Leslie finds a way to move your tabs in Firebox from their location horizontal to the page to vertical on either side.
The instructions to make the change look to be pretty straightforward, just editing one of the config files.
Was anyone else confused by CSI Thursday night? Sure, they did their standard wrap-up and tie together the loose pieces but the explanation just doesn't work based on the testimony of the various suspects.
Is there something you loved to do when you were younger but that you stopped doing? Did you stop doing it because you truly outgrew it... or because you got older? If you want to keep your brain sharp and--just as importantly--get to know your next generation of users, you might want to dust off the legos and slot cars, buy a PSP, get out your skateboard, wear something from Urban Outfitters, and start going to live shows by bands you've never heard of.
Kathy Sierra gives some great tips on how to keep your brain young.
Nat answers the question in an extremely easy-to-understand way.
The real key to being a hacker is getting to the point where you're hacking. Without source code, a working build and a working knowledge of the layout of the code, you're not even able to start hacking. But once you know your way around in there and you're writing code and watching the program take shape, well, that's the fun part.
Charles Miller gives a peek into some of the development process at Atlassian, makers of the fine products, Jira and Confluence.
The basic idea, simplified by me, is to print all the issues/bugs left in a release, do a quick estimate on them and put the physical paper up on a wall. From there, developers work only on things on the wall, they grab an issue and get to work. Once it is completed, the paper goes into the Done pile. Anything which needs to be added to the release needs a new issue and then goes up on the wall as well. As Charles says, it is a great way of focusing development and then getting a sense of where you are in the process.
Once the wall starts to empty, you know the work is getting done and things are going smoothly. In the same way, if the wall stays cluttered, perhaps there are some underlying problems with either estimating the work or how much is going into a release. I don't think this is a feasible solution for day-to-day development since there wouldn't be time to experiment with new approaches or things like that but as a way to crank out the code for a release, it could be very useful.
As I writing this, a thought popped into my head that maybe this idea could be used on a personal basis as well. I'm working on a project as the main (only) developer and there are various little issues that need to be dealt with. As one of the comments in Charles' blog mentions, this idea is like Getting Things Done for development. If I write it down / put it on a wall, it's out of my head and I can focus on the job at hand. I might just have to try this out and see how it goes.
Kevin Dangoor gives a brief history of TurboGears, the new Python mega-framework.
Looks like the Pragmatic Programmers are releasing a new line of books, Fridays.
They address a very specific need: getting targeted and timely information out in a professional, edited format but without the overhead and ceremony of a full-blown paper book.
I think I could post thoughts about any post done by Matt McAlister and today's is no different. He gives a little history of the relationship between producers and consumers of content since the mid-90's.
Back then, you could browse a few sites and feel like you weren't really missing out on anything. Now, it is totally different. I've been blogging since 1999 and I'm still finding new blogs I want to pay attention to. Of course now I do that via RSS instead of having to check whether or not a site has been updated.
This use of RSS to control the spout of information is something that is still in its infancy in my opinion. The more things you are able to subscribe to, the better your information will be, no matter the topic.
Kevin Burton talks about a possible problem with the various ping servers that display changed weblogs. The basic issue is that other services rely on the ping servers yet they are still free and open. Obviously, that's the way you want to keep it but is that possible?
After looking at the front page of Weblogs.Com, my question is whether or not a ping service is even necessary. The page is mainly showing spam blogs so where is the value in that? I remember using Weblogs.Com as the entry point to new blogs but now I find those thru other blogs and use RSS for the notification of new entries.
Of course, it would see that search engines and services like Technorati need the ping sites to keep their data updated quickly but maybe there is a better way that hasn't been found yet. I don't have the answer but I have a feeling pinging a server to indicate a change in my site isn't part of it either.
When your team defeats a friend's over the weekend, a little good-natured razing should be able to happen. But when your friend is your boss's boss, does that change?
While I in no way presume to be Tom Coates, I do know exactly what he is talking about in his latest post. I have multiple browser windows open and then individual tabs in those. I'm scared to count how many I actually have because that would be even more overwhelming.
