A physical object these days, from a car to a camera, is more defined by software than hardware.  For instance the gas pedal in your car is not actually attached to the engine.  In the old days is was attached to a cable that controlled a valve in the carburetor – push is hard and the valve let in more gas and the engine ran faster.  How it functioned was defined by the hardware components and their mechanical adjustments.  Today your gas pedal controls a switch that feeds information into a computer which based on its programmed responses will tell different parts of the engine to react based on your input.   It is possible to change the programming to make your car super gas-efficient or a race-ready speed rocket – still within the larger limits of the engine and other components, but there can be a considerable range of software variability possible.  Other hardware has the same issues – for instance the shutter button on your camera isn’t actually attached to the camera shutter – again it triggers a stream of software cause and effect.

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I just finished The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.  I don’t quite remember how I came across the book, but I’m glad I did.  It is a thoughtful and well presented work on the concepts of craft and craftsmanship with much application to our modern work lives.  I see his presentation as breaking down into two broad categories – management and teaching.  Here I’ll talk on the management side.

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Google has done it again, and created a cool service to make the web better.  In this case it is an API that gives access to a range of text fonts.  Many of you may not know this, but traditionally web page design is limited to a handful of fonts. Read the rest of this entry »

I like my Kindle.  It makes it very easy to get access to books via the Amazon store.  It is easy to use, convenient, good form factor, and easy on the eyes.  It also is a great conversation starter on the commuter train (“ Is that a Kindle?  How do you like it?) But despite all those positives, I find myself not using it much these days.  Why not?  It is a matter of policy, not technology.

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I love to hate Microsoft.  And have made a point to support alternatives to their standard, knee-jerk products.  But as I blog this article from a Firefox Add-on, I write it in Windows Live Writer on a laptop running Windows 7.   Despite the fact that my son’s home computer runs OpenSUSE with OpenOffice a sizable portion of my workday is spent with MS Access and SQL server.  Me conflicted?  Sure

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I just finished reading The Social Factor:  Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networks, by Maria Azua.  She served as IBM’s vice president of Technology and Innovation, where she helped implement social networking tool across IBM’s 125,000 global workforce.   While not exactly a book about IBM’s practices, it does draw heavily on them.  Overall I found the book a little long on generalities, and thin on specific examples.  This might be exactly the book for an upper-level executive with little-to-no experience with social media.  But anyone with an active Twitter or Facebook account will find much of it too basic. 

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