Alan Cohen

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

When faced with the job of creating an application, most programmers start by doing what they know and love best: they start coding.  This is one strategy, but it’s not a good one.  A better strategy is to get onto the Web and find out how others have solved the problem – and hopefully to get a copy of the code they used.

Almost Everything on the Internet is free.  But how useful is it?

Over the past few weeks I've found some genuinely useful services for online storage of... stuff.  I never really thought about it, but there are actually three different scenarios where I want to store stuff online:

It's amazing how much better a technical project can be if it's managed properly. I've studied this for years, and have developed a "bag of tricks" that I hope to thoroughly document. For starters, I've put together a few chapters on managing technical projects on this site.

Comments are welcome!

I've owned a pair of Koss Portapro headphones for five years or so - excellent little headphones - great sound, good comfort, quite portable.  (On the minus side, they look a little geeky, and they're not cheap for little headphones)

One speaker cut out a few months ago.  Koss has a lifetime warranty, so I sent them back with a check for $6 - and, voila - I now have a new or reconditioned (I can't tell which) pair of 'phones.

Thanks Koss!  Great customer service!

After a fair bit of research, I decided to go with Drupal as the web application to power my blog, and to run it on an AxisHOST Linux hosting account.

I've used Drupal in the past for side projects, and it's been great - very solid, good architecture from an administrators point of view. It's overkill for a blog, but - it's easy to use, and free, so why not? Yahoo and IBM have vetted Drupal, which seems like a good vote of confidence to me!