I installed the SessionSaver extension for Firefox which recreates the state of the browser if you quit or if it crashes. I did this originally because I had so many open windows and I didn't want to lose anything. Now, I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to lose everything and start from scratch. I know I couldn't recreate every link and that could be good since now I have many which are two or three weeks old.
Could I still post about them? Definitely but will I? That remains to be seen. I definitely could del.icio.us them but I don't because I feel they need more than just a snippet written about them. I don't know the answer to this and that's not a bad thing. I'll just keep going as I have been and hopefully posts will come easier whether small or large.
David Seah has put together a simple points-based chart which helps him keep the focus on improving his freelance business. These points answer the question, When is something worth doing? There are activities with high points and others with low points.
There’s a little video game theory at work here too: while the big points are earned by the big tasks, there are enough small tasks that guarantee that you’ll do one or two of them every day. That feels good, and feeling good is an important part of maintaining a high level of engagement.
Now, I couldn't use his chart right out of the box since the activities wouldn't coincide exactly with how I work or what my situation is. That being said, I think with some thought, I could put something together for me which would allow me to try this idea out. Definitely something to keep in the back of my mind.
The author of LibraryThing also has written MothBoard. Basically, you can have a free, web-based discussion board without registering.
The idea is to give your board a unique name which only people you want in the discussion will find. The discussion isn't intended to be a long lasting one so why would you need to register. I like the idea of short-lived things. It can be very useful when working on a project.
I'd like to see more time-sensitive blogs, something which could be created, posted to and then archived into a search engine for future reference. Perhaps even republished with the entries in chronological order so the flow of the blog could be investigated.
I bet internal blogs in this fashion would be very popular and helpful.
Somewhere in my online travels today, I read about LibraryThing. It looks to be del.icio.us for books. You can add books to your catalog, tag them and allow similar libraries to be found.
I added a few to mine which I've either recently finished or have in my queue. One user interface issue though is that you can't easily see what the link is for your catalog so you can send it to people. That's kind of frustrating.
I know everyone will be pointing to this but here's Tim O'Reilly's look at the Web 2.0 space. Some things to think about.
Ryan Campbell explains a way to have your cake and eat it too in terms of Ajax and browsers that don't support the functionality needed for it.
The strategy here is to start by creating a page that works like a normal site—processing information on page loads and refreshes. Then, if JavaScript is enabled, we have our scripts bypass this normal functionality and replace it with sweet Ajax functionality.
I know others have pointed to it but TurboGears looks very cool. It's a Python mega web framework, integrating technologies such as CherryPy, Kid and SQLObject.
There is a tutorial for getting a Wiki up and running in 20 minutes plus other very helpful docs.
Ever wanted to leave feedback about an idea on someone's whiteboard but didn't want to write over the pretty pictures? Or perhaps you were going through a document and wanted your comments to stand out?
Well, Chris Heathcoate has an idea for you, iChat Post-Its. Basically, your icon and a thought bubble ready to spread whatever words you want.
Jan Chipchase looks at the use of QR bar codes on business cards. The idea could definitely be useful but until they can look more integrated into the actual card I don't see them picking up. A person's business card can be a very personal thing. I'm thinking of the constant competition in American Psycho.
The task of exchanging contact information typically involves effort from both the giver and receiver of the information. With QR barcode reading software already installed on the receiver's camera phone a suitably motivated giver of the information can take over some of the task-burden from the receiver. On business cards its seems this currently equates to escorts, and mobile phone geeks.
So, a game was played in South Bend today. Plenty of positives but unfortunately the negative is the most important thing, the first loss of the season and the 5th straight loss at home to Michigan St. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
It's cool and all that Boing Boing readers can get a 35% discount on John Battelle's new book on Search but it's not really that exclusive of a deal.
From the looks of Amazon, I get a 34% discount right off the bat...
Jason Kottke went on a tour of Fenway Park. It was pre-conference event for the design conference he will be covering this weekend. Interesting observations about the role of the design in how the game is experienced now in comparison to the past.
