January 2, 2003

Mod Foosball

Dennis Crowley: “Take a standard foosball table and make it a little bit smarter.” (via Slashdot)

January 1, 2003

Dave Winer is looking for a new job

From Scripting News: “I’m going to get a new job with a new title, and it’s going to be quite different from being the CEO of a commercial software company.”

Good luck Dave! Hope you have better luck than most these days!

January 1, 2003

Have a beer with those steamed vegetables

From: NY Times: “Thirty years of research has convinced many experts of the health benefits of moderate drinking for some people. A drink or two a day of wine, beer or liquor is, experts say, often the single best nonprescription way to prevent heart attacks — better than a low-fat diet or weight loss, better even than vigorous exercise. Moderate drinking can help prevent strokes, amputated limbs and dementia.”

December 31, 2002

LazyWeb recursion

Ben Hammersly creates the fodder feed for the LazyWeb, which IMHO is one of those clever “windshield wiper” ideas that once you see it you’re think, “Man! it’s so obvious, why didn’t someone implement this sooner!” Very ingenious! I hope to contribute!

December 31, 2002

NNTP Clients reading RSS

Neat idea: “nntp//rss — Bridging the worlds of NNTP clients and RSS feeds, nntp//rss is an
application that will enable you to use your existing favorite NNTP newsreader
to read your [RSS] information channels.”

December 31, 2002

Firing weapons on New Year’s Eve can be deadly

Ahh, in case you didn’t know … “La Quinta Cove [is] alerting residents that firing their guns into the air at midnight can kill.” Ok, happy new year then …

December 30, 2002

Fax machines are evil!

Today Doc posts about retiring an old “1980-vintage Panafax PX-100 fax machine”.

However, I have a bigger request. When will we rid the planet of fax machines entirely? I mean, technically do they really have a purpose these days?

It seems that the workflow for faxing is ridiculously wasteful for most fax transmissions.

Basically, I print something just so I can fax it. Why waste the paper? When all I really need to do is email or “remote print” the document.

December 28, 2002

PHP Caching with JPCACHE

Sweet! I just configured jpcache to cache and gzip compiled pages on hatch.org. So the b2 powered blog should feel snappier. I need to work out a few of the kinks with respect to expiring the cache when there are new posts and/or comments. Plus, I had to trap the gzip compression function in b2, because jpcache does it as well, but for the most part it seems to be working well.

December 27, 2002

In-Room Chat as a Social Tool

Clay Shirky “… hosted a two-day brainstorming session for 30 or so
people on the subject of social software. In addition to the usual “sit
around a big table and talk to each other” format, [they] set up an
in-room chat channel accessible over the WiFi network which created a
two-channel experience — a live conversation in the room, and an
overlapping real-time text conversation.”

December 27, 2002

The computer pond is shrinking

Quote pulled from a Slashdot thread about Engineering
Careers Short-Circuiting:”The computer pond is shrinking, but
that’s because it’s been overstocked for quite a while. The talented,
smart, crafty, dedicated fish will always be in demand, the ones who are
simply looking for a paycheck will be walking an unemployment line.”