Blog Posts

All my blog posts and articles

Page 99 of 142 (2823 total posts)

September 2007

Is Facebook used or blocked in businesses?

It’s hard to get good data on this, and I keep get wildly varying opinions. I haven’t fully formed my own yet, but here’s another data point: > “In contrast, 50 percent of respondents said that their company did not block access to [tag]Facebook[/tag], with eight percent specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash.” (from Sophos) What do you think?

Barcoding the planet

picture-1.pngSemapedia is a quirky project that wants to get us to put these special little barcodes on everything on the planet. The idea is that you walk up to something, say the Eiffel Tower, or my house, point your cell phone camera at it and a click or so later, you get a nice article on the screen of your phone, describing it. I first read about it in Jeremy Wagstaff’s ‘Loose Wire’ series. Quirky, in a Don Quixote kind of way.

Top Ruby Books

toprubybooks1.jpg Over the last 2 weeks I’ve been actually able to carve out some quality time to get my head around Ruby and Ruby on Rails. My play project is something called myscum.org, which is a lightweight scrum tracking tool. Basically it’s modeled after what I’ve been using for BlogBridge, working with Aleksey. So a pretty simple case, makes a decent play project. But of course, that’s how BlogBridge started. A decent play project…

August 2007

What is the relationship between Technorati tags and Google search results?

Bill Ives of the [tag]Portals and KM[/tag] blog did an interesting bit of analysis about how tagging with Technorati may or may not affect rankings in Google. It’s something I’ve been paying attention to as well. Recently I found this really nice WordPress plug in that makes it dead easy to tag content in Technorati. It’s called ‘[tag]SimpleTags[/tag]‘ and it allows me to simply mark up the text I am writing inline and certain words will automagically become Technorati tags.

Vitamins

Check out this post! > “Vitamins can help with the aging process as well as preventing premature aging. For more information on vitamins , you may want to visit Vitamins Explained. Vitamins A, E, C, and the B complex vitamins How To Approach Anti-Aging Treatm...

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Rebate trickery, again

Many consumer products, like cell phones, computers, and so on seem to come with some kind of a [tag]rebate[/tag]. Buy now and get $50 back, and so on. I don’t quite understand the business or marketing intent of this scheme. I just switched my whole kit and kaboodle cell phone business from Sprint...

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An interesting paper about social networks

The guy who created [tag]Live Journal[/tag] (Brad Fitzpatrick) has a manifesto of sorts regarding what needs to happen next in the world of [tag]social networking[/tag]. He is certainly not the first to identify the problem: > “If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.” (from Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph)

TextMate and Ruby

I’m an on and off [tag]Ruby[/tag] developer, and recently I’ve been trying to decide whether I should use Eclipse for Ruby development or whether TextMate (I am on a Mac) is better. Why even think of [tag]Eclipse[/tag]? Simply that I know it well and it’s very rich for developing Java. It’s also cro...

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Would this have saved JFK Jr?

Check out this post from James Fallows: > A small plane apparently crashed last night on Nantucket Island. First reports are never quite right, but it appears that the weather was terrible — dark; very low clouds; mist and fog; sea, sky, and land in a blur. These are deadly conditions to fly in, and the same conditions in the same area killed John F. Kennedy Jr. 8 years ago.* (from: Would this have saved JFK Jr?)

Announcement: September PHP User Group

On September 11, 2007, the [tag]Boston PHP User Group[/tag] is meeting about “Building the PHP-stack for the [tag]enterprise[/tag]”: > “PHP has become ubiquitous when it comes to personal blogs, content management systems, ecommerce sites and more. Take any list of Web 2.0 sites and you’ll find that more than 50% have PHP as back-end technology. What is less known is that PHP is also making significant inroads in the enterprise. Join BostonPHP, IBM and Zend as we discuss where “Enterprise” PHP (and OSS) is going and how it’s going to get there. : (from Boston PHP) If you are into [tag]PHP[/tag] you should check it out!

“The Most Expensive Bidder”

[tag]Funny[/tag]! I saw this in Dilbert this weekend. I’ve lived this myself. And I’ve been accused of “you make competing sound bad.” They may have a point, I don’t know.