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Betcha Didn’t Know The iPod Was Invented In 1979!

There you have it folks. The real inspiration for Apple’s game-changing iPod, courtesy of the world’s unluckiest Briton, Kane Kramer, 52 (not including the fifth Beatle). You see, in the dark technological days of 1979, Kramer saw a beacon of light in his IXI. Capable of playing a mind-busting 3.5 minutes of music, the IXI [...]

Sep. 8, 2008 09:30 AM

Three DEMO Companies To Keep An Eye On

This week we’re going to see dozens of companies launch new products. Here are a few of the companies presenting this week at DEMO that are showing some strong potential: ffwd: In most cases, choice is a good thing. But when it comes to online video, the abundance of content available on the web can be overwhelming. ffwd (pronounced fast-foward) deals with this by picking your videos for you. The site uses video meta data as well as user behaviors to create virtual “channels&#

Sep. 8, 2008 07:00 AM

new facebook design is a significant improvement

A number of Facebook users are petitioning to keep the old Facebook design. I switched to the new design when I first noticed the option, and it is such a significant improvement over the old design that I would consider switching back to be a bit silly. It’s a cleaner, more efficient, more informative design, that uses more of your screen space if it’s available. It is concise and refined by comparison to the old Facebook design. At the end of the day, a lot of people don’t

Sep. 8, 2008 04:18 AM

Outlook Interview Part One: Current Business Trends and SOA Testing

I was recently interviewed on the program: Outlook Series with host Mike Lippis, and we covered a variety of SOA-related topics, from Testing -- all the way to Virtualization. You can listen to the 45 minute podcast interview here, but our team has also broken the interview into five parts for easier reading. Here is part one -- which focuses on SOA Governance and how companies are attempting to use this discipline to meet business goals. Mike: “Can you share with the audi

Sep. 7, 2008 09:11 PM

Citizen's media is the answer!

Okay, so Sarah Palin agreed to an interview with Charlie Gibson at ABC News, but we all know (right?) that it's going to be softball questions that can be answered with glib one-liners. Not going to get answers to the questions real citizens (i.e. taxpayers, voters) have. But it turns out if you happen to run into Sarah Palin in a restaurant, she'll answer questions, and say things that her handlers almost certainly don't want her to say. AmericaBlog: "I don't think this question will be answer

Sep. 7, 2008 08:31 PM

Hacking the Trivial: Governor of Poker game

During the nine-hour plane ride from Amsterdam (after the 1.5 hr flight from Vienna) to Dallas, I figured out how to increase the amount of money you have in the game the Governor of Poker by flipping a bit in the save game file. I did this because I’ve had a little trouble with the game. It’s a cute Texas hold’em game in which you progress through Texas based on your winnings. Quite possibly because of the oddities of my system, the game several times acted as if it had lost

Sep. 7, 2008 06:47 PM

Unboxing a Nikon D90

Nikon just released the D90. This is the first digital SLR that can shoot movies (as far as I know, anyway)--now you don't have to carry a digital SLR and a video camera. How cool is that?! My buddies at Ritz Camera and the 6sight Future of Imaging conference made this possible. Click here to buy one from Ritz Camera. Incidentally, I'll be the first to admit that these aren't the greatest shots--I had no idea product shots are so much harder than people shots.

Sep. 7, 2008 01:01 PM

Securely reset Nokia E90

Making sure any information is removed from a phone is becoming more and more difficult. To do this on a Nokia E90 do the following: (i) Go to 'Settings' > "Factory Settings" - "Restore Factory Settings" - Enter code "12345"(ii) The above will get rid of all data but strangely often leaves calendar or message data on the phone - to get rid of that, use the 3 finger reset which is, while the phone is off, hold the (*)the(3)and the (

