Tonight I read two articles, one on: how bloated and complicated the latest version of Ruby on Rails is how Javascript is the new must learn language Separately and combined, both are such a mind grenade it can only mean one thing.
Category Archives: General
Loosely Interesting
“Loose federations of heterogenous interests with high incentives to integrate are so much more interesting than centralized organizations.” – erikpukinskis
Bitrayal
“The only difference is most of the users won’t ever know they were deeply and constantly betrayed. Users got so much used to crap, so they forgot how to differentiate between starships and crap.”
The URL Shortener Subcommittee
“We believe that [URL shorteners] pose a serious threat to the internet’s integrity. If one of them dies, gets hacked or sells out, millions of links will stop working. Thus we preemptively release backups, because URL shorteners are too busy to make backups themselves.”
Writing the Great American Startup
“The ‘Great American Novel’ is the concept of a novel that is distinguished in both craft and theme as being the most accurate representative of the zeitgeist in the United States at the time of its writing.” (wikipedia) “My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing. The vast majority of programming is not …
Are Groupon’s Investors Asking for a Public Bailout?
Over the past couple years, I’ve consulting on a number of projects (at least 4) in the same space as Groupon (et al). This model of providing a heavily discounted coupon on local merchants just doesn’t sit right with me – for two reasons. it applies significant downward pressure on the merchant’s overall prices (even …
Continue reading “Are Groupon’s Investors Asking for a Public Bailout?”
Maybe with coupons?
“How do you value a business that could do $3 billion in revenue this year but might not be able to keep the lights on in 12 months?” – Conor Sen
Spring in the Browser
Last autumn, inspired by a conversation with Jamie Thinglestad, I took a couple lunch hours and hacked together a tool that dramatically improves my web browsing experience. Since then, I hadn’t used it much. Nor have I revisited it to polish it up. Jamie and I have shared it with a small handful of people …
Why Can’t Smart Phones Read?
I’ve been investigating useful uses for QR codes and while I’ve got a couple…they still feel rather flimsy. Like the QR Code is being used as a cute novelty – rather than a way to enhance communication. QR Codes are inherently temporary (as in, tomorrow a better encoding technology will exist and today’s readers aren’t …
John’s Phone
To this day – the Palm Treo, for all it’s flaws, was my favorite phone. The team that designed the phone UI – had experience actually making phone calls. Every phone I’ve had since – including my current one – I’m less confident of that. Instead, I have a pocket-size computer that always promises to …