Oh dear…Is it an iTastrophy when the iPhone becomes an iBrick? What happened to "it just works"?
Make that "it just doesn’t work".
[LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]
Wired’s verdict: Not worth the money [LINK].
Good job Jobs.

Here are some videos of an art installation by Bruce Shapiro  [LINK] called "Sisyphus III".
Sisyphus was a king in Greek mythology, punished in the underworld by being set to roll a huge boulder up a hill throughout eternity.
[LINK]
This thing works the same way. It’s a table of sand. On the surface is a steel ball. Underneath the table is a plotting mechanism that moves a magnet, causing the ball to move with it. The result is a line in the sand. Control the whole thing with a computer and …

Some more great reasons indicating the failure of the iPhone:
 
Is the iPhone worth supporting the evil AT&T empire?
The iPhone is super-hyped, but is it worth getting if it means giving money to the privacy-hating, monopoly-having bastards at AT&T? Gizmodo examines why it might be worth skipping the iPhone to maintain a clear conscience. [LINK]
 
$175 Fee If You Cancel iPhone, Even Though You Paid Full Price
You better like your full-price iPhone because if you don’t, AT&T plans on charging you the full $175 early termination fee, even though the …

Tonight we watched a bit of Mary Poppins before putting the kids to bed. It reminded me of the following video I found a while back on YouTube. Essentially a trailer based on Mary Poppins that re-writes the movie as a horror film. Pretty effective.

Equally as good, here’s the reverse: The Shining, recut as a romantic comedy.

By now everyone’s heard of the iPhone [LINK] and with it’s launch date fast approaching I thought I’d share some thoughts as to why I think this device will fail catastrophically.

Apple is running ads with all load times removed (edited out). Have you seen where the guy opens up Google Maps? That’ll never be that responsive in real-life as the network is just not fast enough. Expect the backlash to be significant.

The device is set to run on GSM networks which in North America …

Here’s a list of things I hear about frequently that generally mean or count for nothing. These are features that people will never use but typically if your product doesn’t support it, folks won’t buy it.
Ask a question in a meeting on any of these and you’ll give off an air of being really tech-savvy. Unfortunately the question and answer will be pointless. People ask anyway:

BPEL compliance (Business Process Execution Language): "Is your engine BPEL compliant?" Doesn’t mean anything. You’ll never switch orchestration engines. Even if you …

Ok so a number of folks have written comments and emailed me privately based on my post, nay rant regarding J2EE [LINK]. I think some further clarification is warranted lest you get the wrong impression. And no I’m not back-peddling.
My stance is that J2EE as a web-development platform (presentation, middle-tier, database) is bloated. For prototyping, rapid development, agile methodologies you’re better off in my opinion going with something like ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails or Groovy on Grails (I wish they’d named this stuff better, it feels ridiculous to even …

The other day I attended a small half-day conference with Kevin Mitnick [LINK] as keynote speaker. Kevin is by all accounts the "world’s most famous former hacker". Mitnick is a convicted criminal and was incarcerated for 5 years in the 90’s for stealing information in a number of different instances.

A lot of what he’s done has been exaggerated to mythical levels. For example, at one point in his life he was locked away in solitary for 8 months under the suspicion that he could set off a nuclear attack by whistling …

Let’s say you want to put up a simple Hello World website that saves some information to a database. In ASP.NET that’ll take you about 5 minutes if you’re slow. You won’t get much for your 5 minute investment but you can iterate on the implementation and ultimately "evolve" it to production quality code. You never need to leave the IDE and there’s practically no configuration.
In Java, you’d better start out on the right foot. J2EE is abismal so you’ll need to choose a presentation framework, the most popular …

First there were the Seven Habits of highly effective people [LINK], then there was the 8th Habit[LINK].  For years people have searched for ways of being more effective and thus saving that most valuable commodity; Time.
In the movie “The Fly”, Martin Brundle keeps a closet stocked with numerous copies of exactly the same clothes just to avoid having to think about what to wear.
Well I am here to tell you that that is all well and good but I believe now I have found the answer. The single thing that will free …