Update: I’ve removed the links in this posts to the Jibba Jabba website in. I’ve been working away on something for the past six months, and am ready to release it now. Oft heard by my children, and now the name of my current project. Lately I have been experiencing  a bit of writers block, [...]

This post is going to be as tedious as the post ‘It’s been three years since my last blog post… and I still have nothing to say’ and the post ‘I’m taking a break from blogging…’. This is a post about blogging. A post about Pimping Up my blog. Since my failure to get OpenID [...]

Gadzookes! Someone out there likes this blog design. I just got a heck of a lot of traffic from Vandelay Design and another site that appears to have the same content, in Japanese. This explains the odd email I got last week taking me to task over the copyright statement in the footer of this [...]

I get a lot of email, perhaps a few hundred messages per day. A badge of honor? Rather time consuming I’d say. The past few years I’ve just taken it to be the cost of doing business in the tech industry. A lot of stuff flows in, that’s how you stay on top of things, [...]

I first read about the Orders of Ignorance in an ACM article written by Phillip Armour in 2000. Since that time they have proved a valuable guide to both my software development and business decision making. I’d love to paste the whole thing here, but it’s (c) the ACM, and I don’t want to infringe [...]

I’m in London this week meeting with business angels, venture capitalists, journalists, bloggers, and entrepreneurs: the people that comprise the startup eco-system. The topic I’m exploring is ‘UK vs US Entrepreneurship’ – the similarities, the differences, the problems, and the solutions. I think there are problems and I’d like to be a part of the [...]

I was recently interviewed by Lana Clements of Emigrate magazine about my experience moving to the states. Her questions centered around ‘The American Dream”, which I had never really thought about in relation to myself. It was quite thought provoking. Lana: When did you move to America and on what visa? John: I’ve moved twice. [...]

I was interviewed by Eddie and Irina for Podtech’s LunchMeet series. “Today we meet with John Merrells, CEO of Embrace Mobile, at the Hatfactory in San Francisco. Merrells’ company provides market research surveys to mobile phones. He tells us a bit about how a simple idea on the face is actually quite complex in implementation. [...]

I was interviewed by David Smith of The Observer about Brits abroad doing the entrepreneur thing in Silicon Valley. I was quoted a few times in his article The New Revolutionaries. He asked where I was from. To which I replied ‘international man of mystery’. He jotted down ‘Yorkshireman’. Oh well. If you like the [...]

Wow – someone wrote a book about something I made – that’s such a nice feeling. I met Rex Wang at Sleepycat/Oracle for lunch this week and he very kindly gave me a copy. I’m mentioned in the acknowledgements as instigator of the dbxml project and my company Parthenon gets a mention too for its [...]

On Writing I am sometimes asked how one goes about writing an article for Overload. I usually rattle off an email with a few random thoughts about getting the text down and editing it into shape. This editorial is my attempt to properly address the topic. But, why write? In The Elements of Style [1], [...]

Software Quality I’m dreadful at testing code, as I rarely bother to do it. Yeah, yeah, I know that I should. It’s just a mental blind spot that I have. Have you ever experienced the phenomenon of reading what you intended to write instead of what you have actually written? It’s the same situation when [...]

The Internet’s Coming Silent Spring Lawrence Lessig received a standing ovation for his keynote presentation at Usenix 2002 in Monterey California. Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, and a founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He is a cyberspace lawyer. [1] Usenix is a venerable and aging conference [...]

Methodologies In a recent issue of CVu, Pete Goodliffe wrote an excellent article surveying the history of popular methodologies. In this editorial I would like to chart my own personal journey through that history to discover where I now stand. At the start of my computing experience, before any formal computing education, my methodology was [...]

It was years before I started keeping notes. Even in my college days I rarely took notes, relying on handouts and memory instead. In my first few professional jobs I just did my day-to-day thing. I had the one project, and I always knew what state it was in. I felt no need of notes. [...]

Product Definition

ANTLR

State of C++, Editorial Team, 2001 Thanks You’s.

Books, Dot Com Death, Interviews, …