February 2008
nice! I didn’t even know that there was a new Lost episode, but my fancy download machine knew and downloaded it for me to watch.
Jakob Lodwick claims he'll behave like a normal... →
Wacky entrepreneur-turned-egoblogger Jakob Lodwick has vowed that from here onward, he’ll reveal “less, not more” about his life online. A wise move that would prevent him from, say, deleting entire blog entries as soon as they’re reported on. Buried deep within his Normative nonexplainer is his new philosophy of revealing “a morsel” rather than his whole...
January 2008
Make a Best Music of '07 List with Smart Playlists... →
Weblog Internet Duct Tape has put together a clever iTunes Smart Playlist to build a Best of 2007 playlist. The idea is simple—just create a Smart Playlist matching all tracks added in 2007. I also narrowed down this list by filtering by songs I played most often. For my list I used over 20 plays, but you may want to tweak that number depending on the results. If you use the iTunes ratings, you...
Beanstalk — Version Control with a Human Face →
Lighthouse: Simple hosted Issue tracking, bug... →
MIT Offering Class Geared Towards Android →
This semester 25 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will gather in a classroom with one particular purpose: playing with cell phones. The students are taking a class geared around Android — the first fully open mobile operating system developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG). The class will cover the ins and outs of the Android platform and build...
Whoa. →
Whoa.: (via kylewritescode)
This looks awesome, I’ve been bugging the Chicago google code guys to make users able to have private subversion hostings. Looks like I won’t have to bug them any more!
Social Search: Results Influenced By Friends →
Google’s vice president of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, talked to VentureBeat about social search. She first gives a real-word example: «Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend “what movies are good to go see?” or “where should we go to dinner?”, you are doing a verbal social search. You’re trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a...
Cube and Dre, in the beginning →
The Jeff sent me this random link a bit ago - which subsequently linked to this shining bit of awesomeosity. Three tracks from ‘86 featuring a young Ice Cube and Dr. Dre. It’s so unfathomably great, they don’t know if they love the Beastie Boys or Run DMC more. In the first track it’s more or less just like a Beatsies track, I mean really just like one. It’s got a little DMC thrown in there, for...
Winer: Twitter should have to go in front of a... →
Winer: Twitter should have to go in front of a committee and testify as to “what’s going on.”. Dave demonstrating a breath taking sense of entitlement. It took away breath here, and we are used to entitled users. (hint: traceroute)
Three Commits, Ding, Ding, Ding →
I dislike old boy’s club. Not the part where you sit around in gab, but the part where people have to wait at the door to get in. Something about them rubs me a bit raw. Open Source has this problem in spades. The bar to commit to the major projects is not problematic in that it is high, it is a problem because it is not written down. It is often fuzzy, or worse personality dependent (so...
Google wins 700mhz FCC auction →
Of course there is no way yet to say if Google is the current high bidder, but we do know for sure that Google has won. The auction has now surpassed the reserve price of $4.6bn (sitting at $4.7bn) according to the New York Times. This is significant because now the winner of […]
TestNG and Scala →
There’s been a lot of activity in the TestNG world lately… Here are some highlights. TestNG in Scala Josh Cough has been busy working with TestNG and Scala. As…
Web Standards Aren’t →
After a fantastic day in Perth I ended up talking to a group of oil workers. Men of all classes and walks of life. Scottish, English, Aussie. Tattoos, guys with attitude, heart, and an amazing decency of soul.
An engineer on an oil rig finds a fitting that’s defective. He tells his mates to fix or replace the fitting.
Following manufacturing specs, the person given the task consults the specs,...
technorabble: Try your best Agile, and why we... →
Meebo Rooms Launches API and an Ad Network to... →
Meebo is adding an API to Meebo Rooms, as well as launching what it calls the Meebo Network so partners can share in revenue from advertising.
While Meebo already had an API and offered Meebo Rooms for integration with Facebook applications, this latest option from Meebo lets developers use the Meebo Rooms API for combining applications with the their existing user base. This means that if you...
Twitter needs to level with us and open up about... →
@jack, @biz I’m not going anywhere… at least not for a long time. So, don’t consider this a threat to go over to Pownce or anything. In fact, anyone who threatens to move isn’t really thinking properly, because if we all moved to a different service at once, I’m sure we’d experience the same issues. But, posting blog posts titled “Happy Happy...
Twitter needs to level with us and open up about... →
@jack, @biz I’m not going anywhere… at least not for a long time. So, don’t consider this a threat to go over to Pownce or anything. In fact, anyone who threatens to move isn’t really thinking properly, because if we all moved to a different service at once, I’m sure we’d experience the same issues. But, posting blog posts titled “Happy Happy...
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. →
Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food: “Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals. Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
In memory of chicagocrime.org →
It’s with mixed feelings that I announce the end of one of my projects, chicagocrime.org. This site has been serving Chicago residents since May 2005. I hope you’ll indulge me in a brief retrospective. Chicagocrime.org was one of the original map mashups, combining crime data from the Chicago Police Department with Google Maps. It offered a page and RSS feed for every city block in...
Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science... →
Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we’ve heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.
