Blog Posts

September 2007

• 2007-09-21

  [geeky] Google Groups missing key functionality

  I’ve been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin) Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂

  #programming
• 2007-09-20

  Interesting pointer from Francois on the marketing potential of Facebook et al

  Check out this post from Emergence Marketing: ** "Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation." (from**: What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)

  #business
• 2007-09-19

  Joel remembers Lotus Symphony and talks Strategy

  Check out this post from Joel on Software: ** IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original Lotus Symphony, which had been hyped as the Second Coming and which fell totally flat. It was the software equivalent of Gigli. (from: Strategy Letter VI)

  Actually this is a great article about strategy in the [tag]software business.[/tag] But us Lotus alums remember Symphony and had quite a chuckle to see that IBM brought back the [tag]Lotus Symphony[/tag] brand.I am waiting for the second coming of other great product names owned by Lotus: Lotus Manuscript; Lotus Jazz; Where are they now?

  #business
• 2007-09-18

  Scott Adams is still funny: Suing God

  Scott Adams of course is the evil genius behind Dilbert, which as you know I am a big fan of. Scott also has a really funny blog. As proof, this is from the latest post from The Dilbert Blog:

  Lawyer: “Where were you on the night of the tornado?” God: “Um, everywhere. Same as always. Go to Hell. Seriously.” (from: Suing God)

• 2007-09-17

  Patriots win, I am souring on Football and the NFL

  Reading this article about The Casualties Of the NFL, in Men’s Journal the other week really colors my view of the NFL and football. Here’s a bit of it to give you a taste: “…But the men on the field who generate those billions are real; they bleed; they break; their brains cloud. The nature of their injuries, particularly the mind-dimming concussion, has dominated the off-the-field news of late. Post-mortem exams of Andre Waters (suicide at 44), Terry Long (suicide at 45), Justin Strzelczyk (car crash at 36), Mike Webster (heart attack at 50) — showed staggering brain damage in men so young and affirmed that football is...

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  #life
• 2007-09-17

  Is a book’s cover art copyrighted?

  I’m not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally different business books, published years apart, with practically the same cover. Funny?

  #politics
• 2007-09-13

  [GEEKY] Gshell, the web’s own command line

  You remember back in the stone ages we all interacted with computers by typing [tag]command lines[/tag] at a prompt. Then in the bronze age, the [tag]GUI[/tag] was invented and we used mice, menus and windows? (Oh some of us still preserve the old traditions of course using the ancient language of the unix-people?) Today the Google Search box is becoming the new command line. There’s almost no end to the non-search things you can type into google to get answers.

  I just discovered this one:

  “65 degrees f”

  Gets you a conversion of 65 degrees Fahrenheit to 18.3 degrees Celcius.

  Others that I already knew about:

  5 * 12 => 60 AA 123 => Flight information for American Airlines flight 123 define abacus => dictionary definition of the word abacus AAPL => stock price and chart for Apple

  It goes on and on.

  Google is the command line shell for the web. [tag]Gshell[/tag].

• 2007-09-13

  Web 2.0 or Web 1.0

  

• 2007-09-12

  Is Facebook used or blocked in businesses?

  It’s hard to get good data on this, and I keep get wildly varying opinions. I haven’t fully formed my own yet, but here’s another data point: “In contrast, 50 percent of respondents said that their company did not block access to [tag]Facebook[/tag], with eight percent specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash.” (from Sophos)

  What do you think?

• 2007-09-10

  The Long Tail of Facebook Applications

  Check out this post about the distribution of Facebook applications on Christopher Herot’s Weblog:

  As of today, there are 3,593 applications listed on Facebook. The most popular, Top Friends, has 2.4 million active daily users, and there are half a dozen more that have at least half ...

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• 2007-09-09

  Seth Godin has good insights

  Check out this post where Seth Godin gives some really good ideas about how Apple might have better handled the price change of the iPhone. See it in Seth’s Blog: ** — Free exclusive ringtones, commissioned from Bob Dylan and U2, only available to the people who already had a phone. (This is my favorite because it announces to your friends–every time the phone rings–that you got in early). — Free pass to get to the head of the line next time a new hot product comes out. — Ability to buy a specially colored iPod, or an iPod with limited edition music that no one else can buy.The key **is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less. (from: How to spend $20 million)

  #computing #business
• 2007-09-08

  Barcoding the planet

  Semapedia is a quirky project that wants to get us to put these special little barcodes on everything on the planet. The idea is that you walk up to something, say the Eiffel Tower, or my house, point your cell phone camera at it and a click or so later, you get a nice article on the screen of your phone, describing it.