I don't remember reading anything about it but ESPN has podcasts. They put together a daily Best of from their various radio shows. They also seem to have individual podcasts from reporters including one of their fantasy football folks.
The notes feature is definitely something which could be used for all sorts of things.
James Torio wrote his thesis on blogging. I'll let him give you an overview:
To give a brief over view of the paper, it was written for people who have a basic understanding of Blogs. I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.
It's over 100 pages but I'm looking forward to reading it. It cuts across some thinking I've been doing lately but haven't written down. [ via ]
Jeffrey Veen asks this tough question. I don't know the answer but I have a feeling more people will be willing to help than most people think.
Abe posts the cover of his new book on Twisted.
I've looked at Twisted before and I'm sure I will pick the book up. My only concern is that my kids or wife will freak out a bit once they see the book laying on my desk.
Microsoft introduces their version of small applications which can be run on the desktop or via the Web. From the looks of it, anyone can develop them and then run them on Start.Com. I find that very interesting.
I know tons of people will be pointing to these posts but Merlin over at 43 Folders has a two part post about working more effectively with a to-do list.
This is something I've been struggling a ton with lately. I'm trying to find the optimum solution. I don't know whether writing things down in a notebook works better than having a simple text file open on my laptop. Somehow, I want a combination of both but how I do that hasn't come to me yet.
What has come to me though is at least a temporary solution. I'm still working on the final details but I think it is going to work. I hope to post the idea and some code later tonight. Yes, I do realize the irony of posting a to-do about working to-do's but such is life.
Interesting analysis done on the economics of Web 2.0 through the lends of the Skype / Ebay deal.
For me, this is the money quote:
More simply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains - your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network - to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network.
So in a very real sense, it is no longer who you know but what you can do which will be the driving factor in the next few years of Web advancement.
The Call for Proposals for PyCon 2006 has been released. Deadline is Halloween. [ via ]
Kellan gives a good lens to view tags. Instead of looking at it from the object's view such a link has these tags, it is better to look at it from the user's view, I am tagging this link with these tags.
At some point I don't care how you store it in your database, but you need to be thinking about it as something a user is doing to the object.
Russ responds to a post by Nokia's Janne Jalkanen about the use and usefulness of mobile devices. The basic idea is that the difference between a mobile device and a laptop with Skype installed is the fact that the mobile device can be put into the background. You can give it as much or as little attention as you feel necessary. This is much different than a laptop where you are always compelled to have it be the center of your attention.
When I was at CollabNet, it was rare that I didn't bring my laptop into meetings and generally only pay partial attention to what was going on. I would be checking mail, writing code or interacting on the company's IRC channel. I wouldn't do the same thing with a mobile device because the perception of others in a meeting would be totally different. Of course, a device like a Blackberry could be a bit more acceptable in a meeting, which I'm not saying is a good thing.
I like the idea of having my mobile device in the background, ready for use or ready to have data pushed to it. It gives the power to me whether or not I want deal with the incoming data whether it is a call or a reminder. Case in point, Thursday night I was playing golf with a couple of friends. We've tried to do this most Thursday nights during the summer. The wives go out on Wednesday and we go out on Thursday.
At any rate, opening night for the NFL was also happening and the times overlapped. I kept updated on the score by using the browser on my phone. It wasn't the best experience I've had but it did the job I wanted it to do. I would much rather have had some sort of score announcement happen so I didn't have to constantly check. The announcement could have been done whenever a score happened or a time-based event, such as the end of the quarter or half. Knowing that would be sent to my phone, I could have moved my phone from my background attention to the foreground at my leisure as opposed to the checks I did after each hole.
It's a silly example I know but there is tons of data out there that I want to keep track of and I don't want to be forced to go and get it. I'd rather some of it come to me and I decide when and where to interact with it.
I would be lying if I expected a win going into the Big House. It didn't have the excitement of the OSU/Texas game but the Irish winning is still very, very sweet.
Now I just hope that they'll be ready for Michigan State next week. It's at home and while I think that is a good thing, it also adds distractions and pressure. I do think Coach Weis will be very good at keeping those things to a minimum.
Tom Peters has a new manifesto up at ChangeThis. Read it and live it!
