Why would anyone outside of geeks like us give a shit about this?

— Scott Heiferman at the Betaworks conference today, on a big concern of modern web development

I first realized the worthlessness of stuff when I lived in Italy for a year. All I took with me was one large backpack of stuff. The rest of my stuff I left in my landlady’s attic back in the US. And you know what? All I missed were some of the books. By the end of the year I couldn’t even remember what else I had stored in that attic. And yet when I got back I didn’t discard so much as a box of it. Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone? I might need that one day.

— Paul Graham: Stuff

Brand is the thing that lets me charge more money for the same thing as the guy next to me.

— Emil Rensing’s version of a Fred Seibert quote

You’ve lost. You’ve had sixteen years to try and build a desktop operating system, and you still can’t get your shit together. Nobody wants your software. It’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s yours. Because trust me, if you truly developed a kick-ass OS with tens of thousands of drivers and easy installation and reliable performance, you’d be winning. But you’re not.

— Fake Steve on desktop Linux (via Cameron)

The only internet ads proven very effective are ads on web search. Web search ads help people. Most every other online ad just hopes to distract people.

— Scott Heiferman again

My online life has dramatically improved since I stopped reading blogs about blogs.

Forget “don’t be evil” — Google’s real motto is: “Just trust us (and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).

— Net neutrality? Google, go first!

Worst Domino Rally ever! This is one of the saddest videos I’ve ever seen. Skip the first minute.

ian3 :: photography by ian jenkins - Great photos. Check them out.

I believe there is one furniture store for the entire country, somewhere in South Carolina, where all they do is ship broken furniture, wait for it to be returned then ship it to someone else. It’s a low margin business, but they make it up in volume.

— The Dilbert Blog: Buying Furniture

“Make the Logo Bigger!” (thanks tumbl.us)

Supreme Commander is an awesome game, and I’ve owned it since its release (February) but have only played a handful of times.

I’m trying to play online now for the first time, and there have been approximately 37,215 patches since its release that the client is individually downloading.

What a huge pain in the ass. Apparently, PC gaming hasn’t improved at all since I last cared about it in 2001.

PC gaming is more painful than Apple’s desktop pricing.

R.I.P., 3.4 GHz of Love. My gaming computer is dead.

Blueprint has not yet been tested in every browser. Please do not use this framework in any projects of importance at this time.

— Blueprint - Well, that’s a deal-killer…

Cameron: “My wife and I visited the new IKEA store in Portland. Even after more than a week since opening, it’s still a madhouse.”

That will never change. IKEA is always a zoo to various degrees. Factors that make it more crowded:

• Weekends
• Rainy days
• Number of colleges within 60 miles
• Proximity to college move-in season (August/September)
• Proximity to apartment-swap season for people under age 30 (when everyone’s leases expire in June)

The first time I went to an IKEA was a rainy Saturday in Pittsburgh at the end of August.

Don’t do that.

The best time to go is on a weeknight.

Boot Camp worked fine (except for the fact that it was Windows, and nothing worked)…

— Apple support forum

Effective design is never gimmicky. If you wish to design something that’s easier to maintain, more legible, and more future-proof then simplicity is the key.

— Modern Life Is Rubbish

This stupid company just telemarketed my WHOIS phone number for a recent domain I registered. They were very misleading: they wanted to know if I “had any trouble setting up the new site”, posing as my web host, hoping that I’d realize I had forgotten to pay for it and give them my credit card number to start a redundant account.

Telemarketing is rude, and to this phone number, it violates the National Do-Not-Call Registry. And the scam sounded a lot like phishing to me.

No reputable company would try to defraud consumers like that. And they have to be an incompetent host, so they probably have plenty of downtime and outages. After all, what if they do it to someone whose outbound links carry some weight? Only an idiot would do that.

Ever have one of those days when absolutely nothing works?

Oxford, my health insurance company, notified me today that they’re declining coverage for 2 of the 8 physical therapy visits prescribed for my back problems.

