January 2008
A Hack’s Guide To Unit Testing Generated... →
I know this might make some people groan - but that’s OK - I’m used to it. As Eilon Lipton always tells me:
You’re a PM dude - you’re not supposed to code
Which is true! And to get the PM as Haack tradition alive, here is my latest attempt to completely devastate my reputation as a coder. Have at me, I love it.
Let’s Put an X in Front Of HTML Too
The world’s gone X-Crazy (XBox, OS X, ASPX...
Instapaper, A Beautifully Simple Bookmarking Tool →
Instapaper, a new site by Tumblr employee Marco Arment, simply put will easily be one of the websites I visit most this year. It may very well be the easiest and most beautifully minimal bookmarking site ever created. Let me give a brief history of my arduous experience with bookmarking. At one point years ago I did all my web bookmarking through browser bookmarks - including stories I wanted to...
Scott Hanselman Is Not a Dick →
In my write up on ASP.NET MVC, I decided to recount my conversation with Scott Hanselman on the subject of the “story” behind ASP.NET MVC. I thought it would be fun to offer some anecdotes, but in doing so I inadvertently left out some context to the stories that ended up making Scott come off as a bit of an a$$hole.
Obviously this was not intended - and so as a favor to my friend I thought it...
Review: Pleo gets sent back to the Dinosaur Pound →
UPDATE: In record time, Sarah from Ugobe included feedback in the comments below. Just be clear, I was reticent to do a review at all, because I know how much work goes into things like this, especially for a small startup that pours their hearts into a product like this. It just turns out that it wasn’t for me, and I had high, perhaps unreasonable expectations that...
What's Your Backup Strategy? →
Jamie Zawinski’s public service backup announcement starts off with a bang:
Option 1: Learn not to care about your data. Don’t save any old email, use a film camera, and only listen to physical CDs and not MP3s. If you have no possessions, you have nothing to lose.
This is obviously meant as satire, but it’s disturbingly close to reality for me. I suppose everything in my...
Hubdub Launching Predictive News Aggregator →
I am a big fan of news aggregators like Digg, Reddit and Mixx as they bubble up interesting content from around the Web. Hubdub, a
UK-based startup, is launching at DEMO08 to put a new spin on the traditional news aggregator landscape by creating a predictive marketplace for news. Hubdub will look to leverage the value of user-generated news aggregation with the accuracy and stir of prediction...
Feb Meeting →
Visual Studio 2008: Features, Frameworks and other Fun Stuff by Nick Randolph As we are all probably aware there is yet another version of Visual Studio available. In addition to a number of glossy updates, such as rounded corners and better preview windows, there are some significant language and feature updates in this new version. In this session Nick will guide you through some of the...
Lego-ized Google Lego Logo →
Inspired by Google’s logo for celebrating Lego’s 50th birthday, AFOL(Adult Fan Of LEGO) Antonio Manfredonio replicated the logo with real Lego bricks. It looks exactly the same, except that the shirt is not red.
That’s the coolest thing I have seen all day.
[photo by Antonio Manfredonio, used under a CC-license]
Drive.com.au and CarsGuide.com.au in a... →
Starting today Drive.com.au will be the sales team for CarsGuide. This is a distribution deal meaning that dealerships will now be able to have a single point of contact for both sites. This isn’t a merger in any sense, both Drive & CarsGuide will continue to operate as separate sites in a competitive environment, with their own editorial, marketing and technical teams.
What it does mean is...
YUI Grid CSS and Grid Builder Kick Ass! →
Okay, I’m not a front-end web guy. Not by any stretch of the imagination. So I tend to ignore a lot of Javascript and CSS stuff unless it’s clearly and obviously useful to me. And while I’ve heard tons of praise for YUI, the Yahoo User Interface library, I’d mostly assumed it was stuff for other people—you know, the ones who understand all that stuff. But I recently...
Doodle: 50 Years of Lego →
Google today celebrates the 50th anniversary of the invention of the modern Lego bricks.
The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the...
Why Doesn't Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero? →
I never quite made the transition from the Apple II series to the Mac. Instead, I migrated from my Apple II to a PC. I always thought the PC ecosystem, although deeply flawed, was more naturally analogous to the eclectic third party hardware and software hacker ecosystem that grew up around the semi-open Apple II hardware platform. This, to me, was the most enduring and beloved quality of the...
