Could everyone who is posting so many cool ideas just stop for a few minutes? I would really like to respond to them but I'm afraid if I do, I will be in the office for a long, long time.
I currently have 7 individual Firefox windows open, many of which have tabs. Aieeeee!
Well, the changes were made. It looks like another site API I need to dig into. Plenty of fun ideas swirling in regards to calendars and the like.
Interesting, looks like there is Python support for Growl.
Definitely something to think about when wanting to do a process like this...
So, it's my birthday today and it's Brent's. I sent him an email this morning as I have for the past few years.
So the news is out that Yahoo has bought Flickr. The usual proclamations of how nothing is going to change is being said by all involved. I'm not saying that anything is going to change but obviously some things are.
Jeremy gives the view from the other side of the deal. Also, his original post about Flickr is almost a checklist of what a Web app needs right now to be useful and popular.
I cleaned up my desk at work on Friday. It felt really good to put things in their own place. Walking into my office tomorrow should be an interesting feeling as everything will be ready to go.
Bert has many of the same thoughts.
Last week, I gave a little lunchtime presentation on various memory caches such as OSCache, Whirlycache and Ehcache. I also talked about memcached which is something that I'm really interested in looking into more.
I like the fact that it is so simple. Some folks were expecting it to more of a total solution as opposed to just worrying caching objects in memory. Also, the bindings in multiple languages allow you to use utilize the cache from various angles of the problem.
It was developed initially for LiveJournal and as far as I know, they are still using it. Also, Technorati is using it as well.
Originally, this article started me along this path and now I think I might look into Spread a bit more. We used it a bit at CollabNet but I was mainly focused on build/release stuff then as opposed to writing or designing code.
Merlin Mann asked Mike Harris to write a guest post looking at the *nix application, Remind. Great info in the post as well as the comments. I installed it last night and spent a bit of time trying to get things just right.
Linux Journal published an article about Remind 5 years ago and yet it is still accurate.
Six Apart has release various tools as open source. If I remember correctly, all of these have already been opened up but this is just a way to keep them all together.
Google did a similar thing earlier in the week.
Cory posts his notes on the Life Hacks presentation done by Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann. Some very good stuff to be read but here are a few choice bits:
What does it all mean? There's a continuing interest in makingiterative small improvements to the way you do things. Not crashdiets where you regain all the weight, but rather ways ofchanging your life that makes you better.Also, OS X is making people more ambitious about what they wantto try. Installing Firefox is scary in an institution because theDungeons and Dragons guy will yell at them for changing theircomputer, but OS X is easy to install/de-install.
bbum gives some info on httpflow, a tcpflow parser which shows the http request / responses to the console. Very useful when trying to figure out why a certain http call isn't working.
I'm doing a presentation today during lunch and I needed something to create very simple slides. My former co-worker Leonard already took care of this for me.
I'm hoping to post about the presentation later since it's just on technology as opposed to EarthLink-specific information.
"The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
Found via Paul Kedrosky.
The Robots have released an API to access various pieces of their data. It looks quite impressive.
Bill de hÓra has posted the latest version of his HTTP reliable messaging protocol. He also includes some background and what the future holds. As (my assumption) more and more companies allow API's to be used to interact with their data, having reliable messaging is going to be very, very important.
A few people have pointed to it but this paper on Botnets is really amazing, scary and challenging. Definitely a must-read if you have any interest in security.
One of my biggest weaknesses can be that instead of doing something, I am content in reading about it or even just thinking about it. This is generally true when I have an idea for a little coding side project. Instead of just sitting down and starting to write code, I'll do various searches, read some blogs and before I know it, I've wasted an hour and then I really don't feel like starting so I don't.
The Open Loops blog has a few starting points to help with this. I think the Set yourself a time limit one is going to be most useful for me. Basically, I would adjust it so instead of a time limit, it would be some sort of functionality task like Display something to the console. That might be enough for me to see whether I want to keep working on the project or if I would rather move on to something else.
Tim Bray gives his one-year review of Sun. It's mainly positive though he does call Java boring which I can't say I disagree with him.