“After careful consideration of all the available information, it has been determined that 2 of the 8 visits requested will not be covered at this time for the following reason(s): The clinical information submitted was not sufficient to make a determination of medical necessity for visits beyond those approved at this time.”

Translation: We came up a little short of our obscene profit predictions for this quarter, and it looks like we can extract a bit more money out of you since you pay your co-pays on time.

Now, consider the numbers:

$6300: Total premiums paid for me since I started being a member 14 months ago. $170: Two visits to my doctor, one for a serious illness and one for severe back pain that’s lasted a year. ($20 co-pay each) $120: One visit to a back specialist, referred by my doctor, in-network. ($30 co-pay) $60: Two prescriptions for my back. ($10 co-pay each) $45, 8 times: Physical therapy for my back, prescribed by the specialist. ($30 co-pay each)

Oxford has paid $710 in claims for me. They’ve made a $5,590 profit so far, or 89% of my premiums.

I’ve paid $360 in co-pays.

Now they want another $90, and since they’re a health insurance company and it’s too small of an amount to sue over, I have no choice.

Health insurance is legal extortion that allows private enterprises to control the lives of the entire middle and lower class of the United States while making obscene profits and buying as many politicians as necessary to keep the system going.

I’m lucky enough that:

• I have health insurance to begin with
• this isn’t life-threatening
• I can afford the co-pays
• they haven’t dropped me yet

What about the people who don’t meet those criteria?

Persai is not an Ajax web calendar. It does not have social networking. You will not find tagging on it. You will not be able to make friends on it. It’s not Web 2.0. It’s probably like Web 1.3.

— uncov

Montoya quotes Moonfall: “At first I tried to write a language that generated CSS. I quickly came to realize that CSS is very good at describing itself and no programming syntax comes close. Try inventing a language syntax thats better at describing this: #container div #nav span a:hover { color:red }”

I always thought CSS selectors should be expressable as Xpaths. They’d be a lot more powerful, and they could still support the #id and .class shorthand.

Example:

container/div//#nav/span/a:hover { color: red; }

That’s cool, but longer and more verbose than CSS’ selectors. But what if you wanted to do something more complex, like alternating row colors? No more hacky “odd” and “even” classes:

table#posts//tr[position() mod 2 = 0]/td { background-color: gray; } table#posts//tr[position() mod 2 = 1]/td { background-color: white; }

How about highlighting links that point to a particular site?

a[contains(@href, ‘marco.org’)] { color: #55f; }

You could even do node-inheritance operations backwards, like applying a different padding to a paragraph that contains images:

p[img] { padding: 5px; }

Or giving borders to images greater than a certain size (assuming you use correct width and height attributes):

img[@width > 100 and @height > 75] { border-width: 3px; }

Cool stuff. I can dream…

I love working. I just hate jobs.

—

Sustainability doesn’t mean going back to your investors for another round because you don’t have enough to pay your employees because you don’t have any income because you don’t charge for your products…

— Jason Fried (via Scott Heiferman)

The nice thing about thinking about a model where you charge is that it really forces you to think about the actual value that you’re providing.

— SteamStreet on Fleeing free

I’m satisfied, though not impressed or surprised, with the new iMacs.

My biggest fear was that they’d switch to laptop hard drives to reduce their thickness. Thank goodness they didn’t.

“We’re refreshing the Mac mini today.”

Edit: It’s a non-update. The only difference is that the CPUs are now Core 2 Duo instead of Core Duo.

Reasons this doesn’t matter:

• The difference between Core and Core 2 is very minor.
• They HAD to. Intel probably won’t even give them enough Core Duos to maintain a product.
• The Mac mini is still far too expensive and limited to be a viable computer for almost anyone.

What the Duck #276

xkcd: Facebook

Attempts to enforce the old forms of ownership and profit-extraction in the face of this technological drift entail retooling corporations into autonomous intelligence agencies while simultaneously redefining the better human impulses such as generosity and sharing to be criminal acts.

