Work on unimportant problems
It seems obvious that some problems are important to solve and some aren't, as in, curing cancer is more important than delivering social gaming. Often, people lament the abundance of tech firms working on ultimately unimportant stuff, and advise to work on important problems and not just chase the money.
No Framework Needed
It goes without saying that we use Rails a lot here at 37signals. Often times, when we look at a problem, we turn to Rails or something similar, because when you have a high-performance precision screwdriver, everything starts to look like a finely engineered screw. Sometimes, what you really need …
Racket v5.3
_posted by Eli Barzilay_ Racket version 5.3 is now available from http://racket-lang.org/ Release Highlights:: Submodules are nested module declarations that can be loaded and run independently from the enclosing module. See also the overview of su...
Don't Waste a Single Moment
I’ve embarked on a new adventure as CEO & Cofounder of Referly – a startup that is helping anyone earn rewards for referring products they love and generat...
Useful use of cat(1)
Rather special example: This was useful for me on a Redhat Linux, where man(1) otherwise annoyingly would intersperse the output with headers and footers for a print version, which is rarely used, though... I tried: ( echo -e ".pl 1100i"; cat "$1"; echo ".pl \\n(nlu+10\n" ) | tbl | nroff -man
Traveling Salesman: the most misunderstood problem
Whenever people start talking about NP-Complete problems, or even NP problems, one of the first examples they reach for is the classic Traveling Salesperson Problem. TSP makes sense because it int...
Phonegap 2.0 released
The original PhoneGap 2.0 announcement, preserved with its historical context.
The Best Tech Ad I’ve Seen Lately
A few days ago, I got a copy of TIME Magazine in the mail with an advertisement that really struck me as near-perfect. I thought I’d write a quick post about it since I haven’t heard m…
Python becomes a platform. Thoughts on the release of clojure-py.
The recent announcement of clojure-py made some noise in the Clojure community, but not, as far as I can tell, in the Python community. For those who haven’t heard of it before, clojure-py is…
An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect
Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in:
Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain
(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliograp…
Storm's first birthday
Storm was open-sourced exactly one year ago today. It's been an action-packed year for Storm, to s...
Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)
Bill Buxton Microsoft Research Original: Jan. 12, 2007 Version: December 10th, 2025
Using Twitter to Build a Password Cracking List - 1978 passwords out of 4400
This is going to be a quick one. We're going to show how to use twitter to build a word list for cracking passwords. We'll use John the Rip...
TCP doesn't suck, and all the proposed bufferbloat fixes are identical
: While I'm suspicious of all JIT-compiled languages, C# has always had a much better IL than java, even since version 1.0, making it easy...
Lovelace – The Origin
This brief biographical sketch was done for Ada Lovelace Day 2009. I think I in was a pub at the time.
Books for people in the software business
I have personally read every book in this list. The enormous value I've gotten out of these books is the sole reason I am recommending them. These books helped me to make my Swift To-Do List very successful. There are no affiliate links in this post. I...
Why host and write a blog?
Jon Udell is blogging less . Gosh, so am I . There are loads of ways to talk to the world, new alternatives every day it seems. Is this thing, you know, over?
Amazon Data Center: 450,000 Estimated EC2 Servers
(Edit 3/16/2012: I am surprised that this post is picked up by a lot of media outlets. Given the strong interest, I want to emphasize what is measured and what is derived. The # of server racks in …
An introduction to modern OpenGL
Table of Contents | Chapter 2 » OpenGL has been around a long time, and from reading all the accumulated layers of documentation out there on the Internet, it's not always clear what parts are h…
How Copyright Industries Con Congress
I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about in hopes of persuading lawmakers that…
Announcing the jQuery Foundation
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library