Adventures in IT

For something to be truly awesome, it must be "web scale" right? The rather excellent video just below shows how hype can blind us to the real values of a technology. It's quite a famous trope in some circles and I think is a useful parallel to the excitement about blockchain. In it an enthusiastic user of a new technology repeats marketing hype despite having no understanding of the technical concerns involved. Watch the video and you'll hear every piece of marketing spin that surrounds NoSQL databases. I usually get very excited about new technologies but I'm quite underwhelmed by blockchain. In the commercial context I see it as a great solution that really just needs to find a problem to solve. Lots of companies are looking for the problem that the blockchain solution will solve. Facebook has a blockchain group that is dedicated to studying blockchain and how it can be used in Facebook. They don't seem to have found a particularly novel use ca...

A Google UI employee contemplating how to make Larry and Sergei some money I updated my Google Chrome mostly because I trust Google in terms of UI. In the past they've always released updates that make things faster or easier to reach (while perhaps adding new extra functions). Why am I so disappointed? Well now when you open a new tab you're confronted with a Google search bar and your most visited sites. This most probably sounds like a good thing. BUT... your tab is in the omnibar which is the same as a Google search if you don't specify a valid URL. So to make use of the default Google search requires you to tab or click into the box. More annoyingly you can't choose to have your installed apps show instead of a Google search box and an acknowledgement that they track your browsing activity and share that with the American spy agency. So instead of hitting CTRL-T and clicking feedly I have to face NSA surveillance by Google showing me they're track...