So, what do you think about when you think about Sun? Computers, networks, operating systems... and Java. There’s the problem, because Java is boring. Java is the safe choice. Java is COBOL. You won’t get fired for choosing Java. Banks use Java. Telephone companies use Java. CIOs like Java
Of course, he goes on to list some things which aren't boring and I think it is a checklist for any company doing development.
Cellphones aren’t boring (of all the J2*E’s, I like one with ‘M’ the best). Open Source isn’t boring. Dynamic languages aren’t boring. Web services and SOA aren’t boring, but we may have to destroy that village in order to save it. High-level support for CMT/TLP isn’t boring. Extreme Programming and Agile Development and Test-Driven Development aren’t boring. Ajax isn’t boring. Distributed applications based on RSS/Atom syndication aren’t boring. UBL isn’t boring. Health-care informatics reform isn’t boring. Unified multimodal communication (think voice, chat, email, syndication, video, and whatever comes next) isn’t boring. Distributed identity isn’t boring. The intellectual-property wars aren’t boring
Edd gives some tips to increase your personal productivity. He gives it a Linux focus but I think you can easily utilize them with any operating system.
Yes, Thursday is going to be a very special day. Of course, I am doing a presentation for our dev group at lunch so I will not be partaking in the lunchtime Guinness but I do have a plan for the afternoon.
Jamis Buck gives a great overview of the use of synchronous and asynchronous XMLHttpRequests. He also gives some interesting UI guidelines for when you are working with async requests.
I'm going to tape this post up in my office:
There is no such things as the perfect time to do something. There is always something more that needs to be perfected and if not perfected then some outside condition is not quite right.
I missed this post about a whitepaper written by TiVo employees describing their filtering software.
I'm normally not one to post about issues related to blogging but I figured I should say something about the recent Technorati episode where an employee posted some images which were bound to cause a reaction and the company responded. I'm not going to play the company censorship card nor am I going to say that employees should stop blogging. There have been some interesting posts about all of this today which I want to point out and comment on but first, a little story of my own.
When I worked at CollabNet, I wrote a seemingly innocent post about a change to our business which though I understood it, I didn't necessarily like. It was something which was going to be obvious to anyone so I figured it was safe. I did this at around 2 in the morning after I was done with my part of the change. The next morning I found I had been linked to by Dave and I had a couple of emails from reporters asking me about the change. This was definitely something I hadn't thought would happen so I sent an email to my boss, alerting him of the issue. He wasn't exactly thrilled by the post nor about the attention since it was hoped the change would fly underneath the radar for a bit of time. The couple of hours it took to resolve this wasn't fun especially since I was a remote employee and everything was done either thru email, IRC or the phone. But everything worked out. I declined comment by the reporters and I didn't face any problems at work. Mine was a happy ending but not everyone has been that lucky.
Tim Bray's post gives ten reasons why blogging is good for your career. This focuses on the individual of a company and I tend to agree with the list and the assumption about the blogger.
Let’s assume that you’re reasonably competent, reasonably coherent, and reasonably mature. Cynicism aside, a substantial majority of the people in the workplace qualify.
Scoble gives more advice for the corporate blogger on the Red Couch blog. I think both Tim and Robert are really good examples of how-to blog when everyone knows who you work for and will read into everything you say. I think they both do a great job of being interesting and bringing value to their respective companies.
Ben Hammersley looks at the situation a bit different as he focuses on the balance of power between the employer and the employee.
Both gain reputation from the blog: If average person x blogs about his work at hot company y, person x gains hotness from that company. If hot person a goes to work and blog from average company b, the company gains kudos in return.
I started BaristaLog in December of 1999 and then moved here a couple of years ago. I've worked for three companies (EarthLink twice) during that span. I think I've done a fairly good job at keeping things both personal and professional safe. When I talk about work stuff, it generally is in the context of the technology I'm assuming as opposed to the product I'm working on. I find this a good way to keep balance.
