It’s really worth subscribing to “kazem’s” cartoon feed for some quality geek laughs. Occasionally he turns into a bit of a Sun shill (he does work for Sun) but mostly it’s just general laughs from a (software) bug’s life. Fortunately there’s now a happy little orange icon linking to the RSS feed – it took me ages to find it originally as it was in no way linked (it’s here for the record).

Ugo Cei commented on the new technorati interface and while I think it’s an improvement over their previous attempt, it still needs work. Searches work consistently now, but it’s still way too hard to find the RSS feed for the search and there appears to be a few bugs which prevent you from getting access to one at all for some searches. Oh well, looks like I’ll be using the Feedster integration with NetNewsWire for a while longer.

While this site is graciously hosted by Iain I’m in the process of developing another site (non-blog) and the more I think it through the more likely it is that it’s going to drive a not insignificant amount of traffic and I definitely want it to be snappy all the time (as opposed to slowing down when Iain decides to download too much at once). At the same time I keep playing with different technologies from J2EE to Ruby on Rails to custom perl apps and whatever else, so being able to set up whatever I want is a pretty big bonus.

Hey I stopped short of saying this is why I hate marketers… How many more Microsoft sites will open without RSS? Sigh. Sigh, Microsoft opens another cool but lame site. Cool cause it’s for digital photographers. Lame cause it doesn’t have an RSS feed. After Gnomedex these kinds of lame sites will look even lamer! When will Microsoft’s marketing departments get the memo? EVERY site MUST have RSS from now on.

I’ve been developing a fairly dynamic website using Ruby on Rails for the past week and I’m really quite impressed. I’d had no experience with Ruby before so I had to learn a new programming language and a new webapp framework but I’ve gotten going without too many problems and am already at least as productive as I would be with J2EE (possibly more so). Like most things though, it’s definitely very possible to create really awful looking code in RoR though most of the time the easiest way is very maintainable.

Yesterday morning as I arrived at work about 6:30am, a taxi was dropping off an elderly gentleman and parked halfway across our driveway in the process. This is not particularly uncommon for idiot drivers to park across our driveway being that we’re next door to a couple of ATMs that people like to “just quickly run to”. As such, I shook my head, squeezed past and went into work. About an hour later the secretary from the lawyers upstairs comes into our office and asks if we could assist an elderly gentleman up to their office since he’s apparently early for his 8:30am dentist appointment (the dentist is also upstairs).

There are an awful lot of search engines out there and they all try to index as much of the web as they can, as quickly as they can. For this site, search engines seem to cause more traffic than anything else: Top 20 of 720 Total User Agents # <th align="center" bgcolor="#008040" colspan="2"> <font size="-1">Hits</font> </th> <th align="center" bgcolor="#00E0FF"> <font size="-1">User Agent</font> </th> 1 <td align="right"> <b><font size="-1">6866</font></b> </td> <td align="right"> <font size="-2">12.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned numerous times that you should pay no attention to benchmarks, and apparently the benchmarks Anandtech used in their recent PPC vs Intel article were pretty bollocks too. So if you read or heard about that article and now believe that threads on OS X are too slow, you should read this response from Ridculous Fish. You should also read the first comment (which was the only comment when I read it).

I hope not. Not that I don’t think the Intel chips are superior at the moment, but because I really don’t want to have to deal with all the problems of major architecture changes – particularly such a major shift as PPC to Intel. That’s a major headache for developers and a whole heap of compatibility problems for consumers. Worse than that, it’s yet another platform for us to test on and there’s already way too many of those.

Mostly so I remember this later, this article lists a bunch of good online free (and royalty free) photo archives.

Not so long ago, I said that people tend to use Windows because of Microsoft’s monopoly more than because they actually like Microsoft. Apparently, when Scoble asks them why they run Windows, these are the common responses: Have you ever gone up to people and asked them why? I have. And the reasons people give are quite varied. Yes, “my boss gave me this” +is+ a common answer, but it’s only one I hear maybe one out of four times.

Currently at Ephox we use MSN Messenger for a lot of communication but the servers are somewhat unreliable and it would be nice in some cases to be able to tie conversations into various internal systems (for instance, when talking about a bug it would be nice to “invite” the bugzilla bug into the conversation so that the conversation is logged). There’s a bunch of other things I’d like to play with but don’t know where to start.