Sep. 7, 2008 12:19 PM

StackOverflow Podcast #20

This week's StackOverflow Podcast is up: episode 20. We talked about the deadlock that was fixed, which was the last thing holding up the public beta... caused by a very small bug in third party libraries, which is exactly why I've always had a bias against using third party libraries. I tell an interesting story about why the Excel team had their own compiler. And I explain to a listener why Jeff never listens to me. Thanks to everyone who came to the Business of Software conference and ma

Sep. 5, 2008 06:47 PM

Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld commercial is a hoot

I just stumbled on the Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld commercial (at "Shoe Circus" of all places!) and it's a real

Sep. 5, 2008 04:51 PM

We are hiring

Are you a flex developer? Send me your resume. We need Freelancers and Full Timers. Preferably in the ChicagoLand area, but will consider remote developers for the right candidates. We have needs on several projects, so if you are a flex dev

Sep. 5, 2008 12:24 PM

The Really, Really Odd Couple Debuts - Seinfeld and Gates during the Giants Game

The Really, Really Odd Couple - Gates and Seinfeld - debuted last night and you can find the video online everywhere. In this post are my thoughts on the advertisement.

Sep. 5, 2008 06:40 AM

Implimenting Offline Web Content with Gears LocalServer API

I spent the afternoon playing around with Google Gears in order to get a basic feel for how it works. Specifically, I wanted to see how much work it would take to add support for offline viewing for tostring.org (an online book site). I used the Gears LocalServer API which “allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally, without a network connection”. The implementation can be though of as a small web server that intercepts requests for remote resources and se

Sep. 5, 2008 03:41 AM

Jules Joseph Merholz

Among the challenging decisions new parents must make is the name of their child. It’s a lifetime commitment, and not something to be taken lightly. We very quickly settled on his middle name, Joseph. It’s my dad and brothers’ middle name, and Stacy’s grandfather’s first name and brother’s middle name. So, a family name on both sides. Done. The first name was trickier. Early on I proposed David, my middle name. I’ve always liked the name David (and when

Sep. 4, 2008 08:28 PM

TIBCO acquires Insightful

Per a recent press release, TIBCO has completed its acquisition of Insightful, known for its S+ statistics language (and with a common ancestry with the open source R langage) as used, amongst others, in the financial industry. S+ and R have had a few mentions in recent CEP blogs: Marc Adler commented on the initial TIBCO Insightful announcement [*1], and the potential for S+ queries in CEP (which is probably true at some level) Hans Gilde commented on improvements to R and responded to Mar

Sep. 4, 2008 07:56 PM

It's easy to mistake what's

It's easy to mistake what's interesting for what's important.

Sep. 4, 2008 04:06 PM

Resuming work on jrawio

jrawio is an ImageI/O plugin for "camera raw" image formats. I've started writing it a few years ago for my Nikon D100, and later extended it for working with a larger number of formats. As far as I know, it...

Sep. 4, 2008 11:27 AM

Do you have an impedance mismatch problem? Users speak up! Second series of user reports published.

I have started a new series of interviews with users of technologies for storing and handling persistent objects, around the globe.6 additional user reports (12-17/08) have been published, from the following users: • Ajay Deshpande, Persistent • Horst Braeuner, City of Schwaebisch Hall • Tore Risch, Uppsala University • Michael Blaha, OMT Associates • Stefan Keller, HSR Rapperswil • Mohammed Zaki, Renssela

Sep. 4, 2008 08:03 AM

I like Google Chrome

I like it - it's simple and minimalistic, has a small memory footprint and is easy on the CPU. Flash player works fine on my Windows XP box. I'm sure, Mac and Linux version will be available soon too. The absence of the I like the fact that t

Sep. 3, 2008 11:12 AM

Ajax-heavy Applications on Google Chrome

“This is the best browser so far” is that I can say after being a Chrome user for one day. First of all, I was glad to find out that I haven’t found Chrome breaking any web application yet, especially Ajax applications. I was a little concerned about this, given that the Chrome cartoons say “Javascript runs in its own thread”, which is different from the threading model today. For example, Razor Profiler is a fairly Javascript-heavy web application that I wrote

Sep. 3, 2008 09:02 AM

Question: how to bind SOAP <-> ORM JPA ?

