mertner.com/allan

Yesterday, I read Don’t just roll the dice, a short book about software pricing that is available as a free eBook and can also be purchased in paper form, much like the great book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. Perhaps there is something about the air in Cambridge that helps these guys to just get it?

As an example of someone that sits at the other end of the scale and certainly doesn’t get it is the company behind the PowerDVD software. Their pricing policy positively scares customers away!

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During most of my day, I work at Tideway Systems where we produce software that helps companies get a grip on their IT infrastructure – particularly their servers rather than their desktops.

Over the past few years, we have evolved a process for making the software we write highly valuable to our users and do so in a way that allows us to be flexible about scheduling, keep the creative juices flowing, and deliver it all very quickly.

If you are working in a software development organization and this kind of thing interests you, head over and have a look at my latest blog post which is about how our process allows us to build amazing software.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I just got myself an eBook reader – the new Sony PRS-300.

It’s a new device, and while it doesn’t have many gizmos and features it does have a great little screen that is pleasant for reading books. I read a lot of books, and my first thought when I got it in the post was to – you guessed it – buy a bunch of books for it

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It is the same every time a new version of Firefox is released: plugin authors need to check whether their extensions work with the new version, and then create a new package that includes the flags to say it indeed works.

So far, so good. But the next step, after uploading the package to the add-ons site, isn’t working very well.

A few days after FF 3.5 was released, I uploaded Define Word 0.9.2, to make it easy to get it to work in the new browser version. Today, the extension is still not approved, and anyone that used the extension in the past have probably given up by now.

If you haven’t yet given up, feel free to download it from here. Eventually, you may even be able to get it from Mozilla, but don’t hold your breath

I think percentages are simple. Take 100%, for example: it means everything. And 0% means nothing. 50% is about half.

Per cent of course means “per hundred”, so 27% is just a short way of saying “27 per hundred”, or 27/100, or 0.27. Really, is that hard?

In Britain, it seems to be. Whenever there is a change in tax, it’s not “an decrease of 2%”, it is “an decrease of 2 pennies in the Pound”. The Lib Dems do it, the Torygraph does it, and even the Independent does it, even though it seems like an awkward, round-about and much too cumbersome way of saying something simple.

Today, I read an article about the Chrysler bankruptcy filing, where lots of percentages are thrown around, but this time using “20pc” to mean 20%. What is the idea with that? “pc” means “pieces”, I think, and I constantly read “20 pieces of silver” – most distracting, not to mention unnecessary.

Even Wikipedia’s article on percentages doesn’t mention either of those uses. I’d encourage them to go away – just use “percent”, or the fine sign with the same meaning, %. It’s clear, it’s unambiguous, and it’s really not hard.

Or am I missing something? Not having grown up in the UK, I may this moment be violating any number of cultural taboos, or trespassing on ground that is off-limits for some reason. Did the French use percentages in a particularly bad way, perhaps, or does the % symbol carry some hidden meaning of which I as a foreigner am unaware?

If that is the case, please do let me know. If not, well, then please use percentages: it’s what they are there for

This was a question my son asked me yesterday, and in this internet-connected, twittering age of facebook and social networking, it’s probably a natural thing for someone to want a blog.

What I thinks is unusual is that Iain, who wants his own blog, is just 6 years old.  Or am I wrong, and this is something that happens a lot?

Either way, let me share the short story of how we got to this amazing place, where a 6-year old who only just learned how to read wants to publish his own thoughts on the internet, so that others can Google what I have learned as he puts it…

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After around 6 months of thinking about it, Mozilla finally approved Spam Control as a publicly available extension.  Until now, it has languished is an unapproved extension that only logged-in users see – and has therefore has seen little attention.

Since it was made public around a week ago, more than 2,000 people have downloaded and installed Spam Control – and left several nice reviews.  I like that; it’s the kind of thing that makes me want to do more work on it

One of the reviewers mentioned that mailcatch.com has a good service similar to temporary inbox – but since it’s newer, it’s less likely to be blocked or busy.  It does indeed look like a nice, free service, and v0.2.7 of Spam Control supports it.

Note that I find Spam Control most useful in conjunction with the awesome Secure Login extension.  I wouldn’t like to be without either of them.

Check them out.

I have decided to take a new approach to backing up my most precious, irreplaceable personal data. Things like my pictures, documents, drawings, source code, presentations, etc. If I lose this, I can’t get it back, ever, which makes backups particularly important…

The irreplaceable stuff needs to be backed up somewhere that will last for a long time, preferably in multiple locations, and ideally can survive it even if the house burns down. I used to back it up to CDs and DVDs, but the capacity is just too low and the hassle factor (including remembering to change disks) too high. Not to mention the fact that most CDs and DVDs will last for no more than 3-5 years before they start developing enough errors that they can be hard to read!

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