Archive for October, 2005
Flock and WebOS
Now that I have Flock, I decided to test it out a little. My first task, of course, was trying to post to my blog. That’s what you’re seeing here (please forgive some of the wonky formatting). I was hoping that the blog tool would allow for offline posting a la ecto, but that doesn’t [...]
Want Akismet? Then download Flock. Huh?
(Note on 11/10/05: getting the API key was mildly painful, but Akismet is doing an EXCELLENT job of catching spam. I have zero problems now — it was well worth it!)
I ran across a mention of Akismet, the WordPress spam blocker, on the BusinessWeek blog and since I’ve been seeing a bit more spam [...]
Scaling: still hard
I think one of the most stubborn myths of our times is that it’s “easy” to build a web company because servers, bandwidth, etc. are so cheap. I’m not so sure. Yes, it is “easy” — until you need to scale. Scaling is still hard.
I was reminded of this when I read [...]
Peter Guralnick: from Elvis to Sam Cooke
Peter Guralnick’s two-part biography of Elvis Presley (”Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley” and “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley“) remains the most compelling work of non-fiction I have ever read (and perhaps the most compelling anything I have ever read). It’s an absolutely sprawling but thoroughly amazing [...]
The Y2K that wasn’t
For reasons I would rather not go into (hint: my idea of Friday night entertainment is tending towards the geriatric and my girlfriend was in Milwaukee hanging out with famous movie directors anyway), I decided that tonight was going to be the night that I sorted through my stack of old VHS tapes with the [...]
The law of modern shipping
Here it is, personally witnessed enough times now that I have promoted it from simple theory to law:
If you order something to be delivered to your house on your work-at-home day, it will be delivered a day late, you will be at work, and you will get stuck in the loop of multiple delivery attempts. [...]
Web 0.1 head-to-head: 37Signals’ Backpackit vs. Gmail in Lynx
Last night, I decided to not-so-carefully run a couple of Web 2.0 apps through the old-school Web 0.1 Lynx browser to see which would work best, or work at all. It occurred to me that in the Web 2.0 world, Lynx might be thrown onto the trash heap of history, made useless by [...]
My day with Mark Hosler of Negativland
Of the many fun aspects of my job at Yahoo! managing the “TechDev Speaker Series” is pretty close to the top. “TechDev” stands for “Technology Development,” the group I work in along with Jeremy Zawodny, Simon Willison, Ken Hickman, and now Tom Coates (welcome, Tom!) Bradley Horowitz is our leader. Every Friday, [...]
How to make a kegerator
For those who only know me very casually, you might not know this: through serendipity and some poor man’s search engine optimization, when hordes of males wake up on a Saturday morning and think “this is the weekend that I’m going to finally build the kegerator I’ve always dreamed of,” they often come to [...]
Berkeley-area doctors map mashup
I was sorting through some old papers and found one of those thick health care provider directories that you used to get when you started a new job with new health insurance. While most providers disseminate that information online now, the display of the information is often close to useless — you run [...]