All Hail the Uber-Geek

One of the highlights of Web 2.0 was seeing Steve Souders presentation: Even Faster Web Sites.

His book High Performance Web Sites, is a well thumbed tome at Esendex and YSlow is required add-on to Firefox on our developer's machines.

Steve is an uber-geek. He has a passion for web-site performance like few others. He tirelessly investigates, tests, hypothesises, tests those hypotheses, and, importantly reports back to the rest of us.

His passion, and most importantly, the fact that he shares his results with all of us is something we should all be thankful for.

As developers we get adulation for building faster, more responsive and thus more usable web sites.

As web site users, we get a rich, responsive experience that does what we want quickly.

So all hail uber-geek and thank you to you all.

Microsoft taking a leaf out of Phillip Morris's book

This struck a chord with me. We've recently been looking at schools and I was shocked/concerned about the approach taken to ICT. As far as I could ascertain the lessons were how to use Microsoft Office and Windows rather than using computers to support learning.

I appreciate that MS is pretty much all pervasive in business so there is benefit to children being able to use their software. But as the only ICT element of a curriculum, I think not.

Richard Stallman Slams OLPC for Switching to Windows: "