June in Paradise
I just returned from RailsConf, a conference all about Ruby on Rails. Many bloggers have [written about it...
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June 2008
“This is the Discover card Fraud department. Call 1-800-555-1212 – IMMEDIATELY
Sounds ominous, right? So I call them up, and I hear a serious voice telling me to please hold on, then I hear the official sounding “you are being recorded” beep beep beep. Then the voice comes on the phone and says, “Thanks for calling Discover Card. Please give me your Discover Card number.” What would you do? I am worried about fraud on my card, right? But do I know who I am actually talking to?
Google Sightseeing: Target in my neighborhood
There’s an amusing site called Google Sightseeing whose sole purpose is to point out cool/curious/amusing features that...
Useful and cool little utility
Ever wonder what speed your internet connection really has? Try this handy-dandy little utility!
Portland OR smokes
I’m in Portland Oregon for a few days for a conference, and this may be an unfair sample, but I was amazed to see how many more people seem to be smoking cigarettes – on the street, in restaurants, etc – than what I am used to in Boston. Only one data point, but notable. I wonder why.
May 2008
Life Lock’s CEO Identity Stolen
Check this post Life Lock’s CEO Identity Stolen from MetaFilter: > Life Lock CEO’s Identify Stolen Remember all those commercials recently t...
Read more →Why should do online check-in when flying?
This, from American Airlines: > “Your trip is eligible for check-in now. Save time at the airport and check-in on AA.com® any time from now up to one hour prior to your departure. To use our new instant check-in feature, simply click the button below and print your boarding pass. Save this email and use your personal check-in button for quick and easy check-in for your return flight.” Anyone have any idea what possible benefit I get for checking in online? I don’t think any of these - Save Time? How? I still have to go show my Id before getting my boarding pass don’t I? - Checked bags? Still have to go to the counter as usual, don’t I? Checking in online seems cool, but why???
Big Search, Mechanical Turk and why Amazon is at least as cool as Google
Adam Green points to Scoble who re-discover and discover, respectively, Amazon’s street by street, address by address, photographic coverage of the map of, what, the universe? It’s a neat new user interface of something [they’ve had for a ...
Read more →Asymmetrical conflict in the blogosphere
I met with a potential client the other day who was on red alert because there were a lot of nasty things being said about them on blogs, comments and forums. And I thought of the concept of asymmetrical conflict as we have learned about it in recent years. Even without knowing whether the criti...
Read more →Creepy
(Thanks, Aleksey) Technorati Tags: funny
If you like food you might find this amusing…
Many more where this one came from. Good for a chuckle 🙂 
Really cool rowing instrumentation
If there are any rowing fanatics out there, or competitive rowing coaches, take a look at this cool in-boat rowing instrumentation product. Here is a bit about it from their site: > “The RowMetrics system is innovative in-boat instrumentation bundled with...
Read more →Arduino: Open source hardware
Check out Arduino, a totally cool tiny embedded computer suitable for creating smart things – art, robotics, sensors and controllers. You program it on your laptop, and download the program to the device. I tried it, it was pretty easy. Had to touch wires and stuff though 🙂...
Read more →Amusing: French words missing in English
“No language is perfect, and English is no exception. There are always words or expressions that cannot be rendered from one language to another. English supposedly has the largest vocabulary of any languages in the world (7x more words than French !), and well-educated people typically know less th...
Read more →Ray Kurzweil @ MIT
Went to hear Ray Kurzweil yesterday at MIT, at an event jointly sponsored by IEEE and GBC/ACM Robotics Sigs. The blurb said: > “[…] With input from people around the world, an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to...
Read more →Very cool illusion
Try this out, it really worked for me, and is really strange and wonderful! > “This should be proof enough, we don’t always see what we think we see.” (from Very Cool Illusion, via del.icio.us) Technorati Tags: cool
[GEEKY] Some good Rails resources
Just a few handy links that, if you are a Rails developer you may be interested in: - Ruby Plus – Free Ruby and Rails Screencasts - RailsCasts – free Ruby on Rails screencasts - ActiveScaffold – A RoR plugin that magically and dynamically creates user interfaces - PeepCode – A super valuable collection of in-depth Screencast, worth every one of the 900 pennies each costs I have found each of these a great resource, and I recommend them to you!
Firewalls scanning IM messages: Google as symbolic link
Here’s something I hadn’t seen before: I IM’d a friend of mine at a Big Company and the message got rejected because it included a URL. I have to suppose that it’s any URL that gets bounced, but who knows? So the workaround? I sent the text for a Google query that returns the same url. Further details: Discussing it with him, the logic seems to be that someone could send an employee a phishing link in an IM message.
Know Rule 240!
I recently was on a trip with United Airlines. It’s a long story, but basically the short form is that the pilot didn’t show up, our flight was about 2 hours late, and I was going to miss the connection, also on United. A bunch of us were in the same boat (or plane) and so there was quite a buzz in ...
Read more →[GEEKY] Cool open source product analogous to Yahoo Pipes
SnapLogic is an open source product (at least in it’s base edition) providing tools to construct pipelines that deliver and process and filter information through collections of interconnected REST services. As usual, they provide a free ‘community’ edition, and then variously priced developer and enterprise editions. Pricing wasn’t indicated but if you have this kind of need, SnapLogic looks like it’s worth a peek.