Andy Budd writes a piece on doing spec work for clients, and why it’s nearly always a bad idea. He’s right, but the tough part is resisting that (mistaken) feeling that if you don’t give a potential client exactly what they ask for, you’ll lose the work. I’ll bet that getting over that fear would be worth the risk. However if a client is basing their decision on the spec work you create for them, a pitch ends up turning into a visual design competition.

A (long) Sitepoint article describing the problems and offering solutions for Making Rich Web Application Architecture Usable. Most of it isn’t necessarily specific to so-called “Rich Applications,” so it’s relevant for just about any web app development.

After giving T.M. a lot of grief for not having permalinks on his blog, I realized that my fairly recent move to movable type has left my permalinks open to being broken easily. I’d used the default permalink setting in MT, which uses the entry id as the archived file’s name. Bad idea to use a database-dependent key in the filename, especially since I recently exported the entries out of MySQL from the site on my old server to SQLite on the new box.

Seems as if the Half-Life 2 source code has been leaked after someone comprimised a number of machines on Valve’s network. Bad news for Valve, who’ve always been community oriented. That very community is in the process of hunting down and killing the culprit(s). I sure wouldn’t want to piss off thousands of hardcore gamers just waiting to play some real-life online seek and destroy.

This is cool, Kevin is posting his drawings. Nothing wrong with his photography, but I’ve always been amazed at what he can crank out with a pencil without breaking a sweat. This for example, was meant apparently to demonstrates his ability to draw hair. So that’s what we’re calling it now, eh Kev? Now I’m the one sweating.

I was complaining today that as great and fast as PCs have become, there’s no reason we should have to wait for them—ever. And yet that’s what we spend too large a portion of every day doing. Tom Yager figured out why:: “A 3GHz Pentium 4 desktop is an IBM PC/AT wearing a mail-order gown and too much rouge.”

No parent wants to see this. She’s alright, just a bruised neck. I’ll take longer to recover than she will. (more shots)

He’s getting bigger. (more shots in the gallery)

Our old friend Matthew, aka MrFlick has a new blog Expect the cuisine to taste of theater and geek.

I’ve moved this site to a brand new Debian server at ServerBeach. May take a day or two to get all the knots out. Stay with me.

In yet another miss, some time ago I predicted (offline) that camera phones were a silly, unworkable toy that a few teenagers would buy and forget about. Seems I was off by just a tad. According to the WSJ, more phones are now sold (worldwide) with cameras than without.

Without a doubt more will follow, but here’s an early Queer Eye for the Straight Guy clone…. Without a doubt more will follow, but here’s an early Queer Eye for the Straight Guy clone…. “The experiment: Let loose three tech experts in an average family’s home. The result: gizmo nirvana”