“It’s Been 10 Years, You Still Amaze Me”

Today marks a decade of marriage for Jen and me. Back then, I had no idea how dramatically our relationship would improve over the years. I didn’t know that we’d catch our stride 5 years in, nor how much easier that makes things. Especially with the big stuff. All of which I owe to her. …

Cullect.com – “takes the web2 out of feed readers and I love it.”

Arik Jones, one of the people I’ve asked to try Cullect.com for a week, wrote up his thoughts two-days in: “Unlike Google Reader it doesn’t inundate you with useless UI elements….What I like the most about Cullect is the ability to recommend feeds and then being able to give friends a dead simple url. It …

Book Still Readable – Decades Later!

“If you’d have told me then that by 2007 the state of the art would barely have advanced beyond that of 1998, I’d have wept openly.” – Dave Slusher If you fell into a coma when Business 2.0 had a roller coaster on the cover and woke up today, you’d have one more reason to …

Strib: Off-Topic, Uncredited, Fear-fanning, Ads

Reading the Strib’s Business section yesterday, I was reminded of Sesame Street’s “One of these things is not like the other” sketch. Here’s the story, can you guess which one doesn’t belong? “Grounds for worry: Trouble’s brewing in the economy, if the news from the nation’s biggest coffee chains is any indication. No. 2 player …

Say When

When was the last time you – yes, you, specifically – thought, “I sure would enjoy [insert favorite publication] more if they inserted more advertisements.” Thought so. A friendly reminder that readers, viewers, fans, etc aren’t the people pushing and demanding advertisements. “‘Deal with it’ doesn’t mean ‘Make better advertising’ or ‘Target your advertising more …

Rails Cheap, MySQL Expensive

This is an update to earlier post on Performance and MySQL Indexes. While 10-12 seconds per feed is an improvement, it’s completely unacceptable when we’re talking 2,000+ feeds (full parse would take 5.5 hours) and slow down the system to unusable. In an attempt to find the bottlenecks, I loaded up the query_analyzer plugin on …

If We Can’t Share Nothing

Hi. Howareyou? Whatsup? Nothing. Yaknow. PrettyCrappyOutToday TrafficWasHorrible How many times have you had that conversation? Today? Banality in less than 140 characters is the foundation of our social interaction. It safely builds the trust required for a longer, more engaging exchange. If we can’t share the meaningless, what can we share? “Part of the power …

Project Launch: Developers.Sun.com

The redesigned Developers.Sun.com, another of the Sun projects I’ve been involved on, launched today. Two things I’m real happy with; links to blogs, video, and other community spaces are at the core of the page, and a directory of development resources at the bottom of the page. The official announcement from Jill Welch, managing editor.