All my blog posts and articles
Page 91 of 142 (2828 total posts)
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.
Check this post Life Lock’s CEO Identity Stolen from MetaFilter: > Life Lock CEO’s Identify Stolen Remember all those commercials recently tell us to steal Life Lock’s CEO Todd Davis’ Identity? Well seems as though someone did. This is funny to me, because I am a Life Lock customer, and by coincidence I just received their email asking me to renew. Of course I am not sure of the overall significance of this news story. I guess that the fear of idenity theft that superstition takes over and anything that might help even a little is very tempting!
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???
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 while, actually, but still, quite cool! some nuggets: > “Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to Border Cafe in Harvard Square, which just happens to be one of the best college student dives in the country.” (from Darwinian Web, Adam’s new blog) and… > “But, if you need to know w...
Read more →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 criticism of the client was deserved: for a single act, or a pattern of action, or not at all, it struck me that they were in a very tough and unfair spot. If you look at nasty blog posts or comment streams, it is hard to deny that there’s a piling on, hit them when they are down dynamic. When hearing the people and effort that this client had deployed to try to respond to this, and how helpless they ...
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(Thanks, Aleksey) Technorati Tags: funny
Many more where this one came from. Good for a chuckle 🙂 
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 software to provide a complete measurement system.The revolutionary force sensors installed between the foot stretchers and the rails capture the amount of force being exerted by each rower on a stroke by stroke basis. It measures the balance between the right and left feet for each rower. Also captured is the total boat’s performance and the deceleration after catch. ” (from ChampionMetrics website) Technorati Tags: sports, rowing
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 🙂 It appears to be a vibrant community with lots of people building compatible boards as well as add-ons which they seem to call “Shields”. For example here’s a shield to allow wireless communication between two Arduinos. If you want to learn more, check out books called “Physical Computing” and “Making things Talk”.
“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 than 10% of them. There would be too many English words and nuances that do not exist in other languages (thousands in French, Italian or Japanese), but much less the other way round. Here are examples of the occasional French words that do not have an exact translation in English, or not in a single word.” See French Words Missing in English
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 identify the Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/. We’ve invited one of the leading authors of the report, Ray Kurzweil, to present some of its findings, give his impressions of the important technological trends and challenges likely to occur over the next hundred years or so, and challenge you, some ...
Read more →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
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!
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.
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 the gate area, upon which a lawyer who knew something about air travel said, “Make sure you mention Rule 240”. Huh? Rule 240 is like a magic code word. When you use it with airline personel they know exactly what you mean and they seem to act on it (a little bit scared of it, even.) Rule 240 states that, if you miss a connection and it’s the airlines fault (i.e. pilot doesn’t show up, but not a s...
Read more →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.
Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products contains some excellent Do’s and Don’ts for someone (like me) thinking of starting a new business. Here is just one little ‘Do’ with which I agree whole heartedly. > “1. Do become a domain expert in some domain. If you are a computer science/programming oriented entrepreneur, there is a great temptation to try to solve general broad problems. This is because we tend to have no other skills. If you study programming that is a skill, but you need to marry that with some understanding of some real world issue. I stro...
Read more →Bill Ives of the Portals and KM Blog writes an interesting two-part article on the business impact of Web 2.0: > “Now with Web 2.0 the open architecture, the refinement of web services, and the ability to put together applications through mashups makes the basic development costs much lower and time to market much quicker. More effort can be placed on making the tools actually serve business and consumer needs. Startups now can also benefit from looking back at the mistakes and successes of the first generation.” from Portals and KM: The Business Impact of Web 2.0: Part One. Bill also ...
Read more →I came across this very cool and simple set of criteria or rules to apply for funding from YCombinator. Not sure how well it works for them but they are quite reasonable. Here’s a sample: > “(4) Yes decisions will include the amount we’ll invest and the percent of the company we’d want for it. We usually invest $5000 + $5000n, where n is the number of participating founders (i.e. 2 founders get $15,000, 3 get $20,000), in return for between 1% and 10% of the company. The median is 6%.” Cool. Does it work?