— If Software Companies Ran the Country

Basic Instructions: How to Disguise a Yawn (click for full-size version)

I look at the new Microsoft Office suite and I’m almost in awe. I mean it looks like they just shipped it without anyone actually looking at the programs and without having any central authority over the project. It’s like one of those movies where you walk out going, Did a group of fully sentient adult human beings really watch that movie and say, Wow, yes, this is wonderful, we must put this into cinemas everywhere and share it with the world? Same for Office. Who gave this the green light? I mean how could Ray Ozzie actually think, Wow, this is some beautiful, elegant software? Oh wait. That’s right. Ray made Notes. Enough said.

— Fake Steve Jobs: Regarding our new software programs

I saw one that was making claims at being the “first version uploaded to YouTube,” like that is some sort of accomplishment. Why don’t you try actually making something and uploading that.

— Jacob

Hexzenn: “MP3 is a terribly outdated format […] If you’re not a brainless twit, you’re encoding with either OGG Vorbis or AAC. I prefer Vorbis because it’s unencumbered by inane patents and slightly edges out AAC in listening tests, but all you gullible consumers that bought crap like iPods are stuck with either MP3 or AAC […] I find most stuff to sound transparent to the original source at -q3 (112kbps), so I encode at -q4 (128kbps) to give myself a quality margin.”

Reasons this is stupid and wrong:

• MP3 is old, but age of formats isn’t extremely relevant. MP3 is only 3 years older than JPEG, and TIFF beats them both by a decade. All are still in heavy use for good reasons.

• Nothing’s particularly wrong with properly encoded MP3s (especially VBR encoded with LAME). In blind tests, they’re transparent between 160 kbps and 256 kbps, depending on the content.

• Vorbis is extremely similar to MP3 and has most of the same benefits and limitations. It’s slightly better and slightly smaller, but not enough to justify the lack of good tools and device support.

• AAC is slightly better than both of them, but isn’t magical. AAC at 128 kbps has similar quality as MP3 at around 160 kbps.

• No audio format gives transparency at 112-128 kbps for all music types.

• Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter. Lossy audio compression is about convenience, and most people can’t detect (and don’t care about) the quality difference for well-encoded files with any codec. What we certainly can detect are full hard drives and files that won’t play on our iPods.

I can’t wait until the next version of Tumblr so I can see blockquotes and lists in Dashboard posts. Then maybe I’ll start using them.

It can be really hard when you’re surrounded by people who have millions of dollars at their disposal.

— Millionaires, Greed, and Insecurity in Silicon Valley

Dear Internet,

Can we stop this now?

Sincerely, Marco

Now that I clicked on that ad, I am sure there will be more. Maybe the 2nd most trusted name in the menstrual cup industry will start knocking on my door.

— CultrVultr.com

Just UPSin’ It: Working at The UPS Store rocks!

I finally got around to listening to Filter on Hexzenn’s recommendation (although he was still Ghostvirus) after having a folder full of their MP3s on my desktop for a month. They’re pretty good. Thanks for this and the bigger post that I can’t find.

aatw: I want you to follow me for my personality, not for who my employer is.

Few times in life are as subtly yet universally pleasant as new-socks day.

Basic Instructions: How to Open a Snack Quietly

After searching for a year, both in the city and at home, I’ve finally found a great Thai restaurant! My Thai withdrawal from Pittsburgh can finally end. It’s the Red Lotus Thai Restaurant in New Rochelle, only a 5 minute drive from my apartment in Larchmont. And it’s new-socks day, too!

xkcd: Names

AATW: “Could someone who knows his/her way around XUL please develop a Tumblr button for Firefox?”

Does the “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet (Dashboard/Goodies) satisfy your needs?

Firefox is a reasonably good browser, and since it sucks less overall than the others, I use and recommend it. But as a previous Firefox extension author, I wouldn’t wish that duty on anyone.

Firefox’s extension architecture (mostly XUL, RDF, and Javascript) is buggy, slow, half-assed, poorly documented, and needlessly complex.

Firefox is held together by sticks and duct tape, but the Javascript-powered interface usually hides that from users. Once you get into developing extensions, Firefox reveals its ugly guts. I’m amazed it works at all.

I advise that you avoid Firefox extension development unless you need to accomplish something that absolutely isn’t possible with a different technology, such as a bookmarket.

Minimalism is the result — the effect — of ensuring everything has a purpose.

— Jakob Lodwick

AdSense CPMs by referral source

Very interesting, thanks AZspot. Source PDF

I thought blogging would be a tool for humans to get smarter, not stupider.

— Scoble: Things on my mind

How to redesign the Leopard dock so it sucks less

In my house, when it’s “time to go” someplace, I put on my jacket and go stand near the door. Once there, time stands still. To me, “time to leave” means “go stand near the door.” To other people, it signals the start of an infinite sequence of events that may or may not culminate in leaving.

— The Dilbert Blog

Via Jakob… why does Vimeo always look like they’re having more fun at the office than the rest of us?

Sitting up front is a big deal. When the doors finally open, some folks want those seats badly enough that they will sprint the entire length of the auditorium. Since some of them don’t get much exercise, let alone running while lugging a laptop, the resulting race isn’t exactly the human drama of athletic competition. For me, this is when WWDC really begins, and I like to call it The Running Of The Geeks.

— Official Google Mac Blog: (Non-)Secrets of WWDC (thanks Told or Known)

I hadn’t yet watched the Hell’s Kitchen finale. Your link just ruined it for me.

Hug (thanks yum9me)

SA Forums: Worst products ever

xkcd: Compiling, one of the only things I miss about programming in C.

The opposite of Starbucks is Dunkin Donuts. Not an independent coffee shop, and not coffee at home. On the other hand, the opposite of Dunkin Donuts is not Starbucks. The opposite is ‘not having coffee out.’ That’s because when someone considers getting their morning coffee, the choice is usually home or Dunkin. That person doesn’t have Starbucks as part of their choice set. Defining your brand in this way makes it easier to ignore the irrelevant competition and easier to figure out what you are (and aren’t).

— Seth Godin

A Guide to Creating a Minimalist Home

The people you have to please in the enterprise market are the ones purchasing and supporting the products, not the poor schmucks who actually have to use them.

— John Siracusa (via AZspot)

Sorry, there are multiple web hosting companies named “A+” and I bombarded the wrong one with bad links in this post. It’s now been updated with the correct telemarketing scammer’s information. Expect a full article soon. (It didn’t end there.)

AATW: I can’t give specifics, but I’m sure you’ll be very happy with the next major release.

I assume that they’re running everything with spit, duct tape, wishful thinking, ancient custom software, near-fossilized hardware, and Excel spreadsheets… just like pretty much everything else in the public sector.

— Slashdot: One Failed NIC Strands 20,000 At LAX (reblogged from Adora)

I’ve given up on keeping Tupperware containers in space-saving arrangements with their lids stacked separately. The great Tupperware-bottom towers always collapse and fall out of the cabinet, and I can never find the right lid.

I’m willing to use the necessary amount of space to keep all of my Tupperware and Tupperware-like imitation containers closed with their proper lids and stacked normally all the time.

My 25-year-long frustration with the Tupperware cabinet has now ended, and it’s wonderful.

I’m editing out the numeric part of list-post titles when I link to them.

Example: 10 Reasons It Doesn’t Pay To Be “The Computer Guy” Edited to: It Doesn’t Pay To Be “The Computer Guy”

The dominance of the worthless-list post format on blogs is bad enough. The least I can do is make their titles more useful if they’re actually good enough to get a link.

Some Microsoft dude comes up to talk about how great Microsoft’s open-source contributions are. That one goes pretty fast.

— Steve Yegge on OSCON 2007

Steve Yegge’s great branding talk at OSCON 2007

I’m nuking Tumblr “affiliate marketing” spammers by the thousands. This is surprisingly fulfilling.

