Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
In: web services
25 May 2004Dick Costolo: "[E]ven if we can all get along and agree on a common base syndication format and the number of different clients dwindles to a powerful few, the entire syndication space will simultaneously witness a growing sophistication and accompanied level of fragmentation through conflicting namespaces and specialty clients. We are already seeing the emergence [...]
In: software
19 May 2004Back in the summer of 1993 I was an intern at Microsoft (a couple of years before I got back there for a real job), and I have a vivid recollection of a conversation I had with a product manager. When I expressed my frustration about the product design being process driven by focus groups, [...]
In: software
19 May 2004Ari Paparo just ran into the IT wall while implementing MT to support an intranet project. Here are the features he suggests developers should work on: version Control and archiving (there’s already a plugin for that but I don’t think it works for deleted entries), posting administration, username and password synching (ah, single sign-in!) and [...]
In: search engines
14 May 2004The new Google interface to Usenet has Atom feeds for every newsgroup (add /feeds to a group URL) and features membership more prominently, with shortcuts such as favorites groups and bookmarked threads. Some of the display modes work better than others, but where did the ability to sort search results by date rather than (dubious) [...]
In: software
6 May 2004Chris Pratley worked on MS Word at the time, and tells us Clippy’s story, if not from the very inside (the dreaded assistant wasn’t specific to Word but rather a feature common to several Office apps), at least from close enough. Yes, they were actually thinking, it’s just that not all features end up working [...]
A few minutes ago I was getting an error while trying to logon at Orkut. Ain’t it strange that Login.aspx spits out this: "Generated Wed, 05 May 2004 21:15:34 GMT by www.orkut.com (squid)" Squid on NT? Well, actually, yes. But isn’t .NET good enough to handle caching? It gets more tricky because apparently Orkut runs [...]
In: web services
5 May 2004Line56: "Huntington Bank’s customers have noticed a welcome service change in the past few months. When they use an ATM or use their cards at a merchant, the resulting change in balance shows up in their online banking accounts in real time. [...] The way in which Hungtington Bank has gotten consistency across its platforms [...]
Jason Fried: "We recently added a new feature to Basecamp that people have been asking for since we launched back in February. It’s a simple little feature called comment editing (people have always been able to edit their posts, just not their comments on a post). Yep, now people can edit their comments after they [...]
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.