Last year, salaries of up to $70,000 were common for the best students. This year, Facebook is said to be offering $92,000, and Google has increased some offers to $95,000 to...
jwz - PSA: backups →
The AOL XMPP scalability challenge →
Large scale distributed instant messaging, presence based protocol are a real challenge. With big players adopting the standard, the XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) community is facing the need to validate protocol and implementations to even larger scale.
Yahoo! OpenID Provider, Flickr and Delegation →
The Yahoo OP is officially live today! Congrats to Shreyas and Allen for shepherding this for many months! If you’re a Flickr user you can your photos URL (http://flickr.com/photos/yourname), or if you’re signing into a RP that supports XRDS, just use flickr.com. You’ll also want to visit openid.yahoo.com, and click on “Get Started” and customize your OpenID identifier. Personally I just use...
Google's Synonym for Scientology: "Cult" →
Just yesterday I posted on the Googlebomb (if it’s one) that when you enter dangerous cult into Google, Scientology* pops up as first result. Well, there’s more: if you enter ~scientology into Google, you’re triggering a search for synonyms as well due to the tilde character. Now what happens is that Google, in bold, highlights all those words it considers synonyms of “Scientology”**. The...
Discover terrorists by observing facial... →
The TSA screeners are now being trained to recognize secret terroristy facial expressions so that they can send anyone who makes these facial expressions for extra screening. TSA officials will not reveal specific behaviors identified by the program — called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Technique) — that are considered indicators of possible terrorist intent. But a central...
famous last words “we have a backup pizzas.. right”
famous last words “
Are founders significantly richer than most... →
Harvard thinks so. “Entrepreneurs are, on average, significantly wealthier than people who work in paid employment. Research shows that entrepreneurs comprise fewer than 9 percent of households in the United States but they hold 38 percent of household assets and 39 percent of the total net worth.” So writes Ramana Nanda, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, in his new paper called...
Amazon Earnings Call Details: Web Services Use Up... →
Amazon earnings just came out. The company had a strong fourth quarter, with revenues up 42 percent to $5.7 billion, net income doubling to $207 million, and free cash flow doubling as well to $1.4 billion. On the earnings call, there is a lot of concern among analysts about margin pressure next year.
Most of the things that tend to interest us here at TechCrunch about Amazon are not yet material...
XMPP Happenings →
The last week or so has been a busy time for Jabber/XMPP technologies, and for my work on XMPP, too (thus the lack of posts). Among the daily news of support for XMPP in products and services as diverse as the Asterisk (more here), seesmic, Ribbit, the U.S. Marines, and yes even AOL (!), technologists are starting to grok that XMPP is a powerful, even foundational technology for the real-time...
persai is interesting. i feel like i am picking the wrong keywords though….
What happens when a coffee shop gets too popular? →
I ran into an interesting situation last weekend and I’m curious to know what you think. Budding entrepreneurs, here’s your chance to come up with a brilliant solution to a business problem.
First of all, if you disregard my 8 Stupid Frat-Boy Business Ideas post and start a coffee shop, you may one day encounter this problem. It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.
Last weekend,...
Why does my iPhone mail suck? →
Y’know. I wasn’t really going to post anything about this, but I brought it up with Scott who’s having the same problem and he said I should post it. So here it is.
Why the hell does my iPhone’s mail not sync up unless I actually open the mail app? Why is there a setting that let’s me set this thing to sync every 15 minutes (even though my mail server supports IMAP IDLE and so does the iPhone but...
How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to... →
How do you query hundreds of gigabytes of new data each day streaming in from over 600 hyperactive servers? If you think this sounds like the perfect battle ground for a head-to-head skirmish in the great MapReduce Versus Database War, you would be correct.
Bill Boebel, CTO of Mailtrust (Rackspace’s mail division), has generously provided a fascinating account of how they evolved their...
A Bold Idea →
With last night’s victory, Senator Clinton now claims two states—Florida and Michigan—whom the DNC has stripped of delegates due to voting before February 5th. She won both handedly; in the case of Michigan, she was the only viable candidate to not withdraw from the ballot in placation to New Hampshire (which she won anyhow).
My thought: What if the Senator knows that the DNC will...
Bird Poops In Reporter's Mouth On Live TV →
In what is bound to rank as one of the top news bloopers of the year (and something that’s already making viral waves on YouTube and climbing the GoogleTrends chart), a bird has pooped into a Detroit ABC reporter’s mouth. The unnamed reporter was delivering a story on the infestation of Canadian brown finches in the area. Watch:
Launch: Campfire for iPhone →
Today we officially announce that Campfire has been optimized for the iPhone. Just visit your Campfire site with Safari on the iPhone and you’ll automatically see the iPhone optimized version. Note: To scroll back through the transcript you’ll need to use the two-finger scroll technique as illustrated below: We hope you find Campfire for iPhone useful! Special thanks to Sam for taking on this...
Long Running Mono Processes? →
Does anyone else have problems with running Mono apps in the background? I’m not sure exactly how long it takes, but if I have TomBoy, Gnome-Do, or F-Spot running for any length of time (in the background as designed or unnoticed in another workspace), my desktop stops responding normally. The mouse starts to slow down, the windows start to redraw slow as hell, typing is unresponsive,...