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The Grid of Tomorrow: No Grid

What started merely as something to do while doing the dishes has slowly turned into a small mission of mine: to watch every single TED talk I can. Tonight though, I watched a video that made me almost drop a...
How the Milky Way Galaxy was formed

Scientists, using some very powerful computers, have come up with a model for how the Milky Way Galaxy was formed over beeeellions and beeeelions of years. It is nothing short of beautiful. via i09...
Misleading Google+'s statistics

People have been amazed at the growth trends of Google+, and yes, they are remarkable. Just look at this graph created by Leon Håland, based upon data produced by Paul Allen which shows the time it took Google+ to reach...
Be inspired. Wonder again. Watch the Carl Sagan Series.

Carl Sagan believed that humanity is driven by the unknown, that we are compelled to seek answers to questions we don't even completely understand. He believed that humanity is driven not just to peer into the far reaches of space,...
Now powered by Melody

I am partially ashamed it has taken me this long to upgrade my own blog to run Melody given how much of my own time I spend hacking on it. The day though, has finally come, and I am pleased...
Adobe Flash: evolve or become the next IE6

A couple of weeks ago I commented upon Apple's decision to not support Flash on any of their mobile devices: I would prefer to say "Flash is a hack," but I think Flash is too elegant to risk maligning it...
The iPad: the modern day Pop-Up-Book

Earlier this week I wrote about how the iPad has the unique opportunity to change how publishers make money. This opportunity exists by shifting their focus away from trying to create as much content as possible, and focus rather on...
jQTouch and why the iPhone doesn't need flash

The coolest thing I know about right now is jQTouch, a jQuery framework for implementing mobile web apps. I first saw this at SXSW when its creator showed it off to a crowd that had just finished watching a demo...
Its the experience stupid

Here is an excerpt of a conversation I have had numerous times in my life with people after seeing them reading a printed magazine or newspaper that is readily available online for free: Me: You know you can get that...
Redesigning Movable Type's Comment Management Screen?

In a project I have been working on I have had the need to revisit an old plugin of mine: the Contact Form plugin. When designing the inquiry management screen the plugin I thought it would be a nice user...
Data Porn: Trends in the Economy and Technology

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley gives an amazing 10 minute talk on the trends we are seeing in the economy, Internet and technology. She draws few conclusions, and let's the amazing amount of data she presents speak for itself. For...
An OpenID-powered registration system I actually like...

One of the challenges many face with OpenID is the process by which you convert an OpenID URL into a local username or identifier of some kind. This process is essential for services that want to offer friendly URLs to...
Is mod_php falling out of favor with hosting providers?

Recently I received a comment on a post about modperlite alleging that modphp, an Apache module mod_perlite is modeled after, is falling out of favor with hosting providers. That is quite an allegation - one that I initially shrugged off...
Mint: a review

About five years ago I abandoned the last of my brick-and-mortar financial institutions so that I could manage my money exclusively online. I left Bank of America in favor of eTrade because I believed that as a modern Internet...
The end of social networking monopolies?

The impedance associated with building a network of connections within a social network is a huge risk to innovation on the Internet for two primary reasons: Existing networks have no incentive to innovate because they own the network. New companies...
Agile QA Practices: A Better Way to QA

The past several years the Internet has been transformed by a slew of new web based tools and applications. A key success factor in all of these applications is adherence to a development methodology in which product teams release fewer...
How to Dramatically Speed Up Your Web Application: An Introduction to memcached

Six Apart often speaks of how its technology and contributions to open source help many of the most popular Internet applications scale to unprecedented levels. One of these tools is memcached, yet as important and ubiquitous as it is, it...
Idea: "Preemptive OpenID Authentication"

It is amazing how OpenID is really picking up steam. Just in the last 30 days Microsoft, AOL, and Digg have announced or deployed support for OpenID, a simple delegated authentication protocol invented by Six Apart. But my first reaction...
The Crusade Against Nofollow

I could not believe my eyes when I began reading this week of a growing desire to kill nofollow. The premise behind the argument is simple: nofollow doesn’t work. The truth is that is does work. It just didn’t succeed...
Wow Tim, you really touched a nerve

