Blog Posts

January 2007

• 2007-01-20

  Funny rant about internet advertising

  Check out this post from Saint John the Conqueror:

  Much like when your TiVo “suggests” something uncomfortably out-of-character, like The View when your queue is filled with nothing but The Shield and The Sopranos, their bullseyes can leave you both uneasy and confused. Once, the spread of ads to the side of my screen contained nothing but links to drug rehab centers and alcoholism message boards. Trying to tell me something, Google Ads? Nice try, Falwell, but I don’t need the morality police wagging their fingers at me.

  (from: Interlude: Internet Ads)

• 2007-01-20

  Really interesting interview with Jonathan Schwartz

  Who is he? The CEO of Sun Microsystems. Check out the video: http://www.podtech.net/player/podtech-player.swf?bc=3F34K2L1

  (from Jonathan’s own blog)

• 2007-01-19

  Link softly, but carry a big stick :)

  Some people have such juice (i.e traffic) to their blog that they when they sneeze, the blogsphere gets a cold. In this post from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger: Scoble uses his clout to try and either force or embarass or punish Om Malik for having only partial text RSS feeds, because, as he says "I hate those". "[…]Oh, and Om Malik, I’m putting a lot fewer things from your feeds on my link blog lately after you went to partial text feeds. I hate those. But it’s an effective way to get me to mostly remove you from my link blog.[…]

  (from: The link blog effect)

  So, what, is it "Link softly but carry a big stick?"

• 2007-01-19

  Boston PHP meeting coming up

  A quick reminder of the upcoming BostonPHP meeting: BostonPHP will host a panel discussion on Venture Capital and Open Source Software with Michael Skok of North Bridge Venture, Larry Bohn of General Catalyst Venture and David Beisel of Masthead Venture. Sounds interesting. Follow the link for more details!

  #boston #programming
• 2007-01-17

  MyBlogLog Widget experiment…

  How do you like this:

• 2007-01-16

  Really cool new site: MyPunchBowl

  This new site looks quite cool. It’s a friendlier alternative to eVite, less ad heavy and more fun. They just launched today! Check out this post from MyPunchblog:

  TechCrunch has the story: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/14/mypunchbowl-joins-the-evite-gunners/

  It’s been a blast developing this new product — we hope you’ll sign up and give it a try.

  – The MyPunchbowl Team

  Throw your best party yet! http://www.mypunchbowl.com

  (from: MyPunchbowl.com Now Live)

  #business
• 2007-01-15

  “I�_Tm going to wait for the iPhone Shuffle. You just clip it to your ear and call people at random.”

  Check out this post from John Nack on Adobe:

  "[…]From Victor Allen at Juxt Interactive: "I’m going to wait for the iPhone Shuffle. You just clip it to your ear and call people at random." Hah![…]"

  (from: iPhone quip o’ the day, plus more from Macworld)

  #apple
• 2007-01-15

  New Dawn

  Take a look at wis.dm, which is a new site that I’ve been involved with, and recently started doing some pretty cool posting on their own team blog. Check out this post from the wis.dm team blog:

  […]I can´t imagine how many great ideas get pushed aside by capable innovators every year, every month, every week because there really was no way for them to realize it. No connections, no collaborators, no visibility, no next step in site. Pocketed across the world´s college campuses, intern pits and urban neighborhoods are these lone gunmen of the cutting edge, those guys and gals with the know-what but not necessarily the know-who or know-how. We like to think that community like wis.dm might be the tool that will help transform the situation.[…]

  (from: New Dawn)

  Sound interesting? Send me an email and I’ll see if I can get you an invite!

  #business
• 2007-01-15

  Read this and guess where it’s from…. Is the Matrix upon us?

  ** [3:56 pm PST] In an effort to improve the performance of teleports across the grid, we are going to rebalance our bandwidth to some simulators in our co-location facilities. This will entail taking 164 regions off line for 30 minutes and bringing them back up on a new circuit. We will start this process at 4:00 pm PST so we should be complete with this operation by about 4:30 pm PST.

  (from**: Update on Search and TP issues)

• 2007-01-15

  Scott Adams writres about Spasmodic Dysphonia…

  If you’veheard of Dilbert, then you may have heard about the author Scott Adams. And of course everyone has heard of Dilbert.

  His blog is almost always funny and sometimes really interesting to the point of touching. In a recent post, Scott Adams reveals that he suffers from something I never ever heard of before. Check out this post where Scott Adams writes in the The Dilbert Blog:

  ...

  Read more →

  #health
• 2007-01-13

  Grey Gardens, on broadway

  Here’s a show with a plot that is quite unusual, set as a musical, on Broadway. I enjoyed it immensely — recommended! Christine Ebersole is the lead, she briefly was a regular on Saturday Night Live (early eighties, for a couple of years) – not that I remember her from then although from the un-made-up photo on the web site, I kind of recognize her. Read more about it on wikipedia (where else?) p.s. The whole web site is made in flash and as a result I can’t link to any of the inner pages. Not smart!