  I first read about it in Jeremy Wagstaff’s ‘Loose Wire’ series.

  Quirky, in a Don Quixote kind of way.

• 2007-09-07

  Top Ruby Books

  Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been actually able to carve out some quality time to get my head around Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

  My play project is something called myscum.org, which is a lightweight scrum tracking tool. Basically it’s modeled after what I’ve been using for BlogBridge, working with Aleksey. So a pretty simple case, makes a decent play project.

  But of course, that’s how BlogBridge started. A decent play project…

  #programming
• 2007-09-05

  Security Myth: Generic Login Error

  Check out this post from Jay Fields Thoughts:

  Here’s where I have an issue. Maybe I can’t find out from the login screen what is a valid username and what isn’t, but it only takes me a click to get to a screen that tells me what a valid username is. Do we really believe that a hacker is going to give up on the login screen and not just hit the "forgot password" link like I do? I (from: Security Myth: Generic Login Error)

  Yay. This has been bothering me forever but I just didn’t have the time to blog about it. I...

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August 2007

• 2007-08-29

  Silly morning laugh

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMT5odb90-o]

• 2007-08-27

  Out of body experiences

  A really interesting experiment reported in various places trigger the sensation of an [tag]out of body experience[/tag]. I read about it first in the New York Times: “Scientists induce Out-of-Body Sensation.” But here are some additional links about it:

  New Scientist: “Out-of-body experiences are ‘all in the mind'” Ars Technica: “On-demand out-of-body-experiences: all you need are VR goggles and a stick” Mind Hacks: “Do try this at home”.

  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQAc_Z2OfQ&w=425&h=350]

  #science
• 2007-08-23

  What is the relationship between Technorati tags and Google search results?

  Bill Ives of the [tag]Portals and KM[/tag] blog did an interesting bit of analysis about how tagging with Technorati may or may not affect rankings in Google. It’s something I’ve been paying attention to as well. Recently I found this really nice WordPress plug in that makes it dead easy to tag content in Technorati. It’s called ‘[tag]SimpleTags[/tag]‘ and it allows me to simply mark up the text I am writing inline and certain words will automagically become Technorati tags.

• 2007-08-23

  Vitamins

  Check out this post! “Vitamins can help with the aging process as well as preventing premature aging. For more information on vitamins , you may want to visit Vitamins Explained. Vitamins A, E, C, and the B complex vitamins How To Approach Anti-Aging Treatments.

  BlogBridge release 5.10 now with more vitamins (Pito’s Blog): Over on BlogBridge we just announced that release 5.10 just came out, you should try BlogBridge out! In the post there is also a review and explanation of the difference between our bi-weekly development releases and our full-fledged stable releases which come out every 6 or so months…[snip…]”

  (from: Vitamins)

  This is from one of my many SmartFeeds caught this in its net…. This purports to be a blog about vitamins, but obviously it’s robot generated and it deemed to pick up my lame joke about BlogBridge, now with more vitamins…

  #blogging
• 2007-08-23

  Rebate trickery, again

  Many consumer products, like cell phones, computers, and so on seem to come with some kind of a [tag]rebate[/tag]. Buy now and get $50 back, and so on. I don’t quite understand the business or marketing intent of this scheme. I just switched my whole kit and kaboodle cell phone business from Sprint to [tag]Cingular/AT&T[/tag]. And as encouragement I get $50 off on each of the phones, at least so they say.

  What I actually get back

  A form that looks like a 1040 that has to be filled out in gory detail A requirement to cut out the [tag]UPC[/tag] bar code from the box Which I then have to place into an envelope, address and stamp and mail Weeks late, I receive a little orange debit card pre-lo...

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  #business
• 2007-08-20

  An interesting paper about social networks

  The guy who created [tag]Live Journal[/tag] (Brad Fitzpatrick) has a manifesto of sorts regarding what needs to happen next in the world of [tag]social networking[/tag]. He is certainly not the first to identify the problem: “If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.” (from Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph)