May 2008
168 posts
How to Unleash Your Creativity →
An interesting interview with three different experts on creativity: a psychologist & professor, a poet/playwright/filmmaker, and a scholar at UCSD. As with everything in life, there’s a certain process that can be applied to bring out the best in something, and software developers, designers, and other creative types are constantly plumbing the depths of their own creativity in the...
My take on IgniteBoston
I went to the IgniteBoston event O’Reilly put on at Tommy Doyle’s in Cambridge, MA tonight, and I have to say that I was a little disappointed. I love the concept, but the execution wasn’t quite to my liking. For one, the venue wasn’t a great choice: it was too small for the number of people there, and it was excruciatingly hot. On top of that, it was very noisy - so much so, that people had to...
Going to IgniteBoston tonight
Tumblr's David Karp: 300,000 Users, Pro Features... →
How’s microblogging startup Tumblr doing? Doing well, founder/karaoke star David Karp tells Wallstrip’s Julia Alexandria.
The site is up to 300,000 users as of this month, and growth has…
MediaDefender Behind the Attack on Revision3 →
MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. They’re the ones seeding BitTorrent with fake files - a tactic they hope will…
Why Do We Accept Signatures by Fax? →
Aren’t fax signatures the weirdest thing? It’s trivial to cut and paste — with real scissors and glue — anyone’s signature onto a document so that it’ll look real when faxed. There is so little…
“So why not talk publicly about our health? Fear. We fear losing a job or not...”
– Really public health
Cyberduck keeps crashing on me, and it’s making my work very tedious.
Now a Babson MBA Student
As of this morning, I have accepted an offer as a part-time MBA student at Babson College for the fall of ‘08. It was a very difficult choice, as I had two other schools in which I was accepted that were very competitive choices. I also spent some time on the phone today with financial services to work out a payment plan, which I’m feeling pretty comfortable about. Throughout the...
FbCal Puts Facebook Birthdays in Your Calendar... →
One of the best side effects of using Facebook is knowing when your contacts’ birthdays are—but you only see them if you log in. The Facebook application fbCal is out to fix that. Once you…
Mac OS X 10.5.3 released →
Filed under: OS, Software, Software Update
In much awaited anticipation, Apple just released the next point release of Mac OS X Leopard, version 10.5.3. This release has been …
Google’s App Engine Opens For Business (GOOG) →
Google’s cloud-computing-for-rent service App Engine will open to the public today, in conjunction with the company’s I/O Developer Conference in San Francisco.
App Engine was originally…
Twitter Explains Why Twitter Crashes All The... →
Why does Twitter crash all the time? Various reasons, apparently:
too many connections
errant API project eating too many Jabber resources
past, present, and future architecture…
A low cost guide to making music with your Mac,... →
Filed under: Audio, Hardware, How-tos, Tips and tricks
It’s well known that Macs have always been favored by musicians. And why not? Macs are the only computers that come from the…
Discussing Web 2.0 →
There are two web 2.0’s. There’s the mantra that has come to define the second “up move” of the Internet. Every run needs a name and this one has been called web 2.0. That’s nice enough and…
Spending the day back in the depths of perl web applications
“Instead of sending $400 billion each year to countries such as Saudi Arabia and...”
– Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Cost of converting entire U.S. to electric cars? Zero.
The problem(s) with OpenID →
Beyond this, OpenID is pretty much useless. The reasons for this are many: OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing to become an OpenID “consumer.”
What's the Biggest Rails App? It Doesn't Matter →
Once upon a time, whenever anyone asked, “But are there any big applications built on Rails?” The answer was usually, 43Things, anything from 37Signals, or Odeo. But over the past year,…
MBA Students: We Want Free Food, Too (GOOG) →
You’re getting your MBA, and you’re looking for a job - but where? Goldman Sachs (GS), J.P. Morgan? Not according to the most recent crop of MBA students. They, like everyone else, want to…
TipJoy’s New API Lets Web Apps Share the Love (and... →
How do you get more people top leave tips on blogs? Try to make your tip jar app into a platform that spreads the wealth to more people. Y Combinator startup TipJoy is trying to do that…
Is Friendfeed the Next Big Thing or are We Just... →
Still, as great as Friendfeed is, there’s a question that keeps gnawing at me: are we looking at the next Twitter or the next Jaiku? What I mean here is Friendfeed going supernova or is that that we are simply bored and looking for the next big thing. Remember, we have a habit of this!
Viacom seems to have cooled on Joost; is it headed... →
I was a fan of Joost when it first came out, but I have to be honest: I haven’t opened it up in quite a while. And the reason, quite frankly, is simple: there’s nothing on it I can’t get elsewhere, and whatever exclusive stuff Joost has, isn’t worth watching. What they need to focus on is content, and that just hasn’t happened yet.
Joost, the peer-to-peer Internet...
