Call land-lines from your Jabber client of choice with JabPhone.
Alex King's blog desperately needs to have higher contrast between its text color and its background color.
JetBlue will be serving Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Yay!
With AJAX and DOM scripting becoming more commonplace, pages are too dynamic to illustrate with a static wireframe or page description diagram, and it seems everyone is starting to realize it. Unfortunately, The [sic] alternatives to traditional wireframes such as animated GIF's [sic] or storyboarding, really aren't much better. I really think there's only one solution. Just build it.
— Garrett Dimon, AJAX & DOM Scripting: Just Build It (emphasis his)
Mark Nottingham's announced an utterly fantastic set of tests of XMLHttpRequest's HTTP behavior.
Ruby client and
Rails module for memcached.
via the Rails
blog.
Kevin Burton rightly thinks stealth mode doesn't work (emphasis mine):
If you think your idea is valuable you're wrong… Good entrepreneurs don't create ideas — they execute. It's all about execution…
Here's the important part. One major component of your execution strategy is going to be convincing the blogosphere that your company is the next big thing and will change their lives. You can't do this when you're in stealth.
Stealth mode also prevents you from hiring engineers, finding investors, and partners. There may still be a few small reasons why going stealth is a good idea but I think for 95% of new Internet companies it just won't work.
Looking for a beautiful typeface? Fontin.
Two years ago,
Bill Gates said that two years from
now, spam will be solved.
People often assume that Yahoo! moving Viaweb off of Lisp, and Sony moving Naughty Dog off of Lisp, says something bad about Lisp itself. Bill Clementson looks at the same data and comes to the conclusion that lisp is good for startups (emphasis mine):
So, Yahoo acquires Viaweb and rewrites it. The end result is inferior to the original Lisp-based product. Sony acquires Naughty Dog and decides to eliminate the Lisp-based development infrastructure. The end result is an inferior game development environment. Sure, there were probably a lot of reasons for these decisions by Yahoo and Sony… however, the end result for both companies has been something inferior to what they originally acquired.
But, for both Paul Graham and Naughty Dog, the use of Lisp allowed them to develop products that pushed them to the front of the pack. They were subsequently bought out; however, the fact that their Lisp tools were subsequently discarded does not throw a negative shadow on Lisp. Lisp got them to where they needed to be to succeed — definitely a quality that entrepreneurs want in a programming language!
Trader Joe's 2005 Vintage Ale (by Unibroue) is ridiculously yummy and, at $4.99 a pop, it's easily worth every penny.
Chad Dickerson on email management at a new job (emphasis mine):
[I'm] cleaning out my e-mail inbox, and it's a mess. Only 22 weeks into my job at Yahoo!, I'm looking at an inbox with 5100+ e-mails, since I have deleted absolutely nothing since I started — and that leads to the point I want to make about getting organized in a new job. It might be GTD heresy, but in a new job, I think you should let your inbox fill up for the first 4–6 months… Then, 4–6 months later, when you've really begun to make sense of your role, the organization, and how it all works, spend a few days churning through that old inbox and doing some filing.
That's what I'm doing, and I'm finding e-mails on topics that were inscrutable to me in my first couple of months, but are now immensely valuable. I'm finding e-mails from people who I've gotten to know, but didn't know when I received the e-mails. I'm finding informational e-mails from HR and Finance that didn't make sense when I got them, and now do. I'm finding e-mail threads about projects that were just one in an overall soup of projects, but are now very specifically pertinent to what I'm doing now.
Ironic: IEEE's new web site isn't standards-compliant.