August 14th, 2006
My friend Tom DeMarco, a software guru and co-author (among other things) of the highly acclaimed Waltzing With Bears, commented on the blog that I wrote a couple days ago about Wiki Terror: “There was a much more public proposal made last year that would address this same issue in a crowd-sourcing approach, though not [...]
August 12th, 2006
So here’s the problem: I’ve got 20 boxes of technical books in my office, and the bookshelves are already full. What should I do? Throw them all out? Stack the boxes against the wall, and hope that I’ll get used to the eyesore as time passes? How, you might ask, did this situation come to [...]
August 11th, 2006
Actually, Wiki-anti-Terror is what I have in mind, but that’s a clumsier phrase. Before I started babbling about my ideas on this topic, I thought I should google the Internet to see if something is already up there — but I found only more general entries, like Wikipedia’s detailed, extensive article on “terrorism,” as well [...]
August 10th, 2006
In the midst of today’s airline terrorist alert, Middle East war, bombings in Iraq, North Slope pipeline shutdown, and general chaos and confusion, some notes about a technology conference in Cambridge last week is likely to be — as Steve Jobs likes to put it — as stale as yesterday’s oatmeal. But unlike some of [...]
August 9th, 2006
Someone sent me an email this morning, indicating that he had actually downloaded and opened my Web 2.0 PDF mind-map (as opposed to the rest of you lazy slobs, who have presumably been just clicking on the links to new articles, or perhaps ignoring it altogether). Apparently, some of the branches and sub-branches on the [...]
August 8th, 2006
I’ve created yet another new version of my Web 2.0 mind-map; you can download the PDF file (a whopping 6.9 megabytes this time) by surfing over to the www.yourdon.com/downloads area of my website, or by clicking here. I’ve added several new items to the previous version of the mind-map: I added a link to a [...]
August 6th, 2006
I’m familiar with Larry Lessig’s work, and have read his books, but I’ve never heard him speak before; so I was looking forward to his keynote talk with great anticipation. But I have to admit that I failed utterly to listen, comprehend, summarize, and present a coherent analysis of what he said. Part of the [...]
August 5th, 2006
Say what? Jimmy who, for what? Okay, so maybe my proposal is a bit over the top. And maybe it’s a bit premature: after all, Jimmy Wales has only been doing supremely wonderful things for about five or six years, and they still haven’t made Mother Teresa a saint after a lifetime of good work [...]
August 4th, 2006
I’ve now finished sitting through the first day’s sessions of Wikimania 2006, in a congenial environment at the Harvard Law School, with plenty of food and refreshments, and a good high-speed Wi-Fi network everywhere I went. I expected a fairly calm, low-key discussion among amiable academics about the details of organizing and creating, uploading, and [...]
August 4th, 2006
So here I am at the second WikiMania conference, which is being held at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. I’m hunkered down in the main conference room waiting for the conference to begin; to my great delight, I was able to find a seat near an electrical outlet, and easily logged onto the [...]