• 2007-01-12

  iPhone Lacks Conversational Aspects

  Check out this post from Opus Research:

  iPhone may be a tour-de-force for the touchscreen, but it’s inexplicably odd to introduce a new smartphone with so few speech-based features. I can hardly express how profoundly disappointed I am that this shiny, new thing – the first must-have product since Nintendo’s Wii – has less voice processing than Tickle-Me Elmo.

  (from: iPhone Lacks Conversational Aspects)

  The point of the whole essay that stuck with me is the incongruence between offering a product that requires 100% visual focus and that as often as not will be used while driving a car." As he says: "With all the attention focused on the fancy, new screen and multi-touch controls, I can only imagine what the safety implications are for in-car use."

  #apple
• 2007-01-11

  Another good article about choosing passwords

  I am getting more and more paranoid about this. Lately I have started to use an application called 1Passwd (which also includes a FireFox plug in.) Anyway. check out this post from Schneier on Security:

  "[snip…] So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something not on any of the root or appendage lists. You should mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use two roots with an appendage in the middle.[snip…]"

  (from: Choosing Secure Passwords)

  Read the whole thing!

• 2007-01-10

  Do you really really really want an iPhone?

  Check out this post from Lifehacker:

  So you want an iPhone when it ships in June (who doesn’t?), but you’re locked into a contract with your current provider. Try Celltrade, a service that helps you transfer your contract responsibility to someone else and effectively walk away without paying a hefty penalty.

  (from: Ditch your phone contract with Celltrade)

  #apple
• 2007-01-09

  Drama in Blog Time.

  A very interesting commentary on the phenomenon of blogging. Is what we write ‘of little consequence’? Does the fact that we post again the next day say that we ourselves feel that way?

  Check out this post from What Will You See Next?:

  That’s 75 million people who are eager and willing to read material of little consequence that will be replaced a day later by more material of little consequence. The judgement “of little consequence” is actually that of the writer rather than me or any other reader. When you routinely replace your writing on a daily basis, consigning another post to the black hole that is the world’s blog archive, you implicitly make the judgement: goodbye. I have some 700 posts on this site and 690 of them have not been viewed since soon after I wrote them.

  (from: Drama in Blog Time.)

  Food for thought…

• 2007-01-09

  It’s official global “bow-down-and-genuflect-while-facing-cupertino” day

  I say it’s the Newton of the 21st century. I love my mac as much as the next guy, but mac fanatics become insufferable at a certain point. Bah, humbug.

  #apple
• 2007-01-07

  The best twenty Mac apps you’ve never heard of

  Some good mac applications referenced in this post . I particularly like Service Scrubber (never could really find a use for that Service menu, sorry!) and CocoaMySql which looks like a very nicely done graphical UI for MySql databases. Check out this post from Lifehacker: The best twenty Mac apps you’ve never heard of

  #apple
• 2007-01-06

  A cautionary utility computing tale – or the dark side of Mashups

  Check out this post from Between the Lines: [snip…] “Yesterday Amazon’s S3 service suffered an outage that lasted more than long enough to miss the company’s self-imposed goal of 99.99% availability, at least for the next couple of months. Last November, Google Calendar was unavailable for the better part of a day. And famously, Salesforce.com suffered a string of outages this time last year. Unfortunately, my business relies on all three of these services.” [snip…]

  (from: A cautionary utility computing tale)

  Recently I talked to someone who was tr...

  Read more →

  #business #technology
• 2007-01-05

  [GEEKY] Eclipse 3.2.1, CVS and SourceForge.net on Mac OS X

  If you need this tip, it will save you a lot of time. 99% likely though, you don’t need it and it will read as complete gibberish. But I feel compelled to share it because it’s totally obscure and I just spent 2 hours trying to figure it out.

  Problem:

  Eclipse 3.2.1 just ceased to be able to grab code from SourceForge.net via CVS. It would give an error: “Invalid argument or cannot assign requested address”

  Configuration

  Eclipse for using CVS on SourceForge requires ExtSSH (which means, use the Eclipse bundled SSH client, rather than some other utility that you have on your computer — don’t ask.) Mac OS X, 10.4.9, all patches applied Eclipse: 3.2.1 – brand new download

  Solution:

  In Mac OS X Network settings, TCP/IP, make sure that IPv6 is configured and shows an IPv6 Address.

  Thanks for listening.

  #apple #programming
• 2007-01-05

  I love radio control model aircraft: this one totally takes the cake

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_K7sgTYuDE]

  Technorati Tags: cool