“What if business meetings were like blog comment threads?” (thanks nevyn)

Very funny. Warning: Contains offensive language, just like many blog comments.

Supreme Commander had the sort of mechanised destruction that made other RTS games look like a slap-fight.

— SupCom expansion coming soon!

Tiff hates The Daily Puppy because we can’t have puppies in our apartment.

As work environments go, the Clearleft HQ is pretty damn excellent. And not just because of the Aeron chairs and iMacs. We’re so 2.0, even our desks have rounded corners. Really. They do.

— Jeremy Keith

Basic Instructions: How to Remember the Name of That Song … You Know, That One

Wasting five minutes trying to get the goddamned box open is just the first of many ways that Office 2007 and Vista’s gratuitous redesign of things that worked perfectly well shows utter disregard for all the time you spent learning the previous versions.

— Joel on Software - This article has far too many great quotes.

I am very happy with my decision to free my articles from comments.

— Cameron, on an increasingly popular decision among blog authors

Yes, this made TechCrunch. How? Are they even trying anymore? As usual, Duncan Riley adds no opinion whatsoever about the company. One TechCrunch reader, named Michael Vu, couldn’t even sign up for the service because the signup form forced the last name field to be more than 2 characters. Didn’t quite think that one through, did you, guys?

— uncov on MyProgress. I think web applications are too easy to make.

I say “usually” because you don’t absolutely need to be drunk, stupid and on LSD. You could also be religious. I blogged about a similar story last year, where a guy climbed into a lion’s cage and yelled something about God protecting him. That turned out to be bad luck. The guy managed to find the ONE lion that God loves more than people.

— The Dilbert Blog

Commercials, news articles, and any other media that attempts to tell non-geeks to go to a website: Pick a great verb, and stick to it.

Don’t say “Log on to something.com”. That’s wrong.

Don’t say “Click on something.com”. That’s wrong.

Don’t say “Click to something.com”. That’s not even possible.

I don’t know what’s so bad about “go to” and why you’re not using it. Even non-technical people know that if you say “Go to something-dot-com”, you’re talking about the internet.

Also, the backslash character is never used in web URLs. Ever. They use the slash. Not “forward slash”. Just slash.

Thank you.

The point of your [business] card should not be to demonstrate that you are creative. The point should be to demonstrate that you have good taste.

— Seth Godin: Business card mistakes

Expert PHP developers tend to work in PHP frameworks instead of using PHP as a monolithic template language. If you catch a PHP expert writing a page in vanilla PHP, he’s either hacking a trivial throwaway script or lying about being an expert.

— DaTroof on the SA Forums

The Disconnect Between Wages and Home Prices (thanks AZspot)

Discussions are dominated chiefly by people who have time to dominate discussions, which over time includes fewer and fewer of the people who actually should.

— Matt Mullenweg on many internet “discussions” (thanks Scott Kidder)

David Karp, creator of Tumblr.

Ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never really understand the problems they’re solving.

— Paul Graham: Holding a Program in One’s Head (read it)

AATW: “I wonder when this’ll get fixed.”

It’s a secret conspiracy to make Tumblr slow at specifically the times you’re using it. :)

This is more nerdy and technical than most people care about: the Tumblr database server is under a heavy load, and the daily backups run early in the morning in EST (when you make some of your posts). Dumping the entire database for the backup is disk-intensive, and because the DB load is sometimes disk-bound, this reduces responsiveness between about 5 AM and 6 AM EST.

An attempted optimization on Wednesday backfired and made it slower. I reverted it yesterday. (Tip: InnoDB is not good for tables that only have 12 bytes of data per row.)

We’ve finally reached a point at which software optimizations can’t prevent the need for more hardware. Davidville Upper Management has ordered a new, super-beefy, quad-CPU, 8 GB RAM, 4x 15k disk RAID-10 master database server. When we get it installed and deployed in about a week, you’ll see a dramatic boost in performance and responsiveness, and the 5-6 AM slowdown will no longer be noticeable.

Found the typical workday meme from Cubicle 17.

