Blog



Reactions to the New Facebook
10:08 pm on 09 Feb 2010

Beginning at the end of last week, Facebook rolled out an interface change across its network. This change was ostensibly designed to improve Facebook's usability.

Unfortunately, I found this redesign to completely fail that mission. The new Facebook has increased the feeling of overload that its users must experience, it is visually cluttered beyond that, and it brushes off important usage conventions.

The Free Information Problem
5:04 pm on 26 Jan 2010

One of the more prominent slogans under which the Cybervangelists have rallied in the past decade is "Information wants to be free." The arguments for it are compelling; the spread of knowledge is notoriously hard to prevent and in general costs of it have been steadily falling since the Renaissance.

However, despite what the those heralds would like to believe, there remains a very real cost of creating information. It takes time. It takes plane tickets and video cameras and food. These things have costs, and, until the Singularity strikes, they will continue to have costs.

The Real Netbook World
6:59 pm on 19 Jan 2010

The netbook craze has hit the markets. The recent weakening of spending in the U.S. and other industrialized nations has had consumers looking for ways to save money, and they found the computing world's new brainchild, netbooks, and set to work eating them up.

Hello 2010
5:00 pm on 05 Jan 2010

The new year is upon us. Well, it's actually been here for half a week now, hasn't it? 2010 should be an interesting time and I expect it to be a good year for Webmaren.com.

Normally, I'm not much of a New Year's resolution kind of guy. Those resolutions usually don't go anywhere, and I'm not one to believe in some sort of magic property of timing the setting of goals with the roll-over of the calendar. This year, however, I did decide to set a few resolutions for myself.

When Logo Criticism Doesn't Even Aim for the Mark
11:45 am on 29 Dec 2009

Under Consideration's Brand New has released a year's end roundup of the best and worst logo designs to grace 2009. Slotting in at the third worst was the new logo for Xe, the rebranded Blackwater Worldwide.

Certainly Blackwater deserves a severe degree of public derision for the conduct of its employees in the 2007 Baghdad shootings. Nothing excuses the murder of innocent civilians.

How to Fix Healthcare
10:23 am on 07 Nov 2009

Pretty much everyone in the United States is in agreement that the healthcare system is critically flawed. Right now, there are two basic solutions being presented by the men in fancy suits:

A Review of Ubuntu 9.10
9:16 pm on 02 Nov 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 is the latest release of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, made available in final release form on October 29, 2009. The release is codenamed "Karmic Koala" and is the eleventh release of the popular open source operating system.

Changes

Karmic (as I will hereafter refer to Ubuntu 9.10) continues the progress of continual improvement that has characterized Ubuntu development since the project began in 2004.

Anti-Change is not Anti-Good: The Flaw of Ignoring Backlash
9:40 am on 25 Oct 2009

Popular social networking site Facebook has recently introduced a significant change to its home page, replacing the news feed with a "Live Feed". This new feature spawned a significant number of user-created groups protesting the change. In response, a group was created calling itself "I AUTOMATICALLY HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK HOME PAGE," satirizing those users who simply wanted facebook's home page to stay the same.

What is Everything2?
10:04 pm on 14 Oct 2009

After years of lurking around, I finally signed up for an account on Everything2. So far, I'm having a great time with the site.

But one day in the catbox (to non-noders: chatbox) a very well-established noder posted that Everything2's real problem is that none of its users know what it is. Is this true? Perhaps. It would be folly to say that E2 is a simple place. But I'm going to try and give my idea of what it is.

E2 is people.

A Tale of Browser Statistics
6:17 pm on 11 Oct 2009

A few days ago, Ars Technica ran an article on the worldwide usage statistics of the top five browsers, according to Net Applications. Ars reported on the considerable drop in usage of Internet Explorer (which is always a boon for us web developers) and the continual gains of the other four.