Did you know you can put php calls inside css? For instance, rotating images: background: url(images/letterboxSpin.php) 0px 0px no-repeat; } That’s something of a mind bomb.
October 12, 2006
My Life at Work
Excerpt: * Would it be possible to have the h3 pick up the correct “subhead” style from the div id=”centerwrap” directly? That is, it would be nice if the user didn’t have to enter the class in the edit block. We use the Markdown processor, so typically the user would start an h3 line with […]
October 10, 2006
Stunt Software’s Overflow
This has got to be the most elegant and straightforward software utility ever designed. Watch the short screencast movie to check it out. Without question, Apple should buy these guys and integrate this into the operating system.
September 12, 2006
Users GOOD, Groupware BAD
I read this Jamie Zawinski essay last year, but it’s worth another look. The trick you want to accomplish is that when one person is using your software, it suddenly provides value to that person and their entire circle of friends, without the friends having had to do anything at all. Then, later, you pull […]
September 7, 2006
Facebook Mini-Review
Well, I had a demo of Facebook, and it’s a very nice web application. [Previously: Attention Metastream. Today: Fred Wilson on the changes (good comments thread).] (I have removed names from this screenshot.) It’s hard to get a sense of it from the picture, but I can tell that if I were a college student […]
September 5, 2006
WoW Update
In June 2005, I wrote about World of Warcraft (WoW): Conservatively, there was a one-time revenue stream of just under $100 million dollars, and an on-going monthly revenue of just under $26 million (just under $312 million annually). They are opening the game up in China soon, where there are 500,000 players in the open […]
August 24, 2006
DIY Website Heatmaps
Fantastic. Fully documented source code for making your own heat maps of user clicks on websites.
August 13, 2006
What Is Lingr?
Coming soon… Now live: “Lingr is the place for chat on the web. That’s it, seriously- nothing could be simpler.”
August 1, 2006
The Difference a “..” Makes
Unbelievably crazy-busy day. At one point in the morning, Adrian was working on a website redesign, Marty was starting the v4.1 SFTP programming, Anne was catching me up on her sales work and the plan for August, and I’m thinking, “It used to be that I came to this office and it was mine alone […]
July 25, 2006
Cogitating Is Doing
In software engineering it’s common to spend much more time understanding and characterizing something than actually implementing a feature or fix. For example, we just spent almost two hours pair programming to figure out 1) if the observed behavior is correct by design (yes); 2) why the error message is wrong (null set); 3) finding […]
July 24, 2006
Things Programmers Say
Notio: There are a lot of CGI.pm flags for controlling the HTTP headers. Does our code send any of those? P: Hang on, let me look. … No. Notio: For instance, it says “The -nph parameter, if set to a non-zero value, will generate a valid header for use in no-parsed-header scripts. You will need […]
July 20, 2006
cmd-tab
Trivial Mac tip: I just figured out cmd-tab for application switching. It’s great. The default selection is the last app you used, so it’s easy to switch back and forth between two apps. You can arrow between any open apps, but the UI design to order them based on recency is brilliant.
July 13, 2006
AI@50
Meg Houston Maker is doing some fantastic live blogging of the Dartmouth AI@50 conference. This gathering celebrates, explores, and, to an extent, reprises the original Dartmouth Summer Research Project in artificial intelligence of 1956, which proceeded “on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in […]
July 11, 2006
Examples of Categories
Art: Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins on live TV. (Thanks Jon.) Commerce: Do Patents Encourage or Stifle Innovation? Culture: On media elitism and the “derivative” myth Technology: On playing with my Holux GPS unit… Cool: Velcro Being Pulled Apart
July 9, 2006
Make Something People Want
I hesitate to point to every Paul Graham essay that comes along, but these links are useful for future research. Excerpts: The idea of building something popular then figuring out how to make money from it was born in the Bubble. It sounds irresponsible, but it works. Requiring founders to have a carefully worked out […]
July 6, 2006
Backup Brain
So I don’t have to spend twenty minutes with Google-fu the next time I’m looking for this, here are two in-depth articles on Mac OSX backup. 1) The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X 2) Mac Backup Software Harmful Summary: 1) It’s a complicated problem. 2) Use SuperDuper.
June 28, 2006
Internet Economics 2006
Would you like to tune into a wavelength describing state-of-the-art Internet business models? If so, Jason Calacanis has what you want. You see, Battelle’s model is predicated on Rafat and Om deciding to stay in phase two or keep their relationship with Federated in phase three–which they are obviously not willing to do. That’s why […]
May 23, 2006
Pragmatic Technology Strategy
Yesterday Mark and I drove down to Andover MA to meet with Walden. We three are running a (pro-bono) session for a Coop consulting group next month on technology strategy. Because Kate wasn’t feeling well, we went to Panera for three hours. The place was hoppin’ with businesspeople! Above you see Walden coaching Mark on […]
May 19, 2006
What Nerds Do For Fun
This is beautiful: Closures; an Italian Sonnet, by Bruce Williams. What’s a closure, you ask? Here’s Martin Fowler’s description: Closures have been around for a long time. I ran into them properly for the first time in Smalltalk where they’re called Blocks. Lisp uses them heavily. They’re also present in the Ruby scripting language – […]