Mine:

8: wake up 9: train 10: arrive, get coffee, blow through email and RSS 11: code, sysadmin, answer support emails 12: bug everyone to get lunch 12.5: get lunch 1.5: resolve lunch arguments with Wikipedia 2: code 3: code 4: code 5: code 6: run to the train, go home 7: eat 8: tv 9: tv or code 10: code 11: code 12-8: sleep

Dear Yahoo(!) Pipes team,

Why do your feed URLs return this error when you’re busy?

HTTP/1.1 999 Unable to process request at this time -- error 999

Not only are you using a nonexistent code, but there’s a perfectly valid one to represent what you mean.

HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: “The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.”

Instead, you report the bogus “999” status, so requesters following the HTTP spec (like the Tumblr feed crawler) have no idea what to do or tell the user.

Has anyone ever seen a contextual AdSense ad on a website that actually interested them, then clicked on it and made a purchase?

If you’ve never had green tea from a Japanese tea ceremony, its bitterness is eye-opening, like splashing your face with ice cold water or unexpectedly walking into the sight of a baby popping out of a birth canal.

— The Impulsive Buy

“I’d always wondered what would happen when you photoshopped the entire Apple Store front page together to make one computer.” - SA Forums

(thanks crispyteriyaki and cowboyo)

Tumblelogs are the punk rock of blogging.

— Telegraph

At any given moment, the majority of resources in a capitalist system are being pushed over a cliff by morons…. And it’s clearly the reason that humans rule the earth. We found a system to harness the power of stupid.

— The Dilbert Blog

I somehow doubt that tumblelogging is going to be a mass phenomenon like blogging is.

— Telegraph

Dawn: “They said that about punk rock too.”

I said that about blogs.

By Jared.

So much of the great PHP work out there happens in a vacuum because there’s no place to escape the newbies.

— niralisse on the SA Forums

It’s 11:47 PM on a Friday night, and I’m going to bed.

I have no reason to wake up early tomorrow morning, but I’ll set the alarm for the normal schedule anyway. Then I’ll get up and do side-business work.

And I’m perfectly content with this. I don’t want to go out and party until 5 AM. I don’t want to sleep until 2 PM and waste the rest of the day doing nothing.

This would drive some people crazy with boredom and restlessness, but not me. I enjoy being predictable and productive.

We do not expect you to trust us.

— Wikipedia (thanks Dawn)

Dude go and price out a Dell Cat. Once you add all of the advanced features the iCats come with by default you’ll see that they’re not actually any more expensive. Also you’re paying for the guts of the iCat, not just the common hardware. iCats don’t get hairballs.

— x-virge in the SA Mac Megathread

I’ve been noticing this a lot about Microsoft. They don’t make software for people, they make software for businesses, and expect people to use it. […] Regular consumers would rather have good looking and easy-to-use technology over more advanced, ugly and confusing products.

— Cameron in response to iWork is not an Office competitor

Thanks a lot, Alexa. I’d love to advertise that!

Whenever they don’t feel like using the saw, they pretend it’s broken.

— Seth Godin: Lying to your customers

Crappy graph by pixelspread

I just learned from Modern Marvels (and confirmed by Wikipedia) that France retired the guillotine… in 1977.

We’re running out of scarcity.

— Seth Godin

Marco.org Weird Fruit Review: Golden Kiwi

When your machine runs faster, and your drivers all work, why is it called a “downgrade”?

— FSJ on Lenovo’s Vista-to-XP “downgrade” option

Coffee Drinks Illustrated (thanks Kiyo). My preferred drink pictured.

I find remarkable the lack of hue and cry over the full-scale, production, mass-market rollout of what was once considered by the geekerati to be the Worst Idea Ever.

— Intel’s vPro with TPM

It’s like going to a wedding where the two ugliest losers you know are getting hitched. You’re happy for them, I guess. You’re glad they found each other. But you sure hope they don’t have kids.