From the "Been there, done that, how many times?" department: Tim just posted this to Oreilly Radar: Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup,...
Microsoft to Support OpenID

In a rash of OpenID posts this week, I figure one more won't hurt. Especially news like this: Bill Gates recently stated in an interview that Microsoft intends to support OpenID. This is incredibly significant as it helps address the...
Feedback for "OpenIDNS"

So on Saturday I finally got around to documenting an idea I have had for a long time to find a way to make OpenID a more grokable concept for the average less technical user. On Sunday someone wrote a...
Spec Love for an Idea

Hat tip to Dmitry Shechtman for giving form to what started here simply as an idea. Introducing SMTP Service Extension for Yadis Discovery....
What OpenID needs to succeed

I think I remember the conversation I had with Brad Fitzpatrick and Randy Reddig that inspired us to create OpenID (and by "us" I mean Brad). The conversation started with my trying to understand why more people simply don't trust...
Six Apart Podcast

Earlier this week I talked about how I have been "experimenting" with podcasting. I wrote a little how to on the subject and introduced people to the Professional Network Podcast I produced a couple of weeks ago. Today I sat...
How to make a podcast

Working at Six Apart I take for granted how connected (or unconnected for that matter) people in the world are. I work in an office which often gives me the feeling that I am living in some William Gibson novel...
Alpha and Beta Testing

In early October I had the honor of speaking to a class of MBA students studying product management at the Haas School of Business. Michael Sippey recommended me as a speaker last year, which in my book is high praise,...
YouTube helps to screw the little guy

A couple of days ago a friend of mine released a film they had literally been working on for years. It is only 3 minutes long, but as soon as you watch it you will know realize the magnitude...
Microlabels

I remember spending almost an entire evening speaking with Marc Canter and a few of his microformat evangelists at the Syndicate Conference last December about “structured blogging” and “microformats” and not once did anyone ever correct my misunderstanding about it...
Flickr Leaves Beta Phase

Flickr exits the beta phase and enters the “Gamma” phase. I have always appreciated Flickr’s sense of humor, but this? “Gamma” to me implies finality and completeness, which we all know isn’t true. No matter - it still made me...
Standardizing the Atom Thread Extension

I have been an advocate for the Atom Feed Thread extension for quite sometime, and am an active developer of it. Within Six Apart I have helped deploy the extension across over 1 million Friendster blogs, I have developed my...
Announcing Feed Manager for Movable Type

In my work with the Atom Working Group, which I admit, has been scant recently, I have become really impressed with the number of Atom Extensions being defined and developed by the community - a testament to Atom’s extensibility. One...
Google Calendar and Atom

Google today launched Google Calendar. I am sure plenty of people will blog about it, so I won’t bother with a review of all its Ajaxy-goodness. What I thought was interesting, however, is that Google Calendar does not support RSS....
Why we need a "design standard"

Republished from The Style Contest - "The general concept behind standards is to provide predictable building blocks for others to build with so that the need for re-invention is minimized, to lower the costs of creation and innovation, and to reap the benefits of shared infrastructure."
eTech Wrap Up

I almost posted my eTech Round Up post on this blog, but Anil encouraged me to post it to ProNet. I told him I would be a little snarky to which he replied, "god forbid we show a little personality...
Gluttony for Punishment

I have finally pulled the trigger on ushering the process of getting TrackBack accepted as a core Internet standard. I may feel differently in a couple months, but for some reason I have always wanted to be a key player...
A new logo for Atom?

I have no idea what inspired Mena, but she took it upon herself to design a new logo for the Atom protocol and syndication format, and it’s hot. Who knows if it will be adopted by the Atom community, but...
What's wrong with Microsoft Project

I came across this article because they happen to link to Test Run, but I think it is an excellent analysis of how Microsoft Project is beginning to fail in delivering value to modern software development companies, especially one that...
Increasingly disenchanted with iTunes

I, like many people I know, love buying music on iTunes. It is so refreshing to be able to buy music a la carte. Who wants to buy the entire Dangerously in Love album when all you want is the...
And the winner is...

