Pixels and Widgets

A blog by Tai Toh

Quotes

  • Quote: It’s all about quality…

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    While such attention to detail may not be appreciated in the specific case, however, I’ve found that in aggregate it leads to an overall impression of quality that attracts the kind of fanatically devoted users who form the backbone of a growing, long term user base. Shipping quality is a longer, tougher road than just…

  • A cure for colony collapse

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    In case you weren’t aware, and I wasn’t for a long time, the foundation in common usage by beekeepers results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I’ve measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. This 4.6mm comb was drawn by a hive of…

  • If you don’t save, how do you expect to get wealthy?

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much…

  • Neil Gaiman sums up the whole Kindle text-to-speech debacle

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the…

  • PC World reports 38 percent revenue from online

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    When I was at PC World, I explained to anyone who’d listen that our editorial strategy was pretty simple: We had to be a Web site that had a magazine, not a magazine that had a Web site. That philosophy affected the decisions we made in 10,000 different ways. And it’s nice to see revenue…

  • We have no clue

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    At this point, it’s better to tell people right up front, ‘We don’t know,’ as opposed to trying to put out numbers that we’ll be dissatisfied with in maybe less than a week. // To put numerical ‘certainty’ on the Canadian and Ontario outlooks at this point in time . . . seems silly –…

  • Bill C-61: The Conservative Party of Canada is Insane

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    One formal definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome. Canada’s DMCA is, by this measure, insane — and so is the party that insists on ramming it through. From BoingBoing.net (via Michael Geist’s Blog) regarding the reintroduction of Bill C-61 if the Conservatives are elected to government. Cory…

  • “Directly responding to Apple’s campaign is weak…

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    Directly responding to Apple’s campaign is weak. It’s playing Pepsi to Apple’s Coke, Burger King to Apple’s McDonald’s. It’s an explicit acknowledgement that Microsoft is the second-place brand. From Daring Fireball regarding Microsofts new I’m a PC Ad John Gruber makes an excellent point. It’s almost like MS is asking Apple not to make fun…

  • “We think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web…

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating…

  • Quote on Drupal and the cluster that is theming

    —

    by

    ttoh
    in

    Finding the source can be difficult to track down due to the hierarchy of theming calls whose source can be spread throughout the whole system. From Overriding themable output | drupal.org regarding drupal theming Wow. There is a startling admisssion. Even Drupal admits that theming is a bit hairy.