— FSJ on Acer and Gateway

Well, my sources just moments ago filled me on a new fruit, the banana, that has all the killer features other fruits have been lacking, and which I’ve been calling for for some time now. Bananas require no special gizmos to get down to business. Just peel back the conveniently hard nub at the top and get instant access to the tasty fruit inside. This might get very popular very fast.

— Michael Arrington’s CrunchFood (via Scott Kidder)

The NNN IT staff is currently looking for a program to manage all of the commercial software serial numbers among the staff PCs, because they’re full of extremely strict Adobe and Apple programs that cost thousands of dollars.

That world seems so foreign and backwards now.

I’m so glad that I use almost no commercial software.

nLite can remove the search dog!

David got me this new grill because he has one and it enables him to make steak. We tried it out tonight with excellent results. Thanks, David!

Pretty much 95 percent of everything you do at Microsoft is in some way feeding the beast. You’re working on Microsoft, not your product. You’re not directly causing your product to become better. You’re trying to create the meetings that will cause the things to happen that will cause at some point some part of some product to be better.

— Joel Spolsky in ACM Queue

Working at Microsoft is a big thing. You’re never quite sure what your job is or when you’re supposed to do it. […] You eventually tire of thinking through work-related problems while you shower. You don’t want to check your work email at 11:00 PM, but you’ll do it anyway. It’s easy to give your life and mind over to the company.

— Neopoleon

Whoever is in charge of [Windows Update reboot] policies is on a par with the guy who designed the Molex power connector for hard drives. i.e. if we meet, one of us will die.

— Comment By Tim

Dan:

If somebody reblogs something I write, is there any way for me to tell I’ve been reblogged?

At the moment, it only shows up when one of your Friends reblogs your post. We may change that later.

It’s NNN-staff-photo day. This is the best way we could think of to represent IT.

If you are dissatisfied with database write performance, you might try setting the innodb_flush_method parameter to O_DSYNC. Although O_DSYNC seems to be slower on most systems, yours might not be one of them.

— MySQL manual on InnoDB tuning - That’s encouraging. Thanks a lot.

Velcro being pulled apart (via AATW and Taylor)

Tumblr rocks, because there is no comment system, with a zero-tolerance stance against spam. Instead, it strongly promotes a community where people respond via their own tumblr presence.

— Brendan Borlase (via Cameron). Read the article. It’s excellent.

People are idiots, and for the most part they do not know the difference between good coffee and bad coffee.

— SA Forums: Tell me about owning a coffee shop

Instructions for Windows Users: I think you have to do something with the DOS command line and edit your autoexec.bat file or something.

— NYC subway maps for iPhone (thanks Bijan)

Support email of the day.

This tells me:

• Facebook doesn’t use parameterized queries.
• Facebook might use magic_quotes.
• Facebook definitely sucks at PHP.

That’s just embarrassing.

Economist: Who’s afraid of Google:

On antitrust, […] it has yet to use its dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did.

That’s not true at all: just ask Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Kiko, 30boxes, and MapQuest.

And that’s just when Google has succeeded. They’ve certainly attempted others, such as PayPal and Craigslist.

Nerds love Google and hate Microsoft. When Microsoft does it, it’s an evil illegal monopoly. When Google does it, it’s “innovation.” Sound familiar?

New database server. Breathing room!

This is great news! It means I’ll save the $100+ I spent on episodes of “The Office” and “Heroes” last year — since I’ll be getting the episodes for free off BitTorrent, instead. Thanks, NBC! You’re the best!

— Jeff Croft on NBC Universal Pulling the Plug on iTunes Content via Contrived Chaos

If you’re sitting in my meeting and your laptop is open, I promise, I swear — you are giving me half of your attention. Maybe less.

— Rands In Repose: The Laptop Herring

They start out with an iPod and then they save their pennies and buy a Mac Mini or an iMac. Or an iPhone. We’re their record store, and their hi-fi store, and their TV store, and their phone store. The biggest things in a teenager’s life - other than cars and dope - they can get from us. Not a bad business to be in.

— Fake Steve Jobs