Ben Askins puts the two personalized sites to the test. Some very interesting feedback from a user and while it would be silly to base all decisions on one person's use, it would be just as silly to ignore these thoughts when working on new designs..
Anil Dash puts together a list of upcoming trends.
The definitive collection of idea generation methods.
Code Snippets looks to be very useful. I like the WebAppResourceLoader which will load Velocity templates from inside the WEB-APP directory.
Rashmi Sinha gives a recipe for building a software product. Three simple ingredients to give you something new.
Ingredient 1: A useful but hard-to-use open source product.
Ingredient 2: Find a reason for people to pay for the product.
Ingredient 3: Wrap everything up in an easy-to-use interface.
Richard MacManus has put together a wiki, detailing the various vendors in the RSS world. Check it out!
Very awesome site especially the listing of API's. Lots of stuff to dig into there.
Greg Luck points to hloader, a tool for expressing domain objects in XML so that you can easily add them into your database via Hibernate.
Loading test data and initial data would be very easy doing this without resorting to fragile SQL scripts.
The post is from earlier this year but the idea of using Hypersonic as a sort of Hibernate cache is very intriguing.
There are definitely some benefits to doing this such as:
1. We’re querying an in-memory database, so we’re not incurring the network and disk costs.2. The query is being made on a small subset of the data, retrieved from the new query to the Oracle database.3. Our in-memory database schema is only one table, so there are no complex joins to be made.
I'm not sure if I could use something like this in the current project I'm in, mainly because our cache doesn't really need an object graph but I do think I'll try this in something soon.
Continuing with the productivity theme, I found Bert Webb's post about checklists. He lists some of the important factors in creating one. His info came from NASA which obviously knows a thing or two about checklists.
Lots of people are pointing to PocketMod. Basically you can put together a booklet of things which can help you stay organized.
A few weeks ago, I downplayed anything coming out of the Y Combinator venture but I was wrong. Kiko is pretty cool. I've been using it for a couple of days and I'm really starting to dig it.
Berlin Brown shows a very good use of Jython and Hibernate as he quickly gets a test system up-and-running.
I didn't know what to expect from the Irish but I definitely wasn't expecting a blowout. It is unbelievable how smooth and polished the offense looked. If you had seen any games from the past three years, you would not recognize this team. The right play was seemingly called on every down and more importantly, things were executed.
The second half was pretty sloppy which obviously gives the coaches plenty of things to work on as next week, it's up to the Big House and face Michigan.
I would think this win would be the Irish in the Top 25 but that won't come out until early next week.
We put up Hurricane Help. It's a way to search for those missing after the tragedy or register that you are looking for them.
I know my readership isn't that big but if anyone reading could post about this site so it can help, that would be awesome.
TechCrunch gives the overview of a cool looking service, Writely.
Imagine Word, but as an ajax browser application that was free. And allowed tagging of documents. And you could set reader permissions for each document you create and allow others to edit the document, or just read it. That’s what Writely is.
I signed up for the service and started to edit a little document I've been meaning to write. The interface was just what I'd expect from a word processing desktop application. I haven't tried to share the document with anyone yet so I'm not sure how that will work but from the demo and other blog posts, it looks to be very clever in how it alerts you that someone else is editing the document at the same time.
One thing which would be cool is to integrate some of the usual keyboard shortcuts for things like bold, italics and the like. Perhaps they are there but I didn't try them. I'm definitely going to use this for some of my personal writing.
In their FAQ, they mention that they are working on a enterprise version which can be run on your own server. Now that would be quite cool. I would love to use this for my writing here at work because it would be so much easier than firing up Word for every little thing. The problem is that no matter how good the security is, I am storing proprietary company information on someone else's server which I have no control over. This is the same reason I don't use Basecamp for project management.
I know you can save documents locally but that really defeats the purpose of the service. I want to be able to edit these documents from a browser no matter what computer I'm on, plus I want to share them with my colleagues.
The issue of access to data is one that any Web 2.0 company is going to have to address. While I might want to share my data with some, I don't want to share all of it.