Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability's role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don't take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…
The basic Oddpost JavaScript is broken up between a few JavaScript files including new code from Yahoo! with comments dated throughout the past couple months. Part of the new Yahoo! Mail is a straight drop-in from Oddpost, including some developer fun in the "SubjectOMatique" complete with references to He-Man, The Simpsons, and Zoolander. BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL! Get out of my dreams, get into my car. Up ahead! It's a DONUT HUT!! When Lawyers Attack Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadu Hold me closer, Tony Danza The Dreaded Executive Spousal Review It's funny to see old jokes live on even…
Six Apart is hosting the San Francisco Perl Users Group tonight at 8 p.m. for a behind-the-scenes look at Movable Type. Byrne Reese will discuss the underpinning of Movable Type's architecture and design decisions. The meeting is free and open to all attendees. Topics Template tags Text fliters Callbacks Alternate templates MT::Plugin MT::Object MT:App Tags: movabletype, perl…
The latest stable version of Bugzilla, 2.20, outputs queries in RSS 1.0 format. The new feature cuts down on the notifications flooding your inbox and will probably lead to more developers following more product changes. Tags: bugzilla, RDF, RSS…
I just finished reading Paul Graham's latest essay he prepared for OSCON: What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Paul is an excellent writer and hit on a few key points I want to emphasize here. I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that's news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn't know this, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by…
MySpace, a popular online social networking and blogging site with nearly 20 million users, is moving from ColdFusion to .Net. MySpace received over 7.5 billion page views from 15.5 million unique visitors in May according to comScore. Looks like the site will continue to use its CFML code as native .Net web applications. Seems like a big win for Microsoft! Tags: cfml, coldfusion, dotnet…
I attended the "Meet the Community" panel at the Open Source Business Conference today in San Francisco. After reading the list of panelists I knew I just had to be there.
Amazon is hosting DevCon this week for its software development team. If you could like to join the developer chat you may have a chance to ask questions of Guido van Rossum and other speakers on today's schedule. The web services team plans to post video and possibly audio, but the summaries are an interesting enough read regardless. Some excerpts: Joel Spolsky: "[P]eople won't understand where their emotional reactions are coming from. Use this info in real life. Do same thing with software, put people in control, good emotional response, good physical feel, remind them of mom. Make it pretty,…
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers' contest but I won…
Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…
Nathan Yergler announced ccPublisher, a tool that allows content creators to upload Creative Commons licensed audio or video files to your site or to the Internet Archive for free hosting. ccPublisher will embed a license claim in MP3 audio files. The OS X version is a whopping 60 MB. The application is written in Python and is a part of the Creative Commons Tools project on SourceForge.net….
Sun Microsystems hosted a programming summit yesterday with many big names in programming in attendance. Tim Bray has a good write-up about the day, the process putting together the event, and some of the outcomes. GroovyJames Stachan JavaGraham HamiltonGilad BrachaMartin Buchholz ParrotDan Sugalski PerlLarry Wall PythonGuido van RossumSamuele PedroniSean McGrath Good to see so many major coders in one spot to share ideas. Tim predicts "that as time goes by, more and more of the code written in the Java ecosystem won't be in Java. This is a good thing."…
Python 2.4 is now available. Unification of integers and long integers, better floating point number support, multiple calls per XML-RPC operation, cookie support, and a subprocess module for spawning platform-independent processes are just some of the new features….
Koders is a search engine for source code. Very useful when you want to see how other projects have implemented the code you are considering. You can even check out an estimation for how much money you will save by integrating the existing code or project versus building it yourself. Some examples: Google reference in java code GAIM costs more than HTTPD?…
Programmers at LexisNexis have a creative method of expiring outdated code: it is buried in a graveyard. There are at least eight grave markers and some funerals include the playing of "Taps" and eulogies. To make sure really hated sites are banished forever some employees drive a stake through the printed pages of code….
Novell released version 1.0 of Mono today. Mono is an open source implementation of the .NET framework for use on Linux, Unix, MacOS X and Windows system.
Microsoft released beta versions of its Visual Studio 2005 product, including a new line of low cost Express products. All downloads are free for now, but Microsoft does plan to charge for the products in the near future….
The P2P Weblog posted an e-mail from Bram Cohen listing the some of the features of the BitTorrent 2 protocol. Merkle hash trees, UDP trackers, and more….
Annalee Newitz writes about geek approaches to online romance in the June 2004 issue of Wired magazine. The article starts on page 156, and is now online. Christopher Filkins and his FOAF-based Dating Syndicate. Marc Canter's People Aggregator is mentioned as another dating engine built on FOAF. Kevin Burton is named "The Sniffer" for his use of AIM Sniffer to pick up women in wireless Internet enabled San Francisco cafés. Jonathan Moore is profiled as "The Stalker" for his use Unix shell scripts and Netcat to pull e-mail addresses from wireless networks and match the data with a Friendster profile….
Technorati released a new version of its APIs tonight. Details are available on the Technorati developers wiki. Use apibeta.technorati.com for now but, if there are no major issues, beta will end in about a week. Technorati will now return your query as RSS if you specify your format parameter. Data are returned in UTF-8 format. The new API has better error handling, including appropriate HTTP responses for bad data or no data. Outbound links are sorted by dates and duplicate links stripped. The new API also allows you to limit the number of returned items….
Scott Rosenberg of Salon attended the Systems and Software Technology Conference to research the military's dependence on software code. The average acquisition cycle for a military product, according to conference speakers, is 10 years — and that's an optimistic figure. Between the time the Pentagon commissions a system and a contractor delivers it, whole generations of private-sector computing software and hardware have come and gone. XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America. If you're writing software today for a system that's going to take years to deploy, you have no choice but to plan on everything changing around…
Microsoft is giving away a free copy of Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition to users that view and rate 5 VB movies. There will not be 5 movies available until May 17, but there is already a Data and XML tutorial online. Free offer valid in U.S. and Canada only….
Macromedia officially introduced Flex today. Rich UI through Flash, similar to Laszlo. Later this year Macromedia plans to release a new Flex development tool code-named Brady with visual layout, code editing, debugging, and data connectivity tools for creating Flex applications in Dreamweaver. IBM already has a Flex WebSphere Studio plugin. Runs on Java app servers and you can download a free developer version on the Flex site….
This week's Software Development Conference & Expo featured a panel of software experts discussing the past and future of software engineering. Susan Lammers, author of Programmers At Work, chaired the panel. Panelists were Dan Bricklin, Robert Carr, Andy Hertzfeld, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, Ray Ozzie, Jef Raskin, and Charles Simonyi. Scott Rosenberg has a pretty thorough write-up on Salon.com….
