confused of calcutta

Have you, by any chance, started reading more books in parallel than you used to? I have, and I’m trying to figure out whether it’s an age thing, or whether the Web has an unusual effect on reading habits. I’ve noticed that my tendency to read more than one book at the same time has, [...]

[Read more →]

A few people have come up to me and wondered why I share “personal” things on my blog: things like changing my job, or, more recently, having a heart attack and then having a pacemaker fitted.
Fair questions.
And, given I have a lot of time on my hands while I rest and recuperate, I thought hard [...]

[Read more →]

I’m not a particular fan of any form of “chain” anything, but it’s not something I’m legalistic about. Kris Tuttle “tagged” me via this post while I was in hospital, so it behooves me to follow suit. [All your fault, Kris :-) ] Here’s my five “little-knowns”:

1. I’ve never learnt to swim or to drive. [...]

[Read more →]

Given the incredible materialism that passes for Christmas nowadays, I thought it would be appropriate to signal my somewhat timorous return with a random post about advertising.
I’ve always enjoyed Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users. If you haven’t read it, you should. While there are many reasons to read her blog, one of the minor [...]

[Read more →]

One of the joys (there aren’t too many of them) of being incarcerated in hospital depleted of energy, is the ability to read yesterday’s papers at leisure.
In yesterday’s FT there was an article on the difference in strategy between two major Indian Pharma companies, Dr Reddy’s and Ranbaxy.
Dr Reddy has been buying up [...]

[Read more →]

Guess it had to happen sometime: with all my rants against device lock in, someone had to find a way of making me partially dependent on such a device.
Boy was it painful. But I’m alive and well and sore and tired. And fitted with the ultimate lock in. A pacemaker.
I think it was Churchill who [...]

[Read more →]

Clustrmaps tells me that I had my 100,000th unique visitor yesterday.
It means very little right now, as an industry we have much to sort out in this respect.
The move away from page impressions to unique users. The period over which that uniqueness is defined. The role of different browsers and aggregators. The impact of [...]

[Read more →]

I will be quiet for a week or two as I recuperate from some medical complications.
In the meantime, I wish all my readers and the extended community the best of the season. For those that celebrate it, Merry Christmas.
And may 2007 bring you a whole new time.

[Read more →]

One of my posts yesterday drew a question and a response on the relationship between these two, so I thought I’d give the topic some airtime.
For anyone interested in the subject, a good place to start is Martin Fowler’s seminal article on the subject.
Read it for yourself, for sure it’s worth it. When I read [...]

[Read more →]

Sometime ago, in a post entitled The Destination Not the Route, I shared some of my thoughts about Agile development. Since then, a number of people have come up to me or written to me asking for a similar sideways look at the time dimension, particularly in the context of Agile versus Waterfall development.
Agile development [...]

[Read more →]