Blog Posts

Creepy

(Thanks, Aleksey) Technorati Tags: funny

If you like food you might find this amusing…

Many more where this one came from. Good for a chuckle 🙂

Really cool rowing instrumentation

If there are any rowing fanatics out there, or competitive rowing coaches, take a look at this cool in-boat rowing instrumentation product. Here is a bit about it from their site: > “The RowMetrics system is innovative in-boat instrumentation bundled with...

Arduino: Open source hardware

Check out Arduino, a totally cool tiny embedded computer suitable for creating smart things – art, robotics, sensors and controllers. You program it on your laptop, and download the program to the device. I tried it, it was pretty easy. Had to touch wires and stuff though 🙂...

Amusing: French words missing in English

“No language is perfect, and English is no exception. There are always words or expressions that cannot be rendered from one language to another. English supposedly has the largest vocabulary of any languages in the world (7x more words than French !), and well-educated people typically know less th...

Ray Kurzweil @ MIT

Went to hear Ray Kurzweil yesterday at MIT, at an event jointly sponsored by IEEE and GBC/ACM Robotics Sigs. The blurb said: > “[…] With input from people around the world, an international group of leading technological thinkers were asked to...

Very cool illusion

Try this out, it really worked for me, and is really strange and wonderful! > “This should be proof enough, we don’t always see what we think we see.” (from Very Cool Illusion, via del.icio.us) Technorati Tags: cool

[GEEKY] Some good Rails resources

Just a few handy links that, if you are a Rails developer you may be interested in: - Ruby Plus – Free Ruby and Rails Screencasts - RailsCasts – free Ruby on Rails screencasts - ActiveScaffold – A RoR plugin that magically and dynamically creates user interfaces - PeepCode – A super valuable collection of in-depth Screencast, worth every one of the 900 pennies each costs I have found each of these a great resource, and I recommend them to you!

Firewalls scanning IM messages: Google as symbolic link

Here’s something I hadn’t seen before: I IM’d a friend of mine at a Big Company and the message got rejected because it included a URL. I have to suppose that it’s any URL that gets bounced, but who knows? So the workaround? I sent the text for a Google query that returns the same url. Further details: Discussing it with him, the logic seems to be that someone could send an employee a phishing link in an IM message.

Know Rule 240!

I recently was on a trip with United Airlines. It’s a long story, but basically the short form is that the pilot didn’t show up, our flight was about 2 hours late, and I was going to miss the connection, also on United. A bunch of us were in the same boat (or plane) and so there was quite a buzz in ...

[GEEKY] Cool open source product analogous to Yahoo Pipes

SnapLogic is an open source product (at least in it’s base edition) providing tools to construct pipelines that deliver and process and filter information through collections of interconnected REST services. As usual, they provide a free ‘community’ edition, and then variously priced developer and enterprise editions. Pricing wasn’t indicated but if you have this kind of need, SnapLogic looks like it’s worth a peek.

[GEEKY] Twitter and Ruby on Rails

Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products

Seven Do’s And Three Don’ts For Creating New Web Products contains some excellent Do’s and Don’ts for someone (like me) thinking of starting a new business. Here is just one little ‘D...

On the business impact of Web 2.0

Bill Ives of the Portals and KM Blog writes an interesting two-part article on the business impact of Web 2.0: > “Now with Web 2.0 the open architecture, the refinement of web services, and the ability to put together applications through mashups makes the basic devel...

YCombinator startup application form

I came across this very cool and simple set of criteria or rules to apply for funding from YCombinator. Not sure how well it works for them but they are quite reasonable. Here’s a sample: > “(4) Yes decisions will include the amount we’ll invest and the percent of the company we’d want for it. We usually invest $5000 + $5000n, where n is the number of participating founders (i.e. 2 founders get $15,000, 3 get $20,000), in return for between 1% and 10% of the company. The median is 6%.” Cool. Does it work?

Barcamp is coming to Boston again!

Well it’s not really ‘coming’ – it was here all along, just dormant. Here’s the down-lo: > BarCamp Boston 3 May 17-18, 2008 http://barcampboston.org/ BarCamp is an unConference, organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. There is no registration fee, but you ...

Ray Ozzie on Mesh

You might have missed the announcement of Microsoft Mesh. Cycnical me: these grand strategies come and go. I believe this is the second or perhaps third major iteration of Microsoft’s strategy in this area, in each case without an actual scaling implementation of same.At any rate, if you are interes...

Twitter mania continues, unabated, now claiming bodies, Story at 11

Check this post Twitter’s Lead Architect Leaves: It’s Not You, It’s Me from Mashable!: > "While I’ll give Cook the benefit of the doubt, I can’t think of a more pressure packed job than being re...

Grou.ps Launches Public Beta

Check this post Grou.ps Launches Public Beta from ReadWriteWeb: > "There are a lot of ways to collaborate online – wikis, forums, social networks – but there are very few providers that package all the tools together that a group might need. Grou.ps, a social groupware provider, aims to address that problem by providing its users one single package of integrated tools."Looks like it’s worth a look…

Danah Boyd on Facebook and Myspace

A really interesting article for anyone interested in social networks and their role and impact in our society. > “… I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been s...