Most of you will be familiar with blogger extraordinaire Ben Nadel. Ben recently posted about a fundamental misunderstanding he had about jQuery event objects. There's something very important to be learned about how Ben approaches problems.

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A recent article in "The Business Insider" here reveals some of the questions Google uses to interview applicants. Google's smart, right? So, we should emulate Google?

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Recently, I was reading a post about how Perl blew it (here-- and why it's lost its viability as a web language for new projects. Many of the comments were savage in their response. Yet, ask any non-Perl person and I think they'd agree that Perl no longer has the luster for writing web apps it once did. Given that, why the extreme reaction to what seems a fairly obvious point?

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Malcolm Gladwell is a fabulously successful journalist. He's written blockbuster books: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What The Dog Saw. I find them both interesting and entertaining. Gladwell delivers a product that provides value and he's reaped the appropriate rewards. A heartwarming tale of success, no? Not so fast, grasshopper...

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Yesterday, I inadvertently made public a draft of an unfinished post I was working on. You can read the first part of the post here. Today, we finish the story.

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Al: Agile development rocks.

Bob: No way. Agile sucks.

while 1 == 1{

Al: Rocks

Bob: Sucks

}

Poor Al.

Poor Bob.

Poor us.

Now, this isn't a post about how wonderful Agile is or how bad it is. It's not really a post about Agile at all.

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Try googling "quote simplicity" and "quote complexity" and you'll find some wonderful thoughts from people like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Christopher Alexander, and Charles Mingus on the virtues of simplicty and the perils of complexity. But it seems the way of things that they often start out simple and accrue complexity.

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Well, I finished that monster prototype, with much credit to my coding partner, Maciej. I figured that over 11 days, I worked 165 hours. Whew! Yesterday, we gave the presentation to a large multi-national corporation. To my relief and gratification, they were very impressed. Which leaves me, now, with only one small problem...

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On Saturday morning, I had to tell Liz Frederick, organizer of CFUnited that I would not be able to attend. I was very disappointed as I was looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones, but the decision was a simple, if not easy, one.

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fetish: \ˈfe-tish

1a: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence.

1b: an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion

I just finished reading Chris Anderson's book, Free: The History of a Radical Price. It's quite good. While listening to the book (it's available...for free...at audible.com), I couldn't shake the sense that, for many, "free" software has become a fetish, to the great harm of us all.

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