Archive for March, 2006

Turning the Telcos Around

Friday, March 24th, 2006

There's an excellent article at TechDirt about the latest threats from the Telcos to charge for a tiered internet. You just have to ask, if you had the choice between two dsl or cable companies and one had Google and the other didn't, which one would you choose? All it ...

Bad sign for me

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Is it bad that when I picked up the mail today, I was excited to see a new netflix dvd had arrived, but rather than opening the package, my first instinct was to reach for the laptop to check the site to see what had been delivered? I'm going ...

Personal Search Engine: CloudGrove

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

So, I've got a little pet project that I've been working on in my spare time. I know there's been some discussion on the blogs about funny names for Web2.0 projects, and the driving force behind the name for CloudGrove was that it's become very difficult to find ...

Static blocks in java classes are evil

Monday, March 20th, 2006

This is a pet peeve of mine. Developers that place static blocks of code among java classes. While I know that according to the letter of the language this is a completely valid bit of code, I find that it's usually the result of a developer being lazy. Not looking ...

New version of MyEclipse

Monday, March 20th, 2006

There's a new version(4.1.1) of MyEclipse out now that fixed a few of the problems with earlier versions. With AJAX becoming all the rage among developers the tools are just starting to catch up. MyEclipse has always been the first plugin that I install on a dev box after Eclipse ...

Off Limit Words?

Monday, March 20th, 2006

The post two below this seems to have had a controversial word in it for the ads that appear on the right hand side of my site. While that post was at the top of the site with the T* word in it, the ads all became house ads. However, ...

V for Vendetta

Monday, March 20th, 2006

Went to see "V for Vendetta" sunday morning and was very pleasantly surprised. I felt the movie was even better than the book. They changed a few aspects of the story and simplified some plot points and toned it down a bit, which all worked together to create a ...

Why datamining for terrorists won’t work

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on why datamining for terrorists isn't statistically feasible.

SF 106Miles Meeting

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

Last night was the SF version of the 106Miles meeting. The host for this month was Dave Winer and he gave an interesting talk. He intentionally didn't prepare a presentation, but just let the discussion flow where it would, letting questions from the crowd direct him. Some highlights: Google's search ...

Good source for good books

Monday, March 6th, 2006

Was doing some reading on Lucene, which is an amazing open-source search engine, and was pointed at the book "Managing Gigabytes" from the lucene project's wiki. So, I looked up the book on amazon and was delighted to find a review of the book by Peter Norvig. From there I ...

Being a good manager

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

You can't underestimate the importance of consistency when you're a manager. If the people that you're managing can't predict your response, then your entire organization will grind to a halt. By giving one answer one day and then another answer the next, individuals will have to come to you every ...

All Marketers are liars

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

There's an excellent presentation by Seth Godin here that he gave at Google. Some excellent points about creating products that people actually need and selling them to the people that need them. I think that one of the underlying ideas of the presentation was that business really needs some ...

Ipods keep coming back up

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

After all of the praise and articles, ipods keep finding ways to amaze me. Got home the other day and was cleaning a lot of things out of my jeep and made the mistake of trying to grab the mail as well. With too many things in my hands ...