I recently learned about Conway's Law according to which organizations design systems which mirror their own communication structure. A typical example, mentioned in the Wikipedia article, is a company website that is organized in different sections that perfectly mirror its own internal corporate organization, instead of reflecting the customer needs. In my experience, it's definitely correct. {link to this entry}

I just came across an excellent blog post titled always bet on text that summarizes my own thoughts on the topic. Contrary to what we constantly hear all the time these days, pictures are, for the most part, not superior to text. Motion pictures (i.e., videos) are, if anything, worse. I mean, sure, they both have their place too. They are useful for certain things. However, they are far from being the universal tool that so many people these days assume they are. As the author explains:

Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close.

I just don't know anything as useful and efficient in most scenarios that require complex communication. Now, if the intention is to send a quick message under certain conditions (e.g., lack of a common human language), then pictures make sense, without a doubt. {link to this entry}

While checking out what's new today, I see that LastPass has decided to change its policy about their free service. After many years using my own password algorithm, I decided to start using a password manager a couple of months ago. I did some research, and decided to use LastPass, even though the product was not free sotfware or open source. Now, don't get me wrong. They have developed the product and incur the costs to offer the service. They obviously have a right to charge for the service, if they think it is needed. To me, that is not the problem. I don't see anything wrong with that. On the other hand, though, what I don't like so much is the idea of offering a free service to attract users and, then, later, start cutting features from it in order to push users towards the premium service. In the end, it teaches me the same lesson I should have learned a long time ago: if you don't want to be bitten in the rear when you least expect it, simply run free and open source software. Sooner or later, I should just switch to another web host provider that allows me more flexibility to install and configure things, and then use my own tools. In the meantime, I may just switch to Bitwarden. Incidentally, here are the instructions to migrate from LastPass to Bitwarden. {link to this entry}

We read today on Slashdot that South-Africa's Tax Agency decided to release its own browser to re-enable Flash support. Interestingly enough, just a few days ago, we also read that deactivation of Flash caused some problems for the Chinese railroad company too. Think what you may about the Adobe Flash Player and whether it makes sense to run your browser with the software enabled. But, one way or another, this recent incident provides clear evidence of how Government administrations around the world should invest in open source software. Nothing else gives them this type of flexibility and independence. {link to this entry}