Books: The Next File-Sharing Frontier? →
Mathew Ingram submits: So Microsoft (MSFT) is winding down its book digitization and search project (and its related academic research project) because it wants to focus on verticals that have a…
New York Times API Coming →
As print circulation continues its slide at most newspapers, one of the United States’ most respect the New York Times is taking steps to boost online readership. The paper is already the…
Bookwatch: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X gets... →
Filed under: Books, Developer
Way back in December, our Christmas Gift Guide featured our pick of the many OS X-related books out there. One of the recommendations was the (very…
Is mobile Internet really such a good thing? →
Here’s an interesting argument to temper expectations in the “mobile internet” market, describing why a strategy of building a company on top of the whims of the telcos isn’t a particularly good one.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with mobile or with some of the great new mobile applications and devices, but we have to be careful to remember that most mobile...
Come Saturday Morning: Bike Commuting for Newbies →
With $4.00 a gallon gas staring us in the face — and the near-certainty of $5.00 a gallon gas before the summer is over — here are some tips for those of you who are considering pedaling instead of driving to work.
The Cube lives again, sorta →
Filed under: Mods, Mac mini Here’s a clever blending of Apple past and present, in keeping with ourpost yesterday on Mac mini mods. Rich Willis has managed to stuff a Mac mini, an external HD, and an Airport Extreme into the clear plastic shell of an old G4 Cube.
spider_test
→
A cool way to automatically spider your entire rails app before deployment, checking for any broken links, bugs preventing page loads, etc.
aTV Flash goes commercial: plug-and-play hacks for... →
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Engineering souls have been hacking up the Apple TV for a good while now, but those too scared of completely ruining their box have had to…
Wt, C++ Web Toolkit →
Ever wanted to write a web app in C++? Now you can - using Wt.
Wt (pronounced ‘witty’) is a C++ library and application server for developing and deploying web applications. It is not a ‘framework’, which enforces a way of programming, but a library.
I’m impressed with how they handle events - it’s similar to the Qt-style signals/slots method, which I think is...
Palmist: A Handy Tool for Finding and Fixing MySQL... →
SimpleConsole - Building Console Apps →
cwalcott:
Shared by Costa This is neat - a simple Ruby MVC framework, but for command line apps, not webapps.
Is the popularity of unit tests waning? →
It would be a shame to have unit testing disappear and its current users viewed as aging, pining developers hankering for a technology the world has largely passed by. That would return programmers to the tried-and-true practice of glassy-eyed staring at a debugger for hours—something I have not missed at all.
Vague Rumor of 3G iPhone Delay Was Enough To Make... →
Apple (AAPL) shares appear to be losing ground this afternoon on rumors involving possible delays of the 3G iPhone. Now, I would point out that Apple has not even officially confirmed that there will be a 3G iPhone; but the device has been widely expected to debut on June 9, when CEO Steve Jobs give the keynote at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco.
Outsource Your Subscription Billing →
We’ve written before about the difficulties that independent web workers have creating and supporting useful (and salable) products by themselves. One key is to outsource as much as you…
MacBook Airror →
Filed under: Laptops
Apparently some audio can’t be turned up to F11.
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HamachiX Updated with Leopard Support [Featured... →
Mac OS X Leopard only: Our favorite free virtual private network client for the Mac, HamachiX, has been updated (finally!) to work with Leopard. HamachiX is a graphical front end to…
Starbucks Became Day Old Coffee Long Ago →
To be successful again, Starbucks needs to recreate excitement in both coffee taste and atmosphere. The South Beach store in Miami Beach is an example of great eclectic atmosphere. It is a Hear Music café. Thoughtful integration of music and coffee enhances, not distracts from the stores.
Political Interests at Play in Satellite Radio... →
In my opinion, the vote on the satellite radio merger will never approach a unanimous decision because the concessions that would be required to obtain it would cause Sirius and XM to walk away from the deal. Thus, the cards are on the table. The comments have been made, the commissioners have all had ample time to weigh the issues at hand. The biggest sticking point may well be spectrum and/or...
Could iPhone Subsidies Be Apple’s Ticket to... →
Compete submits: Rumors have been flying this month that Apple (AAPL) and/or AT&T
(T) will begin subsidizing iPhone sales, which could total up to 50% of the
device’s current selling price….
Search, Aggregation, and Conversation: Keys to a... →
There are thousands of new services that pop up every day. Too many services imitate, and only a handful innovate. With all of these services, one wonders what their plans are for success….
PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter →
Some of the largest sites on the internet — sites you probably interact with on a daily basis — are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?
The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn’t be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it...
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Using a... →
How do you structure your database using a distributed hash table like BigTable? The answer isn’t what you might expect. If you were thinking of translating relational models directly to BigTable then think again. The best way to implement joins with BigTable is: don’t. You—pause for dramatic effect—duplicate data instead of normalize it. *shudder*
Friendfeed's Business Model Will Look Like... →
“I love Friendfeed. However, I am far more enthusiastic about the platform’s robust RSS and search capabilities than its current value proposition as a universal social aggregator. I find it generates too much noise at times, but when you tap its search/RSS tools you have a killer app.”