A QA Guy's Radio Weblog

A QA Guy's Radio Weblog
Thoughts from Dave Liebreich

Friday, March 29, 2002

One of my hidden talents is the ability to annoy Dave Winer with my actions, without even trying. 8:14:33 PM

the recent (2 weeks?) discussion of frontier/radio quoting and unquoting of *ml tags reminds me of tcl quoting and expansion rules.

if you never got bit by the tcl rules, then you were happy if you got bit, you had to seek out the highly convoluted explanation.

if you internalized the model, you could get back to being productive

if you failed to come up with a mental model, you never were as productive as you were in ignorance

the problem was that if you stumbled across the explanation before you got bit by a problem you were more likely to end up confused because you did not have a problem of your own to work through the model

so having the explanation out there in public view turned people off of tcl. an interesting conundrum 8:07:07 PM

Pretty soon, all traffic in and out of a company will be controlled by a set of policy maintained by central IT organizations. this policy will be very granular and very flexible, and the boxes that perform it will have built-in support for IM (relay, record, filter, bots, etc), HTTP, email (SMTP, POP, IMAP), and all sorts of big-brotherish things. 8:03:47 PM

What *I* would really like to see is "A Day in the Life of an Expert Radio User" - so that I could notice all the tricks of the trade. How do you open a new outline? What do you use for a multi-entry clipboard? How do you use it? What combination of keystrokes and mousings do you use? What interrupt mechanisms do you let through? What special macros do you have in your toolbox?

I found unix fairly easy to learn, since each component was written by one person, or a very small team. It's easy to "get into the head" of such a designer. VMS was horrible, 'cause I just can't "get into the head" of a committee.

I guess I'm just falling back to my old NPI role - trying to find the pieces of information necessary for new users to really "get" the product. If I can gather such stuff up, then I can walk into whatever new job I find and be ready to "deploy" radio, rcs, and i/o and make my life easier. 8:02:36 PM

It's a Mare

My wife and daughter are up at the stables, awaiting the arrival of our first horse - a 6 year old Morgan mare.

If we stumble across tons of money, I'll get my Friesian, and maybe an Icelandic Pony as well. 2:52:45 PM

Beta 2 - Wooo!

It's official - we hit the beta 2 milestone 1 day early (all right - 10 minutes). 12:31:30 AM