Bug →
Praise For Australian Customs →
Some people think I only write negative stories on this blog, and that’s not true, although I do like pointing out the wrongs in this world. Here’s a positive shout out to the great folks at the Australian Customs Service.
Qantas, in its infinite wisdom, was running very late out of SFO Friday night, and I originally had about 2 1/2 hours between landing in Sydney and the connecting flight...
Pod Bay Doors →
Quake 3 in .Net, it was only a manage of time. →
Greg Dolley has done something amazing. Greg ported id software’s video game, Quake 3, to .Net. I’m going to take a quote from his website regarding the port Before I begin explaining the port, I’d like to clarify one thing. Someone emailed me last week regarding this port and judging from his/her message it led me to believe that some people don’t understand the difference between...
Zero Punctuation: The Witcher →
This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee roleplays a pale, lanky misogynist.
"Use Paint.NET to Photoshop it" →
I guess “Photoshop” really is turning into a generic verb, something that Adobe is undoubtedly unhappy about. I found this on a Q&A website, paraphrased for readability:
Question: “My friend has pictures of her eyes, a different color that really stick out. It’s grey and her eyes are bright blue or neon green. Please tell me how to do that.” (Note: I believe they are...
“The NSW Government today officially terminated the controversial Tcard plan...”
– NSW dumps Tcard and wants $95m back
WatchTujio - Crysis Barrel Explosion
WatchMacHeads The Movie Coming Soon! Whee! - Geekologie
“Academy Award nominee Heath Ledger, 28, has died of a drug overdose in New York,...”
– Heath Ledger dead
More on C# Continuation-Passing Style: The Full... →
Continuing on from yesterday’s post about simplifying exception handling code by using lambdas and continuation-passing style, I’d like to show off some other examples. Another common pattern in code is to generate a value, test it against some condition, and then have an if/else block to execute two other blocks of code dependent on that test.
So, let’s introduce the TryIgnore() and...
Reinventing the Clipboard →
.kbd {font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;padding:5px 3px;white-space:nowrap;color:#000;background:#eee;border-width:2px 4px 5px 3px;border-style:solid;border-color:#ccc #aaa #888 #bbb;}
.i20{margin:15px 30px;}
Over time, I’ve become something of a desktop mimimalist. Sure, I’ll change a few settings to my liking, but I no longer spend a lot of time customizing my desktop...
What’s the best NAS right now? →
As I mentioned earlier, my current network-attached storage (NAS) box took a hit in a power outage. This is what it looked like after I took it apart to swap in a new hard drive.
So I’m looking for a new NAS. Price isn’t really a concern at all, but here’s stuff that I require:
Ability to hot-swap drives. My current NAS requires 22 screws (!) to replace a hard drive.
Gigabit ethernet
...
The Brick Testament →
Neowin.net forum member posts first review of... →
Looks like it didn’t take long for the first external build of Windows 7 to be leaked on to the interwebs. Black fumes were reported escaping Steven Sinofsky’s office earlier this morning after news Microsoft has delivered a Milestone 1 build of the next version of Windows to OEMs spread like wildfire in a dry grassy field on a hot summer’s day.
A member named “kenipnet” on Neowin.net’s forums...
“A few days ago, I was interrogated for 90 minutes by Shirlene McGovern, an...”
– globeandmail.com: What a strange place Canada is
Continuation-Passing Style Simplifies Your... →
Many lines of code in C# and other imperative languages are seemingly wasted by dealing with overhead such as exception handling and the like. How many times have you written the following type of code?
string[] fileNames;
try { fileNames = Directory.GetFiles(…); }
catch (Exception) { // There was an error, like the directory isn’t there. // This isn’t an error for us, so just use...
Humility →
I’ve been tossing up this week how I should post about this result. To simply go out and boast about the result would simply make me out to be a complete and utter wanker, and I know some of you think that, but lets spend at least 30 minutes together and correct that perception.
I am truly humbled that my peers would see it fit to vote for me as Australia’s top web celeb. If I was to be fair, I...
