November 2011

Helvetica The Movie

November 23, 2011

So as I had planned, I watched the documentary “Helvetica” on Netflix. It is a well-made film consisting primarily of interviews with type designers interspersed with a zillion visuals of Helvetica font used all over the place. Not being from a graphics background, I was astounded to see how ubiquitous the Helvetica typeface is. Most corporations use […]

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The Resistance Against Requirements Specifications

November 21, 2011

Martin Fowler re-posted this article from 2004: Tests are always going to be incomplete, so they always have to be backed up with other mechanisms. Being the twisted mind that I am, I actually see this as a plus. Since it’s clear that Specification By Example isn’t enough, it’s clear that you need to do […]

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Pardon the Programming Interruption

November 21, 2011

Nope, this has nothing to do with software development. But for regular readers, a few things to note: If you have subscribed to the RSS feed, please validate if you have subscribed to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/thoughtclusters. There is a digit “2” at the end of the “feeds” sub-domain. Apparently, the “new” FeedBurner wants it that way. If you are […]

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When Phones and PDAs Merged

November 20, 2011

John Gruber posts a photo of this misleading 2007 presentation for the original iPhone: This is true as far as phones go. But back in 2004, there was the Tungsten T5: The Tungsten T5 cost around $400, less than what the first iPhone debuted for. It was a sophisticated device doing almost everything you needed, […]

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Trello and Siberian Cake Shop Owners

November 17, 2011

I was reading this amusing post on the Fog Creek blog by Rock Hymas illustrating Clayton Christensen’s disruption concept through the story of a cake shop owner in Siberia (!) who has some competition in the form of an ice cream stand. It is a good analogy, but it fails to explain why the cake shop owner makes […]

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The Google Reader Update

November 3, 2011

Many fans of Google Reader (the online RSS client) are up in arms over the recent changes. In my opinion, the outrage is a little overblown. First off, if you are reading this on a desktop, you already have a large monitor and the reduction in reading area is negligible. Plus you can hide the […]

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More on Typography

November 1, 2011

To follow up on my post on typography, I noticed that “This Developer’s Life” had a new podcast on the topic. I liked the interview with Bill Hill, who has done some stellar work with Microsoft on ClearType. The previous podcast episode on “Taste” was also very interesting. There was mention about the documentary “Helvetica”. It […]

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