April 2008
When Obama gets pissed →
Yesterday, Jeremiah Wright pushed Barack Obama pretty far. Today, at a DC press conference, Obama pushed back.
Democrat Barack Obama said Tuesday he was outraged by the latest assertion by his…
What do I owe my readers? →
This is a question I ask myself every once in a while and I am sure that I am not alone in that aspect. Asking the question though also allows us an opportunity to evaluate how true we as…
How to Get Rich with Green Putty →
I realized something amusing today. If you take a 3 ounce wad of putty (just enough to put in your hand and squeeze it), color it green, and put it in a little plastic container, you can call it…
Iron Man Sucks! (If We Can't Go Tomorrow) →
Who says old school media companies still just don’t get it? I do. Mike Arrington of TechCrunch had arranged to rent out a theater in San Francisco tomorrow night to show Marvel’s new film
Zeldman on the Vanishing Personal Site →
There’s a thoughtful post by Jeffrey Zeldman (along with many equally thoughtful comments) about how the growth of social networking sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and twitter have led to an…
Star Wars Book to be Put Online for Free →
In an effort to promote the latest book in the Star Wars “Legacy of the Force” series, starting at 9am tomorrow (Tuesday, April 29), Del Ray will give out book one Betrayal for free as an…
ASP.NET Tips: Printing an IP Address →
So while looking through a dump, you will sometimes come across an IP Address. For example, the System.Net.IPAddress: If you look at this output, you can see that we have the address…
GoLive Put out Of Its Misery →
Adobe discontinues GoLive: We here at Blend are devastated by this news. Oh, wait, no we’re not. Adobe on Monday announced that its venerable visual Web site creation tool GoLive has…
Please don't rip off our music →
Australia’s biggest musical acts are crying poor in a new documentary that seeks to discourage people from obtaining music illegally.
Column - Two standards on rights →
OUR top human rights body is so savage on Australia that it claims we’re guilty of “genocide”. But when it comes to China, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission can’t grovel enough.
…
Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should →
One of the central themes of stackoverflow.com is that software developers no longer learn programming from books, as Joel mentioned:
Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The…
Search Commands now available from Office Labs →
Microsoft Office Labs, probably best known for their concept video of the future of personal health which was shown at MIX08 (video), have just launched their public website today at …
Early Stats Show Twitter Taking Off in Japan →
Last week trendy micro-blogging service Twitter launched officially in Japan, after the company had “noticed a significant percent of Twitter usage consistently originating from Japan”. At the…
Microsoft needs an intervention →
At some point you have to really feel for the Microsoft employees who care about the company and are passionate about the products they are responsible for. There comes a point though…
Google Relieves Your Muni Frustrations →
There’s something new on your Google Map: Muni! We’re so happy about this, we don’t even want to ask why it took so damn long (BART’s been on Google Transit since forever). Now at last you…
Zealous Autoconfig →
Demos Happen { Here } - Win a trip to TechEd in... →
Note: this competition is open to Australian Residents aged 18 years or over on or before 1 September 2008 One of the cool things we’re doing as part of the launch of Visual Studio 2008,…
The nation’s speech-crusher... →
Age columnist Russell Skelton was apparently unable to have a conversation until Kevin Rudd liberated him and his friends last November:
The 2020 Summit has been just such an exercise. For…
Bloggers are Filters (but not gatekeepers) →
My friend Steven wrote a thoughtful post about handling large amounts of information and about how bloggers have become the news anchors (or ‘gatekeepers’) of the Internet
We become a…
Time for an experiment →
For the past week there has been an on-going conversation happening about how we use the many services that are available to us. Whether it be Twitter, our blogs, FriendFeed or any number…
Last rites for quacks? →
Here’s an oped I wrote in this morning’s Daily Telegraph:
Few experiences are more disorientating than the erosion of faith. I have seen it many times in my encounters with religious believers:…
You Can Only Pitch Me In Reverse Polish Notation... →
As the world of journalism/old media gets increasingly blurred with bloggers/new media, some of the larger news-breaking bloggers are finding themselves inundated with pitches from companies…
How We Use Twitter for Journalism →
How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on Twitter have proven wildly useful for some writers penning…
6 Free Cross-Platform Apps–for a USB Thumb Drive →
I’ve posted before about good applications to put on a USB thumb drive, for both Windows and the Mac. If you work on a mobile basis frequently, this is a great way to have any application…
Disqus' Excellent Customer Service Enables... →
Disqus is seeing a meteoric rise as the default comments management system for the Web, enabling bloggers to deliver threaded comments, and track their own commenting activity throughout the…
Jailbreaking Hotmail →
