers and administrators. The portal area was a different platform than the one being linked to. To be exact, I was using a Moodle to link to PowerSchool. One of the brilliant things about the web is that a URL address gives […]

Enforce school rules via the community, not software

I recently was involved in an effort with some exceptional colleagues in re-launching our Activities program. Some of it involved rebranding, which was their side, whereas my side was coming up with software that had to do one thing and one thing only: (A) Produce a definitive list of which students have signed up to […]

Streamlining daily notices at school

When I first arrived at the school where I am now, I was rather astonished at how much human effort went into the publication of the daily notices. “Boxing club is canceled.” “There will be cookies for sale at break time.” I think any school could potentially have this issue. Imagine you’re a Principal and […]