Peter Coffee

With admirable timing that buried the news in the heart of the pre-Christmas rush, not to mention burying it further in paragraph 5 of a presidential signing statement, the White House on Dec. 20 declared that “The executive branch shall construe…the [Postal Accountability and Enhancement] Act, which provides for opening of an item of a […]

When I saw a Reuters article about David Platt’s new book, Why Software Sucks, I thought it sounded familiar. Then I realized that I’d gotten a reviewer copy of that book a few weeks ago, but had put it aside because it didn’t have an animal on the cover. That article brought me up short […]

So far as I can tell, just about nobody recognized the joker in the deck when I put dBase Mac on my list of 25 killer applications of all time — even though I took pains to say, “in the homicidal sense.” Many Web sites merely posted the list of products’ names without my explanations […]

My engineering education was significantly shaped by my MIT faculty advisor, John Biggs, who thought it would be a good use of my time to take core courses in other departments whenever my degree program left some room for “free electives.” Instead of taking a class in Cinema of Classical Science Fiction, hypothetically, he thought […]

If you’re reading this post between the time it’s made and the day after Christmas, you may be on the Geek Shift: you know, the schedule slot that’s populated by people who couldn’t make the appropriate Bambi Eyes about their need to get home and assemble toys or cook the Christmas goose. If so, tell […]

Our Killer Apps list continues to inspire conversation, much of it missing the point that I’m not saying a Killer App is necessarily a good app: only that it appeared at the right time, with the right functionality or appearance thereof, to drive users’ platform choices. No more, no less. But killer apps are nothing […]

A reader asked me today if I would comment on “e-OK” — as a proposed term meaning “electronically OK,” perhaps as a sort of parallel to the Project Mercury expression “A-OK.” It’s interesting to think of the number of times, in the course of a day, when it might be useful to have a shorthand […]

Promiscuous use of the label “Web 2.0” is the hallmark of the entrepreneurial developer who’s going “ftw” — “for the win,” in Web game parlance. “Web 2.0” is often spoken in the same breath, as if it were what the Spaniards call the “calidad” (the essential quality) of the interactive model often called “Ajax” — […]

The SOAP API to the Google search engine, an archetype of Web service enablement and the soul of the seminal book “Google Hacks,” is apparently on its way to retirement. Developers whose eyes are aglow with the prospect of writing composite applications should consider the difference between Web services as multi-source marketplace–a good thing, but […]

When I saw this morning’s story on the thriving marketplace in unpatched exploit info, two things came to mind: the famous entrepreneurial strategy of selling shovels, blue jeans and other supplies to gold prospectors in the 1840s, and the “Blacknet” scenario of crypto-libertarian engineer and essayist Timothy May. In the justly famous words of the […]