Everyone knows you'll have bad days but the good thing is that they generally don't happen too often. If they did, you'd have a tough time getting out of bed each day, heading to the office. Today though was a bad day. Mistakes were made last week and the bill came due this morning. I'm purposefully trying to find as many cliches as I can since they all seem quite appropriate.
Fixing code is a funny thing sometimes since you can introduce new things when seemingly fixing old things. That's what happened in a nutshell but unfortunately I didn't find out about it until 7AM this morning. It could have easily been fixed Friday afternoon but no, I knew nothing about it until today. Once I found out, the fix was easy and done fairly quickly but then the real fun began. The endless questions, the repeating of the steps, the reviewing of the process, all very legitimate but still it wears on you.
I have a project at work which I just need to break down a given URL and insert data into a database, nothing more, nothing less. Right now for convenience sake, I'm using JBoss, mainly because it was already setup and ready to go. That's way too much stuff for this so I wanted something simple. Hopefully I've found that with Mongrel and the ability to create simple, custom handlers.
Since I can't show the actual project, I've pasted a sample one which does pretty much what I want. I'm hoping to do some load testing on it this week and if it performs like I hope, life will be nice.
Technorati Tags:
mongrel, mongrel+handlers
I'm never one to shy from posting about people having problems with EarthLink but it is nice to read about someone happy with one of our services. Hopefully this will be the default experience for anyone using Muni WiFi.
Technorati Tags:
earthlink, municpal+wireless
Lots of people are talking about Ask's launch of their new search interface and new algorithm. It is a different way to search and so far, I'm very impressed by it. I'm not going to rehash all the new features as any of the above links can do that. Instead, I thin it is awesome that Ask continues to innovate and try new things. Honestly, I believe they are the most innovative search company right now, not counting the various vertical engines.
It's true that they are somewhat forgotten by many end users based on recent usage numbers but that hasn't caused them to go into their shell, lamenting that fact. Instead, they put out things like AskCity and the ability to draw on a map and search within that area. Put those things together with this update and you see a company with little fear.
Will this work? Will it cause a right in the amount of user's searching? No one knows right now but to me it's way better to go out fighting then give up and pander to your existing user base with lukewarm products and ideas.
Technorati Tags:
search, ask3d
A week or so ago, Tara Hunt posted a thought-provoking blog entry. That isn't really a shock since most of her pieces live in my browser tabs, waiting for some sort of response. Invariably, too much time passes before I comment and the moment is gone. Hopefully that isn't the case for this one.
LoserCamp would be a take off from FooCamp and BarCamp, a sort of unconference bringing people together talking about the times they failed and how they learned from that failure. Many times, people don't like to talk about their failures even if that failure spurred them onto greater things. It's just not talked about. I'd like to see that changed and perhaps something like LoserCamp would help with that.
Failing is one of the most important things you can do and as a father, I'm finding it even more important to instill into the kids. The idea that you can fail, pick yourself up and move ahead, learning from what went wrong and making any sorts of adjustments into your future. That is what people and companies need to learn. I feel that too much of today's plans are done via spreadsheets and metrics. Now, don't think I'm totally down on metrics because I think they have a place in building your product roadmap but it isn't the only thing that should go into building that roadmap. Part of the roadmap should come from intuition as well as trying different things and seeing what works and what doesn't work.
I think one of the hidden strengths of Google's 20% rule is that a developer can try many new things, failing more often than succeeding, yet each new project will benefit from that failure. It's something that I would love to see instilled into the 'Link because we don't have the belief now that failing can lead to better things and because of that, we try to make every new application or project absolutely perfect from Day 1 and unfortunately that causes delays or things to not even make it to the public.
So get out there, try something new, skin your knees, pick yourself up and do it again.
Technorati Tags:
earthlink, google, celebrating+failure, tara+hunt
One of my favorite blogs is information aesthetics. They post some amazing visualizations of data and sites which do the same. One of their latest posts shows off a physical activity fishbowl which was used in a study recently.
The basic idea is that a virtual fish's size and facial expressions are tied to the physical steps that a person takes. When the person reaches their goals or moves beyond it, the fish grows in side and is happy. The other side is when the goals aren't matched, the fish is smaller and has sad expressions.
The study [pdf] goes thru the process and how it increased the activity of folks. This is a very interesting idea of how virtual things can influence how people act and what they do.
Technorati Tags:
information+aesthetics, physical+activity+fishbowl
David Sacks makes this argument in a recent guest post on TechCrunch. He's see the evolution coming from the browsing of portals to search-based portals and now to a portal which your social graph pushes information to you. He sees the Facebook Platform as the example of the last step.
Obviously I'm a little biased because of my involvement in developing a traditional portal but I don't quite buy Facebook as the end-all application. Yes, it is seeing some tremendous growth and people are building some great things for it but that does not mean this is exactly what everything will look like in the next few years.
That being said, now is a great time to build an application for the platform. All you have to do is look at iLike and the gains they've made since the launch of their application. They've seen amazing user signups and usage. I would love to see us put something together which could show off some of the newer applications we've been developing. They can be hidden behind the monolithic portal application unfortunately.
And perhaps that's one of the keys of this new idea, that you are going to see mini-apps handle different things, you'll be able to pick-and-choose these apps and if they are done well, have some sort of sharing aspect to the data. That could be an evolution if we let it.
Technorati Tags:
earthlink, facebook+platform, portals, evolution+of+portals