This is probably going to make me look dumb, but that’s never stopped me from posting before.  Was reading another article this morning about how Twitter’s been down *again*, which got me to thinking about other options, then to think more about the technical hurdles facing Twitter.  One thing I’ve read a few places is [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Software, Web 3 Comments »

This is the last in my MySQL conference series.  Brian Moon, author of Phorum and Sr Developer at Dealnews.com, sat down and gave a recap of his two presentations.  We have here nearly a full hour of his insights in to PHP/MySQL scalability, both with an app like Phorum and a more complex environment like [...]

Posted in Conferences, Database, Design, Development, Job, MySQL, PHP, Podcasts, Software, Web 2 Comments »

TechCrunch has a story on a recently funded Facebook app which, frankly, seems stupid.  Buying and selling ‘friends’ as ‘pets’.  People have already sold me somehow on Facebook, and I just ignore it.  I don’t get it.  I thought MySpace was the place for stupid/flitty ideas, but it seems Facebook is moving in that direction, [...]

Posted in Blogging, Business, Design, Development, Ecommerce, Ideas, Society, Software, Web 2 Comments »

I’ve been taking on a lot of small projects lately, and have been noticing the same problems over and over.  I’ve seen these for years, but I’ve dealt with far more projects in a short time than I ever did in the past.
The checklist below wouldn’t necessarily determine if I’d take a project or not, [...]

Posted in Design, Development, PHP, Software, Testing, Web 4 Comments »

Michael Arrington posted a fresh lament about the state of his inbox. He’s got 2400+ emails in his inbox right now, and he will likely nuke them all and start over (yet again) shortly. This got me to thinking (yet again!) about email/spam/inboxes. The article rightly pointed out that right now we [...]

Posted in Design, Ideas, Social, Society, Software, Web 6 Comments »

Bill Gates is predicting that we’ll interact with computers via speech and touchscreens more in the future.
In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.
I just can’t see this happening without a [...]

Posted in Business, Design, Search, Software 5 Comments »

I was a bit disheartened to learn that the standard Grails GSP tag for ’select’ didn’t accept a list in the ‘value’ parameter.  This is necessary when building HTML SELECTs with multiple options preselected.   So I wrote a patch, then realized it was already an issue, but hadn’t been looked at since May 07.  I [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Grails, Groovy, Java, Software, Web, opensource No Comments »

I was speaking to a friend this evening about a new site he’d put up, and I noticed yet again something that’s perplexed me for years.
I changed my Firefox settings to use a gray background instead of white.  It’s easier on the eyes in many cases, and I’ve had it set that way for years.  [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Web No Comments »

I just picked up Dreaming in Code from the library yesterday (or was it Friday evening?) and I’m about a third of the way through it.  I saw it at digitalguru.com when I was there a couple weeks ago, but didn’t know what it was about.  Then I read a review in the latest “strategy [...]

Posted in Book, Design, Development, Personal, Software, Web, linux, opensource No Comments »

I put up a new webdevradio podcast last week, day after Thanksgiving (or was it the day before?  I forget now).  Anyway, I’ve turned on the comments - apparently there was a bug that was stopping it from working - and am inviting more feedback and audio comments from listeners.  The podcast is short this [...]

Posted in Blogging, Design, Development, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Podcasts, Software, Web, linux No Comments »