With Microsoft’s announcement this week that Outlook and Outlook Express will no longer support desktop access to Hotmail accounts raises some interesting questions on data…
My robot can totally beat up your robot →
Microsoft launched a new contest called RoboChamp which is a simulated robotics competition. By using Robotics Developer Studio 2008, you have the ability to write code or use an…
Live Mesh Technology Preview: A closer look - User... →
Kip already posted a Live Mesh Technology Preview: First Look, let’s follow up on that. So we’ve already added some devices, now what? First let me start off by saying that the Live Desktop…
Unbundling Biblical Studies →
A recent series on the Britannica Blog is discussing Newspapers and Net, starting with an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book “The Big Switch” called “The Great Unbundling”, and then followed by …
What's Your Twitter Noise Ratio? →
The many thousands of people who use Twitter do so in wildly different ways. Some use it to deliver minute by minute updates of their daily activity. Others use it to hold conversations with…
Put A Spin On Your Lifestream With Dipity →
Have you heard of Dipity? I hadn’t either until today. Dipity recently came out of private beta to a full launch last week. What is Dipity? Dipity allows you to create a timeline out of…
Mesh Review: A User’s Perspective →
Microsoft send me an invitation to try out its new Live Mesh service last night and I have to say that I’m happily surprised by the quality of the current beta version (or ‘Tech Preview’ as…
Want to try Mesh, but not got access? Find a... →
Unsurprisingly, here’s some more Mesh news. If you have yet to see what Live Mesh is all about and you’re just waiting patiently in the waiting list, there is another way you can get in on the Tech…
Added Gravatar support →
I just wanted to quickly point out that we added support for gravatars earlier this week. Gravatars are popular universal avatars. If you haven’t uploaded a picture on Disqus, we’ll…
GReader Shared Links - the new territory of... →
Sharing links with a wider audience is a great idea and when Google came up with the idea of you being able to share links to blog posts that you found interesting it met with almost…
WordPress 2.5.1 →
Version 2.5.1 of WordPress is now available. It includes a number of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and one very important security fix. We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly…
Anatomy of a "Small" Software Design Change →
File this one away for the next time your boss comes in and asks,
Yeaaah, I’m going to need you to make that little change to the code. It’ll only take you a couple hours, right?
Restraining Order →
Faster Builds with MSBuild using Parallel Builds... →
Jeff asked the question “Should All Developers Have Manycore CPUs?” this week. There are number of things in his post I disagree with. First, “dual-core CPUs protect you from badly written…
how can a website with only 5 employees (reddit)... →
I have no idea how those new reddit UI screenshots surfaced on Brent Csutoras’ blog… Bonus! Even Valleywag thought the redesign was newsworthy. Given that there are only five of us, you’d…
The Semantic Web as Data + Intelligence →
Talking with Talis is rapidly becoming my favorite podcast source: Paul Miller has a lot of really interesting guests addressing topics at the intersection of libraries and the Semantic Web.
…
Drowning in APIs & Death by freemium →
It doesn’t matter where you turn these days on the web or in the tech blogosphere but you are almost guaranteed to here something about API this and API that. Everything it seems has to…
Video Comments Would Be A Waste Of Time →
Josh Catone has an awesomesauce post about the cons of integrating video comments into a sites commenting section and a poll asking whether or not you’d like to see it incorporated on
Free Online Content Management and Web Dev Tours →
Most of us web workers are familiar with the many free trials for various software applications and services that are available. However, these often require downloads, installation and action to…
Books: We need more So What, Now What and What... →
Have you ever looked at a word you use and see every day, like the word “What,” and suddenly start doubting yourself and wonder if it’s spelled correctly? There you go. What. Is THAT how it’s…
What happens if the real world bites Twitter on... →
Yesterday the tech blogosphere was all awash with talk about Blaine Cook leaving his position as Chief Architect at Twitter. Today the talk is about Lee Mighdoll the VP of…
Video Comments are a Dumb Idea. →
I see TechCrunch now has integrated commenting via Seesmic videos on all TechCrunch blogs (no surprise given that Michael Arrington is a Seesmic investor).
I can’t help but think…
Facebook Makes Stalking So Easy →
So Facebook has finally gone public with it’s new chat feature. It’s pretty harmless and nicely integrated with the option to hide offline if you’d like to. I’m sure many Facebook users…
Ray Ozzie on Live Mesh: “There’s almost nothing... →
When we told you to “pay attention to Feedsync”, we were of course talking about Live Mesh, but what Ray Ozzie is bringing to the table with the Live Mesh Technology Preview, enabled by Feedsync, or…
Ultimate Extras sound schemes: a comparison →
Not anyone can say they received some Ultimate Extras for a birthday present. Yesterday of course was my birthday and the day a new wave of extras was released, included is the third pack of…