Chris McKinstry's Suicide →
Off Topic - So what does a web suicide note look like?: I missed this when it actually happened two years ago. Chris McKinstry posted a suicide note to his own blog and to the Joel on Software off-topic discussion forum (since closed). He had taken a bunch of pills, and he conversed with people in the thread while they took effect. He eventually stops posting, and was found dead the next day....
The Data So Far →
AT&T Makes Telstra Look Good, And a Good Travelers... →
Given when I first traveled to the United States in November 2006 I came home to a $998 Optus bill, I’ve been really, really shy on subsequent trips about using my mobile for anything. The roaming charges on Optus are insanely expensive, some calls are $2.50 a minute, and for memory it’s $1.30 to receive calls or similar.
Given I’m State side for 2 weeks this trip (I’ve been here a week as I...
“Two years ago, a knock on Fatima and Mansour al-Timani’s door shattered...”
– Wife’s suicide threat over forced divorce
What We Have vs. What We Want →
By Tim O’Reilly After reading Dale’s post The Rest of the Rest of Us, I have to share a link that my brother sent me to a story about an Indian businessman’s venture to give the poor of India a taste of modern life:
An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere...
I’m glad Louis Gray called out Mashable →
I’m a big fan of the Mashable blog by Pete Cashmore. They cover technology and the Web like no other blog, and they have some great writers — like Adam Ostrow, Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, Kristen Nicole and others — but something has always kind of bothered me about the site, and I’m glad that Louis Gray finally wrote about it: Mashable often isn’t that great at giving credit to the blogs and writers...
ReadBurner Keeps Improving With Stats and Upcoming... →
I always knew the first service to crack the code of showing the most popular shared items in Google Reader, along with who shared them would be a fun utility. The catch? I used to think it would be Google who would be the winner. But now, with ReadBurner almost two weeks old, I’ve already seen the site change the way I think about and interact with RSS feed aggregators and shared link...
The metered internet →
I’m getting a preview of Time Warner’s doomed idea to charge internet access based on usage.
At the hotel here in Munich, I’m getting criminally overcharged for internet access by the hotel and Swiss: They’re charging me 27 euros for 24 hours to get supposedly unlimited speed (ha! I tested and it’s slow; I can’t even watch a YouTube video worth a damn and it almost took longer to download On the...
Social Networks, from the 80s to the 00s →
Written by Brian McConnell As Facebook enjoys its moment in the sun, we should take a moment to step back and look at the history of computers and social communication. Some historical perspective is in order, both to assess the real value of social networks as businesses, and to anticipate how they are likely to evolve in the future. I’ve been using the Internet since 1988, and have been using...
The Sesame Street Presentation Rule →
After being on both the giving and receiving end of plenty of presentations, I now realize there’s one golden rule which applies to all of them:
Entertain your audience.
Every slide of your presentation should serve this fundamental vision statement. Is it entertaining? I don’t mean each slide has to contain a wacky joke of some kind. Every slide should provoke a reaction from...
Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz →
In the tech blogosphere, there’s a clear delineation between those who are actively creating the news (the developers, engineers, and business people), those who are reporting the news (those blogs who follow journalism standards and do actual reporting) and those who simply follow along - either by referencing other people’s work, or simply duplicating it. Mashable, billing itself as...
Why bloggers relying on Google may not be a good... →
A while back I wrote a post called So why does Google get a free ride…. which got a really interesting rebuttal post from Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins over at Mashable in which he came to the conclusion that Google doesn’t really have what could be classified as a monopoly in the classic sense of the word.
In his well written rebuttal of my original post he said:
The bottom line is, though, where...
Why don’t tech bloggers write about Kenya →
I got slammed on some blogs for not writing about Kenya’s problems. Truth is I missed that story because I was busy with CES and MacWorld and Fast Company stuff. Ethan Zuckerman, who founded Global Voices Online (which +is+ the right blog to keep up with human rights blogging from around the world comes to my defense, which I greatly appreciate).
Guy Kawasaki had a great guest post from a...
To Be Wanted →
Where’s The Cheese? →
Peter Russell Clarke outtakes from the 80’s. Language NSFW via FullTimeCasual on Twitter. LMAO.