Oxyfish

I spent a half hour on the phone with Erika Brown educating her on Wikis, but I guess I failed to produce any soundbites worthy of quoting. At least Woodside Fund is mentioned.

Forbes.com: Veni, Vidi … Wiki?

I have been playing with wikis lately, and installed MediaWiki (the one that runs WikiPedia) to get started. Unfortunately, I’m not particularly good at the visually creative part – I liked the web better when you just had <h1> and <strong> to do formatting. Once I get it looking reasonable, I’ll link to it here. In the meantime, here’s another new wiki that has a decent setup.

Main Page – Grokdoc

A pretty interesting re-casting of the software development process as an economic cooperative resource-limited goal-directed game.

Alistair Cockburn

Cringely goes over the top once again, but it’s always entertaining. I have a WRT56G, so I guess I’ll have to try one of these open source firmware distros at some point.

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

So, I just installed Markdown and Smartypants. Let’s see how they work!

This should be bold and emphasized. And now a list:

• an item
• another item

Just for fun, a numbered list:

1. just for fun
2. buckle my shoe

How did it work?

I decided to post my enhancements to pop2blog, even though they aren’t very earth shaking. They are:

1. use a mail folder instead of POP to get the mail
2. authenticate against the entire email address, not just user portion
3. strip .signature from the email

enhanced pop2blog

Did it work? I’m sitting in SFO on T-Mobile, and it took me about 15 minutes to get on, figure out the right regular expression to remove the signature, and test it. I manually removed my sig from the previous entry, but this one should be automatically removed.

I just installed pop2blog, so I can blog from anywhere with my blackberry. I budgeted a half hour, but it took me more like an hour. Not bad!

I found this quite funny, and somewhat educational. Lots of inside jokes.

How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less [dive into mark]

I enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, although I liked Eastern Standard Tribe even more. Here is a cool project to create an open-source audio version of it. I love the Creative Commons!

Details for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – Prologue

I tried Bloomba, but I need to continue to use Outlook for a variety of reasons, mostly corporate. What I really want is the functionality of Bloomba, but as an Outlook plug-in. I tried switching back and forth for a while, but I really live in Outlook. I’ve also tried Search Folders in Outlook 2003, but they’re not as good as Bloomba.

Stata Labs, Inc.

Speadsheets distort our thinking:

There are two ways that spreadsheets, as we know them, distort our thinking and lead to bad decisions. The first distortion is the use of point values and simple arithmetic instead of probability distributions and statistical measures. So far as I know, there’s no off-the-shelf spreadsheet product—certainly none in common use—that provides for input of numbers as uncertain quantities, even though almost all of our decisions rest on forecasts or on speculations.

The second distortion caused by conventional spreadsheets is more subtle… The paper described an experiment in which subjects were asked to perform a planning task using different tools, some of them with elaborate what-if capability and others without it. The subjects whose tools invited them to imagine alternative scenarios believed they were doing a better job—even though statistical measures of their results showed no improvement in the actual quality of the forecasts.

Yahoo! News – Spreadsheets: 25 Years in a Cell

Filelight seems like a cool way to visualize your disk usage.

Simon Cozens

A terabyte in a portable box for $1200 – incredible.

LaCie – Bigger Disk – largest hard drive capacity available

Paul Mockapetris was the original inventor of DNS and has some interesting ideas about using it for other uses.

Letting DNS Loose

And when you finish that, build some more of you. Go ahead, fill a
whole desert valley. And then produce unlimited energy while
eliminating the greenhouse effect. Okay? Thanks.

By Thomas Bass

DISCOVER Vol. 16 No. 10 | October 1995 | Technology

Read the rest of this entry »

A pretty good article on the difference between Windows and Unix programmers.

Joel on Software – Biculturalism

I love finding new uses for old tech stuff.

New Startup Secret: Dumpster Diving :: AO

I tried (and failed) to do this once – this guy is much more organized than me.

CVS homedir