EWeek has a story up about Gentoo Linux. Despite characterizing it as generally unfit (or just unready) for "enterprise" use, it is generally a glowing report. The author seems to want to like Gentoo Linux very much, and although he stops short of recommending it for "production use", he marks it as a distribution to "keep an eye on."
Gentoo stays consistently in the top ten distributions at distrowatch.com, makes the first page of links in general google search for "linux", and, as the article states, does seem to be among the worlds most popular Linux distributions.
Continue reading ‘EWeek on Gentoo Linux’
InformationWeek reports that Firefox is still gaining market share. It’s rate is slowing, but it doesn’t seem to be stopping. Certain tech oriented websites are already reporting that as many as 20-25% of their hits are coming from Firefox. Overall, the market share is apparently around 5.7. The same article reports that IE market share seems to have dropped below 90% for the first time in… well the first time WebSideStory has ever reported such a thing.
How did such a thing happen? It’s mainly been driven by word of mouth…
Continue reading ‘Firefox, and word of mouth marketing’
In yet another plea for feedback, if anyone who reads this regularly (or even irregularly, like standing on your head or something) has their own blog or webpage, let me know in a comment or an email. I’d like to start a list of links to the blogs/pages of those who read here.
Want another link to your page? Leave me a comment!
Continue reading ‘Get your blog linked!’
Despite the fact that I’m a computer geek, I have an anomalous streak of business/marketing/management interest that seems to be reviving of late. So, I’m going to allow this streak to vent by starting to write up a regulaer "customer service recommendation" — I don’t know how many there’s going to be, but I don’t think I’ll run out for awhile.
Why do I think I’m qualified to do this? I actually think that almost anyone who’s willing to give the matter a little thought is qualified to do it; if you live in modern society (and if you’re reading this on the internet, you probably are), you are a customer — you know how you like to be treated and how you don’t, what you consider good service and what you don’t. We don’t necessarily spend as much time considering who our customers are, and how our customer service rates — but there’s no reason we couldn’t.
So here’s my Customer Service #1: Never attempt to address a problem by saying, "It’s not my fault."…
Continue reading ‘Accepting responsibility’
Just to save you some time, and give me something to write about, here’s an aggregate summary of the news that caught my attention over the weekend. Some may be news to you, some may not. Click "read more" to see the list.
Continue reading ‘Monday morning news round-up’
I mentioned a few days ago that I had installed Enlightenment, a Linux window manager, on my computer. Right now it’s on both my desktop PC and my Laptop, though I’ve done far more customization on the desktop PC’s instance. It’s an extremely nice desktop environment, but I don’t know that it’s one that will catch on en masse, no matter how good it is.
The reason? Critical mass. Gnome and KDE have it, and in North America it seems that Gnome is in front over KDE, also.
I was using Gnome before I tried out Enlightenment, and I have to say that I’m impressed enough that I plan to go on using Enlightenment for the forseeable future, though I may not upgrade to e17 (the newest version, still in development) until it’s stable. However, if I was planning a Linux distribution, or setting up a Linux PC for someone else, I think I’d still choose Gnome as the default….
Continue reading ‘Enlightenment, and Gnome’
A few days ago I added some rotating quotations just under the header of this site. If you’re like me, and really dig reading cool things that other people said, you’d probably be interested in wist.info, which is where I found most of the quotations I’ve used; it a cool site with a whole lot of quotations, a lot easier to navigate than many other "quotation" sites I found.
Also, if you area Mambo user and were looking for a module to display random quotes… well, I didn’t write one, and I haven’t found one. I used the newsflash module with the heading, titles, and other post-settings hidden; the newsflash module is already set up to randomly display one of its items, so it works perfectly for this purpose, provided you aren’t already using it for, um, newsflashes.
Continue reading ‘Quotations’
If you notice some of the most successful (ie, A Whole Lot of Traffic) blogs on the web, one of the things you’ll notice right away is that they have a very specific, often narrow, niche, to which they cater nearly exclusively.
A new one, only 5 days old, is FontLeech. Yes, it’s a blog about free fonts. And five days into its existence, it’s getting attention all over the blogosphere.
Another great example is Cooking for Engineers. A great idea; a site for geeky, left-brained types who happen to cook; it got so much traffic when it began to be noticed (a link from Slashdot helped, with that) that it was down and out, temporarily…
Continue reading ‘Power of the niche’
ChangeThis.com almost always has something new and interesting. Today it’s Dan Auito’s manifesto on A positive attitude.
Cool!
Honestly, I’ll join the curmudgeons who dislike the fact that all of ChangeThis’ documents are PDFs. It annoys the heck out of me; I hate it with a passion. But, like most others of this opinion have also admitted, so far the content of these documents has been superior enough to warrant reading them anyways. If you haven’t visited them before, or lately, check it out.
Continue reading ‘A positive attitude!’
After my recent "product evangelist" post, in a comment I mentioned (because it just sprang to mind) Gilad Bracha, Sun Microsystems‘ Computational Theologist.
That started me thinking about job titles, and in particular what separates a Cool Interesting Job Title from a Stale Collection of Buzzwords. For every Product Evangelist and Computational Theologist we have a bunch of E-Commerce Solution Architects, Quality Assurance Technicians, and Mission Critical Support Consultants. I have no interest in a puffed up title, the only purpose of which is to make one feel more important.
Really cool titles, on the other hand, are kind of, uh, well… cool….
Continue reading ‘You’re a what?’
