I am exhausted; I spent most of my day either in transit (metro->airplane->airport->delay->airport->taxi), in meetings (one an hour longer than expected (though for decent reasons), one which the other party missed, and one not very useful), or fighting with MS Windows Media Encoder, which is a pretty nice product, when it isn’t completely broken for completely opaque reasons. All in all not at all a happy or productive day, especially since I had to wake up at 4am.
Clouds (outside, and on horizon with LSAT in five days) not making me any cheerier either.
Was pointed at the 37 signals blog today (via planet HCI); particularly at their series of ‘getting real’ posts. Some really good stuff on the art of pragmatic software design, including the teaser that they are turning it into a book. Looking forward to reading that.
Federico: if OOo doesn’t have a full-time performance staff, then OOo needs to adjust either their architecture or their feature lists appropriately. The current approach (extreme sloth combined with tons of features that are difficult to use, at the same time that MS is investing heavily in performance and ease of use) means that I’m embarrassed to push OOo in my organization, even though my organization is one of the highest profile advocates of open standards like opendoc. If the staff at Berkman, who are mostly ideologically predisposed to use OOo purely because of open standards, won’t use it, then OOo is doing something fairly wrong in terms of the quality and user experience of the product they are delivering. If that is because of resources, they need to take a hard look at prioritization and strategy and figure out strategies and targets appropriate to the resources at hand.