To the best of my knowledge, EarthLink does not have an official blogging policy but from what I understand one is possibly in the works. There are few people that I know of who blog and I wish it was more because there are some amazingly smart people here with plenty to say.
One more thing just in case it isn't obvious, I work for EarthLink but I in no way speak for them nor will they agree with everything I say. I will be putting this disclaimer up soon.
I read 100 feeds daily. The number fluctuates a bit. It has gone as high as 150 and as low as 75 but 100 seems to be my sweet spot. I also keep track of various pieces of data with a My Yahoo! page as well as an EarthLink Personal Start Page. Neither of these two portal pages are exactly what I want nor is adding more RSS feeds to my aggregator for things like stocks and sports scores a solution.
In my perfect world, I want a hybrid of the two. I want a single page I can hit or keep open which will have the data I need at that moment. I will still be reading all of my feeds and looking at other data but there is some data which I want to know about right away.
For example, I follow many sports teams but generally I'm only interested in the score of the Cubs in real-time. So if I hit my aggregation page during a Cubs game, I want to see the score and possibly some other metadata right away. In the same way, if I'm on the look out for blog posts on certain topics, I would want those to also be on the top.
Basically, I would want my single page to be dynamic and flexible. Something which I can script to show me the data I'm most interested at that time. I don't know of anything that does this currently but I am looking. And if it turns out, I need to help build it, so much the better.
Someone has written an Amazon.com version of Google Suggest. Quite interesting.
Also, my friend Leonard has written The Pocket Wisherman which will grab your Amazon wish list via their API and format it in various ways to make it easier to print and bring to a bookstore.
So Firefox just crashed and I had around 30 tabs open. So of course now, they are all gone. I remember Galeon had a cool feature which would reload all tabs if it crashed. I wonder if there is a Firefox plug-in which would do something similar. I can go through my history a bit but that's somewhat time-consuiming.
Update: Niel Bornstein pointed me to Session Saver which looks to give Firefox this functionality.
Some good words from Mitnick:
Social psychology has found that people should generally pay attention to their own discomfort. If something doesn't feel right, or it's nagging at their gut, they'd better check it out. They're not always going to remember a security policy, but what you want is to come up with some very simple protocols that will trigger employees to refer to security policy. The only people who are going to object to this are the bad guys.
I'm going through some of the archives of Slacker Manager and finding some great posts. Here's a little list of them:
Slacker Manager gives the low-down on creating a Yay Me! which will hold the accomplishments you've done. It should just be for your view so it's ok to put even the smallest thing down.
Like for me, I could put down I steered someone away from Maven and back to Ant today. I think that is definitely an accomplishment.
Using something like the Gmail Journal from the previous post could be very useful.
One of my co-workers points out a cool app, Shinkuro. Looks to be a Groove-like system but one that supports multiple operating systems. I'm going to have to download it and play around. If you have an account, let me know.
Joi Ito also likes it.
The Python Grimoire explains how to perform common programming tasks in Python. It is a good place to go after you've read the Python Tutorial and have a reasonable grasp of the basics of the language.In essence, the Grimoire is a collection of small recipes for very basic tasks. Its purpose is similar to that of the Python Cookbook, but the Grimoire's recipes are much simpler and more basic than those in the Cookbook. It does not cover advanced and/or specialized topics such as GUI toolkits and Jython.
Matt Raible wonders if using iBATIS might help some folks instead of using Hibernate.
I think I need to reacquaint myself w/ iBATIS soon. I think it could become very useful soon.
The recent (and seemingly continuous) Java vs. Rails discussion has been really frustrating. I don't see any real point to it and all it does is distract users from any type of dual use.
Jeff Mesnil puts it into the best perspective yet:
It reminded me of the old "Java is slow, C is fast" argument that I heard some years ago (I still hear it but mostly from Slashdot crowd these days). Then people realized that C and Java have their respective strength and weakness and are best used in some areas than others.So maybe, we will realize that the same thing apply here and that Java/J2EE and Ruby/Rails serve different purposes and are better suited for different kind of web applications. Maybe, just maybe, one size does not fit all...