Blog Posts

All my blog posts and articles

Page 98 of 142 (2823 total posts)

October 2007

Steven Pinker on Why We Curse

I know that access to my blog is blocked at least by EMC (heard so from friends there) so I will refrain from quoting this article’s first word: > “*ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Glo...

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[GEEKY] Weakness in Mac OS X Software Update

Everyone loves how much easier Mac OS X makes it to install software. Well sort of. It’s a place where new users easily get stumped. What the heck are those .dmg files anyway, and where’s the installer? Well this post isn’t about that. After all, it wouldn’t count as [GEEKY] if that’s all it did. Be...

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Hackers and the elections

In New Scientist Tech, an interesting article about hackers and the elections: > “The web may not deserve its reputation as a great democratic tool, security experts say. They predict voters will increasingly be targeted by internet-based dirty tricks campaigns, and that the perpetrators will find it easier to cover their tracks.” (from Hackers could skew US elections”) Read the whole thing here.

Temporary phone numbers and eBay

When you are selling or buying something on the web, say eBay or Craigslist, it always is a question whether to give your ‘real’ phone number out. I just came across Numbr.com (credit Lifehacker, and several others) which appears to have a neat solution to this. Simply, it gets you (for free, but doesn’t everything have to be free nowadays?) a temporary phone number which will anonymously forward calls to your real number. Simple and useful. Check out Numbr.com.

Is Newser this weeks Daylife?

Newser.com is a new news site, with the tag line: “Faster, Smarter News.” Seems like it does some kind of automatic classification of news by one of 9 major topics and organizes it automatically and attractively. It may or may not be trying to personalize what it displays for me. To my eye it is similar to Daylife.com. Remember Daylife? It flashed pretty good a few months ago, but haven’t really heard much more about it. Again I am not sure whether it does any personalization or how that works. As someone who follows these kinds of products pretty closely, I don’t immediately see the key differences. Do you?

September 2007

LinkedIn has photos, finally

Finally, welcome to the 20th  century, [tag]LinkedIn[/tag]: > “It’s taken four years for LinkedIn to add photos, when every other [tag]social network[/tag] has done it forever. The site for business professionals has always kept a conservative, business-like tone. But although it says the decision has been driven by members, LinkedIn could not have escaped noticing that business people are using sites like Facebook to network both personally and for business. Adding photos ticks a box marked ‘we can be as friendly-looking as Facebook too guys’.”

Shelby is back from Liberia

My friend Shelby has been living and blogging from Africa over the last year or so. From reading it you can tell what a unique experience she has had, and that she comes back a changed person. Welcome back, Shelby! Check out this post from Plantains and Palm Trees: > “[snip…] Going from Liberia to the US, my overwhelming thought is always this: It’s not that they’re poor and we’re rich. It’s that they’re incredibly poor and we’re incredibly rich. [snip…]” Read her blog, there are lots of other interesting and revealing stories.

State department has a blog team

Apparently the US State Department has a team of bloggers who get into discussions on boards and blogs around the world, taking an interesting alternative approach to the usual formal, high level diplomacy: > “…The State Department team members themselves said they thought they would be immediately flamed, or insulted and blocked from posting….” This is pretty interesting, and yet another sign of how blogs are infiltrating all aspects of life. Read the whole article: “At State Dept. Blog Team Joins Debate”, from the New York Times.

[geeky] Google Groups missing key functionality

I’ve been living inside a couple of [tag]Google groups[/tag] lately, posting questions and waiting for answers. (Which ones? Ruby on Rails: Talk and [tag]Active Scaffold[/tag]: Ruby on Rails plugin) Much to my surprise and [tag]productivity-loss[/tag], it’s not possible to request an email alert when someone posts an answer to your question. Odd, this is a oldie-but-goodie feature in many many mailing lists. So I am reduced to checking manually every day or so. (You can see it annoyed me sufficiently to bother writing this 🙂

Interesting pointer from Francois on the marketing potential of Facebook et al

Check out this post from Emergence Marketing: ** "Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself – many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group’s conversation." (from**: What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace)

Scott Adams is still funny: Suing God

Scott Adams of course is the evil genius behind Dilbert, which as you know I am a big fan of. Scott also has a really funny blog. As proof, this is from the latest post from The Dilbert Blog: > Lawyer: “Where were you on the night of the tornado?” God: “Um, everywhere. Same as always. Go to Hell. Seriously.” (from: Suing God)

Is a book’s cover art copyrighted?

I’m not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally different business books, published years apart, with practically the same cover. Funny?

[GEEKY] Gshell, the web’s own command line

You remember back in the stone ages we all interacted with computers by typing [tag]command lines[/tag] at a prompt. Then in the bronze age, the [tag]GUI[/tag] was invented and we used mice, menus and windows? (Oh some of us still preserve the old traditions of course using the ancient language ...

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