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"I firmly believe that widgets (local HTML/CSS/Javasctipt web apps) are the future of the mobile web...."

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:48:15 -0400

“I firmly believe that widgets (local HTML/CSS/Javasctipt web apps) are the future of the mobile web. They are easy to create, they’re based on open standards, they save the end user quite a bit of network traffic, and many people around the world already know how to create them.”

- Peter Paul Koch - QuirksBlog: Introduction to W3C Widgets

"the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these..."

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:47:09 -0400

“the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout”

- Danah Boyd

"Presence always trumps presents."

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 14:55:00 -0500

“Presence always trumps presents.”

- Joe Kelly, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

ï»¿ - Weird characters in Visual Studio 2008

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:18:00 -0500

I am using VS 2008 while most of my team is on 2005. Recently after syncing with CVS, my solution would not build. One of my code-behind files had the characters “ï»¿” prepended to it. After a bit of googling, I found this:

“Those are the marks some Windows applications use to distinguish UTF-8 from ASCII (they are a translation of the U+FEFF byte order marks into UTF-8). I’ve never done anything with VS and aspx, so I don’t know how to get rid of them. Maybe there is a way to tell VS to save things in UTF-8 without the marks (if you still want them to be UTF-8) or to just save them in ASCII (if you don’t care about UTF-8).” (from here)

According to Wikipedia, “a text editor that does not recognize UTF-8 will display “ï»¿” at the start of the document, even if the UTF-8 contains only ASCII and would otherwise display correctly.” Hmmm, sounds like our issue, doesn’t it?

So, I dug around in Visual Studio until I found the “Auto-detect UTF-8 encoding without signature” option (Tools->Options->Text Editor)

That did the trick. I re-synced with CVS and verified that the issue is gone. The “ï»¿” characters are no longer showing up.

The Story of Stuff

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:21:15 -0400

The Story of Stuff

"There are no longer ‘dancers.’ the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and..."

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:17:33 -0400

“There are no longer ‘dancers.’ the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. […] We are content in the ‘given’ in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.”

- Jim Morrison, The Lords and the New Creatures

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:19:16 -0400

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”

- Richard P. Feynman on The Value Of Science

New YouTube Beta Feature: Video Annotations

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:32:20 -0400

New YouTube Beta Feature: Video Annotations

A Bit of Fry and Laurie - There ain’t but one way (Kicking...

Fri, 23 May 2008 19:26:54 -0400

A Bit of Fry and Laurie - There ain’t but one way (Kicking ass)

"We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines..."

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:13:57 -0400

“We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce. […] If as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.”

- The Gospel of Consumption | Orion magazine

"People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her..."

Fri, 02 May 2008 16:59:39 -0400

“People who hear about this suit will have a sour taste in their mouth about Rowling from now on. Her Cinderella story once charmed us. Her greedy evil-witch behavior now disgusts us. And her next book will be perceived as the work of that evil witch.”

- A great commentary by Orson Scott Card on The Harry Potter Lexicon lawsuit. J.K. Rowling, Lexicon and Oz

This TED talk by Yochai Benkler is about a current, ongoing...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:30:00 -0400

This TED talk by Yochai Benkler is about a current, ongoing transformation in ways in which we live, exist, cooperate and create. It is about the defining trend of our time. It is an exciting glimpse into a possible future, a better way of living and being.
It is already here, not on the fringes, but at the very core of the most powerful economies.
And while it is neither unstoppable nor inevitable, it is certainly promising, hope-inspiring and worth fighting for.

And if the video sparked your curiosity, perhaps you’d be interested in a free download of Benkler’s book “The Wealth of Networks”
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Download_PDFs_of_the_book

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’"

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:19:48 -0400

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

- John Greenleaf Whittier

"Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the..."

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:56:29 -0400

“Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.”

- Mozilla Labs announcement of the Prism project (formerly Webrunner)

If by Rudyard Kipling

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 13:24:50 -0400

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master,
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

A very insightfull and funny TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the...

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:47:00 -0400

A very insightfull and funny TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on the problems of the modern educational system, designed for the needs of the industrial society, end result of which is a system which is “educating people out of their creativity”, educating “from the waist up”, focusing on our “heads, and slightly to one side.”

TED | Talks | Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? (video)

Live from Apple's iPhone SDK press conference - Engadget

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:53:00 -0500

Live from Apple's iPhone SDK press conference - Engadget:

Key points:
iPhone in the enterprise

Exchange on the iPhone
push updates for Email, Contacts, Calendar
global address list
Cisco IPsec VPN
authentication and certs
enterprise class WiFi (WPA2 / 802.1x)
security policies
remote wipe

SDK is out

Leopard only!
Interface Builder
Simulator
Remote Debugging
SQLite
APIs for Location, Audio, Video, Touch, Accelerometer, Contacts (SQLite)
OpenAL
OpenGL ES
Demos from EA(Spore), Salesforce.com, AOL (native AIM client), Epocrates, SEGA (accelerometer-based Super Monkey Ball)

Distribution

App Store built into the iPhone
can use iTunes as well
over WiFi or Cellular data connection
automatic update notifications (like Installer)
Apple takes a 30% cut of the profits, dev gets 70%
no other fees
dev sets the price
free apps distributed for free - no charges
Apple screens apps - no porn, no malicious apps

This all comes out with the iPhone 2.0 software update

beta going out today
released to all customers in June as a free software update
iPod Touch support - “nominal” charge for the software update (lame)

John Doerr speaks

iFund - $100m
“if you want to build the future, the iFund wants to help you fund it”
details??

Q&A with the press

nothing earth-shattering here
parental controls for the iPhone!

"It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without..."

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:20:35 -0500

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

- Charles Bukowski, Factotum, 1975

"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas,..."

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:18:49 -0500

“I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war … our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

- Fight Club, 1999

Why We Banned Legos - Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:20:18 -0500

Why We Banned Legos - Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom