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Abulafia Way back in 1990, when I worked at Brown University, I wrote a hypertext application for the Macintosh called “Abulafia.” (named after the computer in Umberto Eco’s book, Foucault’s Pendulum. Recently I found some old Zip disks onto which I archived my Brown work when I left the university in 1995. I asked a hardware magpie friend of mine if he had a way of reading old 100MB Zip cartridges and he did. Amazingly, the old Zip cartridges were still accessible (thanks Iomega) and even more amazingly, I was able to find an old binary of Abulafia and run it under OS X’s classic emulation mode (thanks Apple). ...

In Part I, I described two graphs that I think help explain much IT dysfunction. I also noted that, typically: People in group A will often talk to and solicit advice from people in group C. (think VC or CEO talking to technical guru) There are relatively few people in group C. (some companies might not have anybody internal in group C- they hire consultants or read expert opinion) Most of the people who actually have to implement and maintain new technologies are in group B. Clearly there are lots of gradations between A & C & B, so I am using the groups as a convenient way to refer to the extremes. In the case of group B, the extreme is people with relatively-solid technical credentials but who are very cynical about technology and are very risk-averse. There are a few things that one often finds with group B: ...

Inspired by reading about other people’s blogging weaknesses, I’ve decided to finally get this one off the back burner and post it. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t original, but I started thinking about this way back in 1996 (pre-social-bookmarking) and I’ve lost my pointer to whatever influenced it. Anybody who can set me straight- I’d appreciate it. So here goes. There are two graphs which, when seen together, explain a hell of a lot about various forms of dysfunction that you see in the technology world. ...

After my trash-talk about “uber-geeks”, Leigh Dodds picked up the “Subscribe To My Brain” challenge and produced this within hours. He even produced a button, which -as everybody knows- automatically turns beta software into a production service… It turns out that Phil Wilson, was working on a similar concept and Danny Ayers was thinking along the same lines. And I am happy to say that the phrase “subscribe to my brain” seems to have turned into a mini-meme (Play Austin Powers theme tune here, start maniacally laughing). ...