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2008

  • 1 min read

[GEEKY] How to fix slow Skype on Leopard

(Click for enlargement) Upon updating to the latest Mac OS X 10.5, a.k.a Leopard, I noticed that Skype was ridiculously slow, hanging and doing other ugly things. A search of the web didn't find any useful ideas, at least that worked for me.

Here's what fixed it. In Skype "General Preferences" there's an option to "Show Address Book Contacts".

Well I have a fairly huge address book - about 3000 people. Somehow Skype was driving itself crazy trying to show them.

Unclicking the "Show Address Book Contacts" check box solved it for me.

  • 1 min read

Apple sense of humor

Funny comment by Apple about Windoze

Look closely at the dialog box on the right. It's Mac OS X info sheet for an attached Windows computer. Now look even more closely at the simulated screen on the image of an ugly big CRT monitor. See the BSOD?

Who said they don't have a sense of humor?

  • 1 min read

SNL Season best in years – but why does Christopher Walken not rehearse?

Saturday Night Live is having the best season in years. Consistently much funnier than last year or the year before. Last night, Christopher Walken again was extremely funny: the writing was funny and his delivery was funnier.

But. It is extremely distractin g that Mr. Walken doesn't even try to pretend to appear to be addressing his counterpart in the skit. He so obviously is reading cue cards that no matter how hard I tried to suspend disbelief, all I could notice was how he was looking in the wrong direction.I wonder how that happens. Did he not rehearse? Is it, for some wacky reason, on purpose? Can he just not remember his lines?

It all doesn't add up, because the way he delivers his lines is right on the money: funny, quirky -- perfect.

For example, check out this post Saturday Night Live: Christopher Walken/Panic! At the Disco - VIDEOS from TV Squad:

"[snip…] Seriously, think about it. His delivery is jaunty and weird, and when he's not awkwardly staring into the middle distance, he's just glaring directly at the cue cards. All these elements combined should throw him in the realm of the crappiest hosts.[…snip]

  • 1 min read

Boston Tech Scene is cooking

Last week I went to the monthly "WebInno" - web innovators group - meeting at the Sonesta in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). I am quite impressed with the attendance and the quality of the people presenting.

The gathering was quite crowded and the buzz was very loud, lots of dynamic discussions going on all over the place, people trading war stories and comparing products. It was stimulating and fun, and I plan to go next month again.

In the meanwhile, Don Dodge of Microsoft writes a post "Boston Startup Events and Resources" with quite a schedule of upcoming tech events in the Boston area. I thought I was in the loop, but guess what, there's something going on tonight in Waltham that I had never heard of, so I will be there too.

It's the so-called "Tech Tuesday" event, organized by Dan Bricklin, apparently with the collaboration of the mass technology leadership council. In a break with convention and tradition, it is not a free event for non-members. I guess they have to keep the MTLC staffers employed 😉 Still it should be fun.

So for all you "Boston is cool but I wish I lived in silcon valley" types, I say, stop it already, there's a lot lot going on here. You just have to look!

  • 1 min read

Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup

I've wondered and written before about the 'downside' or 'risk' of building your application based on one of the excellent SAAS services from Amazon. And I do think they are excellent. But check this post Amazon Web Services Gets Another Hiccup from TechCrunch:

"Amazon does not guarantee 100 percent uptime for its Web Services, although it does strive to achieve that. And data centers go down all the time, no matter who is hosting your data.But more and more companies are relying on Amazon to be able to scale their computing resources on demand and do it cheaply by paying only for what they need. Many Web startups are building their entire businesses on top of Amazon’s Web Services, and even an hour of unavailability is unacceptable. At least this one happened during the middle of the night."

  • 1 min read

Go See “The Cry of the Reed” right now

I just came back from the theatre, the Huntington Theatre, Boston's, production of a brand new play called "The Cry of the Reed" by Sinan Ünel. This play and production is truly amazing, great, dramatic, thought provoking, and overall excellent.

We were discussing this play the whole drive home. Talking about war, religion, morality, ethics, human nature, theatre and drama.

I like seeing these productions before the pundits and professional reviewers decide if it's any good. I went there tonight not even knowing what this play was about and happy not to have been influenced by some stupid reviewer. This world premiere better get a five star rating IMHO.

Em. Yeah. I liked it.

  • 1 min read

Doomsday Cult

Scott Adams as usual is hillarious in this post Doomsday Cult from The Dilbert Blog:

"A Russian cult emerged from the cave they were hiding in while waiting for the end of the world.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/01/doomsday-cult.html?ref=rss

Allow me to give you some advice: If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday."

  • 2 min read

Use Google Sets for competitive analysis

I bet you've not heard of another crazy-cool service from Google, Google Sets. I first read about Google Sets some months ago but didn't bother looking until today, Sunday, when i saw this interesting article about Google Set's patents.

This is from that article:

"Google Sets is one of the first services that were added to Google Labs and it's a cool way to find list of related terms. Google Sets is a tool that generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples. For example, you could enter Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and get a list of US presidential candidates." (from Google Operating System)

So, think I, this would be a cool thing to use for competitive analysis. You know, answering the question, "What other companies are in this space?"

So being of a single track mind, I tried suggesting the following list: "BlogBridge, Google Reader, Net NewsWire, NewsGator and FeedDemon." Can you tell what they all have in common? Oh yeah, they are all rss reader / aggregators, a space that I have wasted too much of my life getting expert on.

According to Google Sets, the competitors in the space of RSS reader/aggregators are:

feeddemon, blogbridge, google reader, newsgator, netnewswire, bloglines, feedreader, sharpreader, rojo, pluck, newzcrawler, rssowl, jyte, netvibes, amphetadesk, awasu, newsburst, pageflakes, google, newsfire, feedster, rssreader, rss, feedlounge, 订阅到抓虾, feedburner, yahoo, technorati, feedness, firefox, msn, pluckit, newsmonster, aol, bottomfeeder, gougou, sage, myaol

Dang! That's a really good list. All the RSS reader aggregators I know are on that list, some that I don't know, and a few products which are closely allied.

Welcome to the new force in competitive analysis!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, competitive analysis