Few days thinking about the best way to copy values between the objects representation of SOAP message elements and JPA entities. I couldn't find a good answer, so I am sharing the question.

Sep. 3, 2008 05:57 AM

Half a Million Thanks

A big thank you to all the people who read my Blog for now over a half a million visits ...

Sep. 3, 2008 01:00 AM

The browser war III

Google Chrome, a new open-source browser from Google that builds in parts on Apple's WebKit and in parts on Mozilla Firefox, was announced yesterday and just launched today at 3:02 pm EDT. Here is an interesting twist: most of the technical details about Chrome cannot be found in blog postings or technical web documentation, but rather in the form of a comic book. Talk about weird! But the comic is actually full of very interesting details - definitely worth reading, especially if you are a we

Sep. 2, 2008 03:27 PM

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

In September I’m heading to Germany to present to the German PowerBuilder user group. I’m also working on arrangements to go back over to Europe in November for other locations as well, including (hopefully), England and Switzerland. If

Aug. 29, 2008 05:17 PM

Mashups in Action: A Better Way to Trade

In past 'Mashups in Action' blog we have described mashups used in intelligence analysis, medical research, and most recently a dual-purpose community-building/data-sharing effort for a scientific community. So mashups can help make better spies, better doctors and better scientists. But other than the occasional flu shot, I don't expect most of us have much exposure to these professions.Today's Mashup In Action story is about trading, a profession you have better odds of encountering in yo

Aug. 28, 2008 02:56 PM

Joel on Software

StackOverflow Podcast #20

Posted: Sep. 5, 2008 06:47 PM

StackOverflow Podcast #19

This week's StackOverflow Podcast is up: episode 19. Jeff and I spent some time talking about the home page for StackOverflow. What goes there? What does it mean to vote on a question? We also talked about Aaron Swartz's article on How to Launc

Posted: Aug. 28, 2008 10:02 AM

How I Learned to Love Middle Managers

“Another programmer came to us. ‘I thought you should know that people are really unhappy,’ he said bluntly, ‘and it’s starting to make it so that people just complain all day, instead of doing their work, and thatR

Posted: Aug. 26, 2008 06:45 PM

A review of the Nokia E71

When Apple’s iPhone 3G came out, I was pretty sure I’d get one. It had all the features I was waiting for. But the lines just weren’t going away. I searched Twitter. For a week, then two, every day brought fresh reports of five-hour wa

Posted: Aug. 22, 2008 10:32 AM

StackOverflow Podcast #18

This week's StackOverflow Podcast is up: episode 18. It was the first chance I've gotten to speak to Jeff since the beta went live, which is, honestly, exceeding even my highest expectations. Performance is terrific. The site is crisp and clear. Ev

Posted: Aug. 21, 2008 10:02 AM

Good System, Bad System

“I pass six Starbucks every morning on my walk to work. Just to clarify, that's counting only the Starbucks that are actually on the west side of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. I think there are some branches on the east side, but that

Posted: Jul. 29, 2008 11:59 PM

Pecha Kucha

We've already got a great lineup of speakers for the Business of Software conference: Seth Godin Eric Sink Steve Johnson Richard Stallman Paul Kenny Tom Jennings Dharmesh Shah Mike Milinkovich Jessica Livingston Jason Fried and me! Neil Davidson wa

Posted: Jul. 18, 2008 03:59 PM

Pecha Kucha

Posted: Jul. 18, 2008 03:59 PM

Annual Fog Creek Open House

Here at Fog Creek Software we get a lot of requests for a tour of the office, which we usually have to decline: we have this unusual obsession with giving programmers quiet working conditions. But once a year, we do have an open house. It's a rare c

Posted: Jul. 14, 2008 12:12 PM

Annual Fog Creek Open House

Posted: Jul. 14, 2008 12:12 PM