Sumana Harihareswara on the Fog Creek Weblog explains how FogBugz plays a central role in customer management at the company. Especially impressive to me is the part about how incoming voice messages get automatically converted to tickets with a voice attachment.

Thought 1: I wish I had a dedicated server so I could run FogBugz in all its glory.

Thought 2: Would it be excessively eccentric for me to run Asterisk in my apartment?

I’ve decided to, at least experimentally, ditch my links blog.

That blog was born out of a fear that posting quickie links in here would drive away readers. But it was a major pain in the butt for me to manage two “blogs” just to achieve this artificial separation. The thing is, I don’t like the mental burden of deciding for myself whether something I’m about to post is a “link” or an “article.” I’m longwinded, so links often turn into articles just by virtue of me going off about them.

I’m going to adopt a “I’ll fix it if they complain loudly enough” attitude, and just put my links in here when I feel like it. Sometimes they might be aggregated into a single post per day, sometimes not.

If this ruins your day, please let me know and I’ll count your vote.

Paul Kim of Noodlesoft started blogging last month after I bugged him for months to do so. I do this kind of nagging with several people I know. I am hoping to improve the Mac blogging landscape by encouraging more development-oriented writing.

With Paul, it looks like I’ve succeeded. His latest article is a wonderful write-up on achieving the perfect gradient fill for an arbitrary path. He observes that simply applying a gradient to the bounding box can cause undesirable effects, depending on the shape being filled and angle of the gradient. Interesting!

I didn’t write the article, and I probably wouldn’t have figured out the trigonometry myself, but I can still take a little pride in that entry. In fact I get to take little tiny bit of credit for every great post he ever writes. I’m a blogging venture capitalist! If I convince enough people to write good stuff, then I can stop writing and just point people at their entries. Then I’ll have “really made it,” and I can get back to programming full-time!

Paul’s post describes how to perfectly mix colors in an arbitrary shape, but it also follows a sort of perfect mix for technical blogging. He probably followed these steps subconsciously, but let’s identify them for posterity:

1. Identify a problem related to your own experience.
2. Explain the problem in simple terms that non-specialists can understand.
3. Allude to but gloss over the difficult steps you went through in solving the problem (doing the trigonometry).
4. Present a working conclusion that everybody can share and enjoy.

Bonus points for pretty pictures with OmniGraffle.

I strongly encourage you to check out Paul’s blog if you haven’t already. It’s developing quite nicely, and I know where I’ll be turning the next time I have to fill shapes with gradients. I won’t be doing the trig myself!

The contractors are abuzz in the neighbor’s building, hammering, spackling, and chatting loudly with each other. I sit here staring into Xcode, furiously trying to figure out an NSTextField drawing issue, when I hear a choice bit of wisdom echo through my office:

“I just fuckin’ hate working on windows, man.”

Amen to that. Apparently the similarities between our trades run deep. Not more than a minute later:

“We both fuckin’ know we could do it, but it’s just a matter of looking up the code.”

Psychic hi-fives, buddy.