Software

I'm very skeptical about the effectiveness and long-term benefits of the healthcare system put in place by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). However, I'm not going to join in with the people who are proclaiming that Obamacare doesn't work because they've visited HealthCare.gov, poked around for a bit, and found busted web sites.It's the first day of production operation … [Read more...] about Obamacare Day One Doesn’t Matter

It looks like Google has decided to screw up Reader with a new design: I guess they wanted it to have a more modern-looking design, and I suppose it looks nicer, but it's kind of goofy from a usability standpoint. The biggest problem is that everything is, well, bigger. They're following the modern web design trend of separating things on the page with space rather than … [Read more...] about Google’s New Reader Mess

There's an animated video making its way around the legal blogosphere in which a cynical older lawyer tries to convince an idealistic prospective law student not to go to law school. As a non-lawyer, I'm probably missing half the jokes, but it's still pretty funny. I was more fascinated, however, by the web site used to create the video, xtranormal.com, which provides tools for … [Read more...] about The Only Known Requirement

When I figured out that my Sony Vegas video editing software was crashing because of a bogus file date, I filed a detailed problem report with Sony Creative Software, and I emailed a short description of the problem to Premiumbeat, the suppliers of the music files---created by a guy names Styve---that had bad dates on them. I got a reply email from Premiumbeat early … [Read more...] about Followup On Sony Vegas Problems

Now that I'm experimenting with video for the blog, I'm learning how to use video editing software. Currently, I'm experimenting with Sony Vegas. I like it a lot, it seems intuitive and fairly powerful. One of the more interesting features of Vegas is a tool called Media Manager which helps you index and track your media. That's important because video files are huge---the … [Read more...] about Why Software Testing Is Hard