A recent mailing-list discussion has raised my hackles about documentation. So at the risk of offending all the tech-writers out there, let me restate my thesis: Documentation Sucks! I’m not just saying that because I’ve been very slow to provide substantial documentation for my two in-house applications. The only thing worse than lack of documentation […]

It’s the beginning of the month, which means it’s invoice time for me. I very rarely send out paper invoices. These days most companies are hip enough to have addresses like AccountsPayable@<company>.com. So my low-volume invoicing mechanism involves a Pages templates document, and a little manual copy and paste from my web-based hour-tracking system. One […]

One of the aspects of being a professional software developer that is a real grind is the tedious, careful double-checking we must do in order to reduce the odds that our work will lead to some major metropolitan area bursting into flames. Double-checking means diffing. Diffing is hard. Even with somewhat friendly tools at our […]

I’ve decided to make a slimmed-down version of FastScripts available, starting immediately in conjunction with a minor 2.2.7 upgrade of FastScripts. FastScripts Lite [d/l] offers much of the same organizational and performance functionality of FastScripts, at an infinitely lower price. What you don’t get in FastScripts Lite is best summed up by what you do […]