Archive for August, 2005
longbets.com: “the betting site for big thinkers”
Steven D. Levitt over at the Freakanomics blog (the companion blog to the book by the same name that is on my reading list) pointed me to the utterly fascinating longbets.org, which he described as “the betting site for big thinkers.”
In a nutshell, bettors publicly put real money on one side or the other of [...]
Opera, the Amiga of web browsers
The news of the Opera browser’s tenth anniversary came from two different directions today: via Scott Rosenberg in my news aggregator, and via David Wheeler in IM. You can get a free registration code today from this page. I’ve tried Opera before but never quite switched. Still, it’s a reminder that [...]
Backing up a Mac with rsync
If you want to avoid using all the goofy backup software that come with firewire drives these days, but you haven’t gotten around to reviewing the rsync man page and you’re starting to get a little worried about your backup situation on your Mac, this is the page for you. Rsync has always been [...]
Wilco, Ken Waagner, and the future of music
Wilco is one of my favorite bands and has been since I picked up Being There sometime in the ‘97 timeframe. If you take a look at my Last.fm artist charts and you skip past the Pink Floyd (no apologies, fellow indie rock fans — I enjoy it without irony), Wilco is in the [...]
Frederick Brooks / Ruby on Rails smackdown
Over at the 37Signals blog, there’s a post praising Frederick Brooks’ absolutely timeless Mythical Man-Month book (Wikipedia entry here), following up on a prior post espousing a “three people for version 1” philosophy, described as follows:
If you can’t build your version 1 with three people, then 1. you need different people, or 2. you need [...]
PHP/Perl programming language mashup!
(Via O’Reilly Radar) My friend and former Salon.com colleague David Wheeler announced on Saturday that the new version of open source CMS Bricolage supports PHP templating via a new Perl module developed by George Schlossnagle. From the README:
This module provides a way to load a PHP interpreter into your Perl programs. The PHP interpreter [...]
Fun with robots and fire at Yahoo!
This week has been a VERY cool work week. Closing out my first week, I attended an amazing lunch-time presentation by Mark Pauline, founder and director of Survival Research Labs, a talk put together by my boss Bradley Horowitz as part of a regular series here at Yahoo!
How to describe SRL? [...]
Memories of the WELL and its geek-infamous server
When I saw that Salon had put the WELL up for sale, it brought back some interesting memories. I was CTO at Salon when the WELL was acquired, so I was ultimately responsible in an org chart sense for integrating the WELL hardware and software into our environment, although the “real” work was done [...]
Bye-bye OS X: I’m back on Windows
When you join a new company, if you’re lucky, you can choose whether you want a Mac or PC. Since Yahoo! supports both, I had the choice — and I chose Windows with very little hesitation. I wanted to be where most of the users were, and besides, Macs just aren’t the magic [...]
First two days at Yahoo!
I was really honored to see Phil Windley’s post tonight in which he called me “one of the good guys.” Phil, the feeling is definitely mutual. Phil has that rare mix of humility and expert knowledge that I wish all technologists I work with had. I’m looking forward to reading his Digital [...]