Blog

I’ve had HP printers for a long, long time, since the earliest LaserJets. The latest is an all-in-one printer/fax/copier that we bought a few… Read more »

One of the joys of living in the country is all the wildlife around us. Deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, rabbits, and birds. Even the… Read more »

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve posted here. I have lots of things running around in my head that I want to… Read more »

So much animation on the web is gratuitous, underwhelming, and just plain unconvincing in terms of telling a story. Here’s a piece of very… Read more »

Today we reached an important milestone in the short history of Webvanta—we closed the next phase of our financing. We now have the capital… Read more »

After an amazing year of effort, I’m thrilled to report that the Webvanta beta is now live! Sign up for a free trial on… Read more »

The financial meltdown of the past two weeks has been scary to watch. The New York Times has a nicely done interactive graphic of… Read more »

For the first time in more than a dozen years, I’m boatless. Well, nearly so, as there’s still a couple of kayaks and dinghies…. Read more »

I’m really excited to be heading to Startup Camp toward the end of this week. This is a gathering of folks from seven startups,… Read more »

Many years ago, when I was writing Microprocessor Report, I read dozens of magazines a week and sifted through hundreds of printed, mailed press… Read more »

Meet Sapphire, our new kitten. Is there anything better than a kitten?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog, so I thought it was time for an update. Anyone who has been involved… Read more »

One year ago today I embarked on my current adventure, leaving Adobe after five years there and two years creating the startup they acquired,… Read more »

During the dozen or so years I ran the Microprocessor Forum conference, I presented hundreds of seminars on microprocessors and PC technology. I enjoy… Read more »

I wrote my previous post, Tracking the Cosco Busan, just after I published the animation of the ship’s track as it hit the Bay… Read more »

As you probably know, on Wednesday morning a 908-foot cargo ship, the Cosco Busan, ran into one of the San Francisco Bay Bridge towers,… Read more »

For the past several months, the majority of my time has gone into a web application for a startup called Accreditation Helper. The marketing… Read more »

When I started this blog almost a year ago, I really wasn’t sure what I’d be writing about. As it happened, it ended up… Read more »

I’ve been blogging for about a year over at www.mslater.com. That blog ended up being, well, eclectic, as it reflected diverse areas of interest… Read more »

It’s been awfully quiet here on the blog the past month or so… but that’s only because life here in the physical world has… Read more »

If my personal behavior is any indication, things are looking up for subscription web services. When I went out on my own last fall,… Read more »

Update: some more presentations have been added to the conference site, most notably DHH’s keynote, titled “A peak at Rails 2.0”. (I’m not sure… Read more »

Six months into my exploration of Ruby and Rails and the opportunities it represents, I’ve settled into a niche of building web applications that… Read more »

When I’m writing content for the web, I hate dealing with HTML coding. HTML is rather verbose as a markup language, and having to… Read more »

I moved to the hills near Sebastopol, in Sonoma County about an hour north of San Francisco, almost 17 years ago. We came for… Read more »

One of the things that Ruby’s advocates find wonderful, and others often find scary, is its dynamic nature. You don’t declare the types of… Read more »

If you think of this as a computing blog, which it mostly is, this will seem like a wildly off-topic post. But those of… Read more »

My first built-from-scratch Ruby on Rails site is now live: www.newhorizonschool.info. This site is for New Horizon School and Learning Center, a wonderful small… Read more »

Having recently left a five-year stint at Adobe, I became accustomed to the world of expensive software. Now that I’m doing web development on… Read more »

craigslist is a fascinating anomaly in the world of large-scale web sites. Take a look at these numbers, as published by Craigslist with October… Read more »

One of the curses of the computer age, especially for those of us who do development work, is the vast amount of detail that… Read more »

Happy new year! When I left Adobe at the end of November, I promised myself that I would “take a break” for perhaps as… Read more »

Many English words have taken on new meanings in the digital world, often as product names. Since Google bases its search rank not on… Read more »

Tagging has become one of the themes of so-called Web 2.0 sites. Really nothing more than free-form keywording, tagging has proven useful in many… Read more »

Photo sharing has proven to be one of the Internet’s most common applications. Indeed, the ability to easily share photos electronically is a key… Read more »

A little more than a year ago, I heard Jason Fried’s “Getting Real” talk at the second Web 2.0 conference. For me, it was… Read more »

If you thought email spam was bad enough, you should try running a web site with a user forum and a mailing list.

Those of you who may have started reading my blog for its relatively non-technical articles may have been mildly horrified, or at least repulsed,… Read more »

It is often said that failures are more instructive than successes. In this spirit, I’ve done a lot of reflection on what went wrong… Read more »

There’s a couple things I just don’t understand about the massive proliferation of spam. First, who responds to these messages? I assume someone must,… Read more »

I’ve used IBM Thinkpads for a long time. Upon leaving Adobe recently, I had to purchase my own notebook PC for the first time… Read more »

Today was my last day at Adobe. It was an odd feeling walking out the door for the last time. I had a great… Read more »

One of the projects I led at Adobe during the past year was the development of a new generation of web photo galleries to… Read more »

Somehow I never got to reading The Cluetrain Manifesto until recently. I’m stunned at how insightful this work is. It illuminates an awful lot… Read more »

Update: I published this quick list some time ago, and I’ve noticed it continues to get a fair amount of traffic. It is woefully… Read more »

I’m currently at the Rails Edge conference, an interesting gathering of about 100 Ruby on Rails aficionados, newbies, and everything in between, in Denver…. Read more »

I’ve just reached the end of a seven-year adventure into software for digital photography. The adventure began with my first digital camera, a Nikon… Read more »

As I’ve been exploring what kind of business I want to build, I’ve found my thinking settling on hosted applications for small business. Here’s… Read more »

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of months thinking through potential opportunities for building a new business. I’m still exploring… Read more »