Software Trenches

Seth Godin on Word of Mouth Marketing

A great post on marketing by Seth Godin:

Word of Mouth is a really fragile entity. Someone asked me at a recent engagement what I thought about various agencies that are paying people to shill for their products. I said something like, "Well, for a long time the oldest profession has taken money for what other people do for free. How do you feel about the difference between the two transactions? Which kind of person did you marry?"

MacBook Pro and 3GB RAM Limit

I was surprised to see that the newest MacBook Pro memory can only be upgraded to 3GB. Since the laptop has two memory slots one would think with 2GB memory chips you can easily (for $625 a piece) upgrade to 4GB.

Jason D. O'Grady and MacFixIt explain that it is not that simple, Intel's 945PM chipset has limitations:

The MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo presumably uses Intel's 945PM chipset, which can physically handle 4 GB of DDR2 RAM. However, a number of items that must be stored in physical RAM space, and when RAM reaches 4 GB, there is some overlap. In other words, in a 3 GB RAM configuration, there is no overlap with the memory ranges required for certain system functions. Between 3 GB and 4 GB, however, system memory attempts to occupy space that is already assigned to these functions. For instance, the PCI Express RAM allocation occurs at somewhere around 3.5 GB of RAM and requires 256 MB of RAM. Thus, the virtual space between 3.5 GB of RAM and 3.75 GB of RAM is occupied by PCI Express data. So in a system with 3 GB of RAM, nothing is being wasted because the memory space required by PCI Express is still between 3.5 and 3.75 GB, and the installed system RAM does not violate this space.

The net result is that at least 3 GB of RAM should be fully accessible, while when 4 GB of RAM installed, ~700 MB of of the RAM is overlapping critical system functions, making it non-addressable by the system.

Oh, well... I guess I just have to limit myself again; as always ;)

Empire of Debt

A year ago I read Financial Reckoning Day by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin. The subject was so interesting and the book was written so well, it was hard to put it down.

Empire of Debt, the new book by these authors, is a great read as well:

A republic, a monarchy, or even a dictatorship is a relatively modest undertaking. Its scope is limited, and controlled by leading citizens either through their influence on the autocrat or by shaping public opinion. An empire, on the other hand, steps onto the world stage and plays a role that is beyond the control of its citizens. Private life becomes auxiliary, moving to a supporting role while the grand public spectacle plays itself out. In the United States Constitution, it is expressly stated that the people are sovereign, not the government. Ultimately, what people want in their private lives is what is supposed to matter. But the idea passed away when the American Republic died and the empire was born. By 1960, John Kennedy was able to lecture voters to "ask not what the country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Suddenly, the government that was created by, for, and of its people was way out in front of them. They found themselves servants to it, no longer its masters."

Beginning of the End of America

Found via Throw Away Your TV

1Passwd On Digg

Now that 1Passwd started to get some "competition", it is great to see 1Passwd 1.5 mentioned on Digg. And it is described very well, much better than I ever did it myself.

With the explosion in the number of websites we rely upon it has become impossible to securely keep track of all your passwords. The old techniques of password memorization and password reuse are no longer acceptable practices in today’s security conscious environment. But most users continue to rely on bad practices in order to remember their passwords.

read more | digg story

Jessie Belle Rittenhouse — My Wage

I bargained with Life for a penny,

And Life would pay no more,

However I begged at evening

When I counted my scanty store;

For Life is a just employer,

He gives you what you ask,

But once you have set the wages,

Why, you must bear the task.

I worked for a menial’s hire,

Only to learn, dismayed,

That any wage I had asked of Life,

Life would have paid.

-- Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, “My Wage”

Online Criminals

Seth Godin describes his recent experience with a phishing e-mail.

He questions if phishers ever think of themselves as criminals. I doubt that they spend much time analyzing that — they do not know their victims in person, they never see the people they steal from. And the anonymity makes this crime much easier as Seth already mentioned a few years ago.

It is very sad to see that number of spam e-mails and phishing attacks continue to grow every day. One thing I am confident about — the more people protect themselves with the tools like RoboForm or 1Passwd, the less phishing will take place.

Google Code Search

Google Labs has recently launched a code search service.

This useful service is a great help for every developer, but there is more that one way of using it.
Jason Kottke started to collect the creative exploits of this service. For example, right now, you can find

• possible buffer overflows in open source software
• confidential code
• backdoors and backdoor passwords

The growing collection is available at
http://www.kottke.org/06/10/google-code-search

Because Everyone is An Expert

Two weeks ago I was looking on how to improve the disk image design of my product. I decided to download a few product I personally used or tried and see how they do it. This ended with a blog post which appeared up on Digg's homepage:

Being displayed on Digg's homepage is great -- over 3,000 hits in one day and 40 comments. Most of the comments were positive but the one I remembered the most is a comment by Chad:

How can anyone pretend to be an auhority on Mac software dstribution when they use the word “shortcut” to refer to an alias...

A few years ago after a comment like this I would humbly delete my post and quit blogging. Today, I just laugh — after starting several businesses in the past 5 years, I can say one thing: “Everyone is an expert”. And if you do not trust me, ask Seth Godin — Seth even built a new business based on this idea:
http://www.squidoo.com/

A few days ago I read Seth's book and decided to give Squidoo a try:
http://www.squidoo.com/productivemac/

It is still work in progress — one great thing about Squidoo Lenses is that you are not forced to finish everything at once, but can gradually improve and add more content as the time goes by.

The Joy of Ecto

If you ever find that the blogging is not fun anymore and you dread logging into your blogging page, try ecto.

This feature-rich program makes blogging easy and fun. I especially enjoy its ability to upload images and create image thumbnails. Together with SnapNDrag, you can post screenshots in your blog in a matter of seconds. Without ecto+SnapNDrag I wouldn't even think blogging about the best disk image design.

Adriaan just posted an Intel version of ecto which makes it blazingly fast on Intel Macs.