Blogs

Take the Firefox 3 Pledge

Steve Backman — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:20:12 -0500

I’ll be celebrating Download Day Tuesday June 17. That’s when Mozilla will release Firefox 3, the new generation of the Open Source browser. I have used test versions of Firefox 3 for months and love it. I love the performance and speed even when I have multiple tabs open, which I almost always do. Right now, I have Firefox 22 tabs open, and the browser remains perky and stable. Yes, it’s using up a huge amount of my computer’s free memory, but I’d rather give it to that then most anything else on my desktop.

BlueAnt: Great Product, Great Service

Steve Backman — Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:40:47 -0500

Being in the customer service line of fire myself, I'm always impressed when a small company manages both good products and good service.

Memorial Day

Steve Backman — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:39:38 -0500

I visited the Forest Hills Cemetery today, on Memorial Day. I rode my bike over for a quiet afternoon visit. Fresh flags had gone up along the winding roadway in, and commemorative flags marked some of the graves.

Backing Up is Not Hard to Do

Steve Backman — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:17:19 -0500

Recently my Carbonite back-up stopped working. Carbonite is one of the new breed of low-cost, on-line, continuous data back-up services. I have tried Mozy and Jungle Disk as well, and stick with Carbonite because I started with it, it works quietly and reliably, the control panel is simple, and its costs just $50 a year for unlimited storage.

Heathrow's T5 and technology project management

Steve Backman — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 19:31:25 -0500

I have been trying to follow the problems in the new T5 terminal at Heathrow Airport. There are small project management problems and there are big ones. Ours are modest. On the scale of big, you have T5 which apparently included 400,000 hours of software development (that’s a lot of lines of code!), a full year of testing and a full year of training. Yet its open was a technology disaster.

Where will you get your news?

Steve Backman — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 06:02:09 -0500

From the opening scene of Blade Runner, you know you are in for a more personally challenging vision of the future. Harrison Ford’s monologue interposed with messages from oversized personal billboards (“a new life awaits you…”) still come to memory first for me even after all these years. Visually alluring ads clash with the degraded city.

Check out Goodreads

Steve Backman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:31:57 -0500

I joined Goodreads this weekend. I had heard of it, but not gone down that road before.

Open Source or Open Enough?

Steve Backman — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:10:22 -0500

The 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference reinforced my sense that at this point, it's useful to consider choices about Open Source as a continuum rather than a yes/no.

Loving Firefox 3

Steve Backman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:09:30 -0500

I have been using the beta version of Firefox since last weekend. I love it! You can try it here.

The main thing I needed and that I’m experiencing is that it stays perky even with a ton of tabbed windows open. Yes, my browsing habits include opening and keeping open lots of windows at once. Firefox has had the ability to support this for a while, but memory use grew, sluggishness crept in, and Firefox sometimes crashed.

Back from the Nonprofit Technology Conference

Steve Backman — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 10:09:33 -0500

I'm just back from this year's NTC (Nonprofit Technology Conference) in New Orleans. The most striking and welcome thing for me was the richness of experiences in organizing campaigns and building constituency on the web today. Lots of detailed, honest sharing of experiences in blending email, one's own web site, and the social media to accomplish meaningful goals. By social media, I mean public resources such as FaceBook, mySpace, care2, blogging, social tagging.