mamamusings: July 19, 2003

words of wisdom

Beware the tyranny of bad tools and bad management.

You spill milk to discover how big the table is.

Nothing brings the experts out of the woodwork like an idiot speaking his mind.

Kill your UI people. If you fire them, they’ll go to work somewhere else.

Asking programmers to make social software can be like asking deaf people to make violins.

Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity or lack of serotonin uptake.

white house communication enhancements

Could there be a better, more public, more embarrassing example of poor interface design? The real question is whether it was born of ignorance or malice…

• Doc Searls’ step-by-step attempt to email President Bush
• John Markoff’s New York Times article on the new system

5 steps to flagrant bandwidth abuse

1) Turn on iSight camera

2) Launch QuickTime Broadcaster

3) Send video stream of self to QuickTime Streaming Server in Tokyo

4) Launch QuickTime to view stream at rtsp://stream.joi.ito.com/lizstream.sdp

5) Show results to family on couch, who note that real-time viewing of mom is far better than the QT player version (which appears to have latency of approximately 8 seconds)