Not to long ago I was struggling with the decision of which Digital SLR to purchase. I asked my friends, scoured the Internets, and debated with myself endlessly. Here is the quick round up of the sites that I felt...
Making slight course corrections in Pandora

I am constantly surprised at the quality of suggestion coming from the Pandora service. However, the selection is often too reliable and linear, in that Pandora doesn't give me enough ways to explore music I am unfamiliar with, but enjoy...
Flickr finally figured it out

It appears that this is old news now, but today I saw for the first time that Flickr is now allowing users to order prints of the photos people upload. Well, its about time. For over a year I have...
Digital SLR Showdown

With Arin and I expecting, and Christmas right around the corner, we have decided that the gift we will give each other, and the grand parents when you really think about it, is a digital SLR camera. However, we have...
Kill Your Cable Television

My wife and I have been wanting to start a bold new experiment in our household: wean ourselves off of cable television. Why does anyone need cable when virtually all of television shows worth watching come out on DVD? Which...
Finally getting Test Run out the door

I don't know where I find the time to do these things, among the number of projects I actively work on, but yet another Project-by-Byrne has been released. My latest is a departure from my tradition Free software project as...
Managing Agile Development Practices

I have received several interesting emails, and some great feedback following my latest post about Agile Product Development lifecycles. In one email, I was asked the following: How in a fully agile world one would reasonably manage budget, customer expectations,...
Pandora - Helping the Musically Inept

Just the other night I was telling friends how musically inept I was, joking that I had only recently learned about Dave Matthews, only to find out that he is not so cool anymore. Who knew? Not me. Obviously. You...
Firefox Bookmark Synchronizer that actually rocks

My friend has been hacking together a Firefox plugin ever since I started pestering him to solve one of the most annoying problems I have: 2 computers - one at home and at work - and no easy way...
Google Maps Sucks

Google just released an enhancement to Google Maps that allows you to overlay satellite photos on top of any street map you desire. Naturally, the first address I typed in was my own. Not only did they miss my house...
Suggested searches

Props to the folks at Google who really push the envelope of the web based user interfaces. A friend just sent me a link to Google Suggest - a technology where Google will help you auto-complete your search by suggesting...
Linux woes - how I put the "working" back into "wireless networking"

For the last 6 months or so, as it became increasingly obvious that my wife needed a new computer, she would ask me if she should move to Linux. It makes me proud knowing that she would even consider switching...

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majordojo

Recent Entries in Technology

The Grid of Tomorrow: No Grid

What started merely as something to do while doing the dishes has slowly turned into a small mission of mine: to watch every single TED talk I can. Tonight though, I watched a video that made me almost drop a...

How the Milky Way Galaxy was formed

Scientists, using some very powerful computers, have come up with a model for how the Milky Way Galaxy was formed over beeeellions and beeeelions of years. It is nothing short of beautiful. via i09...

Misleading Google+'s statistics

People have been amazed at the growth trends of Google+, and yes, they are remarkable. Just look at this graph created by Leon Håland, based upon data produced by Paul Allen which shows the time it took Google+ to reach...

Be inspired. Wonder again. Watch the Carl Sagan Series.

Carl Sagan believed that humanity is driven by the unknown, that we are compelled to seek answers to questions we don't even completely understand. He believed that humanity is driven not just to peer into the far reaches of space,...

Now powered by Melody

I am partially ashamed it has taken me this long to upgrade my own blog to run Melody given how much of my own time I spend hacking on it. The day though, has finally come, and I am pleased...

Adobe Flash: evolve or become the next IE6

A couple of weeks ago I commented upon Apple's decision to not support Flash on any of their mobile devices: I would prefer to say "Flash is a hack," but I think Flash is too elegant to risk maligning it...

The iPad: the modern day Pop-Up-Book

Earlier this week I wrote about how the iPad has the unique opportunity to change how publishers make money. This opportunity exists by shifting their focus away from trying to create as much content as possible, and focus rather on...

jQTouch and why the iPhone doesn't need flash

The coolest thing I know about right now is jQTouch, a jQuery framework for implementing mobile web apps. I first saw this at SXSW when its creator showed it off to a crowd that had just finished watching a demo...

Its the experience stupid

Here is an excerpt of a conversation I have had numerous times in my life with people after seeing them reading a printed magazine or newspaper that is readily available online for free: Me: You know you can get that...

Redesigning Movable Type's Comment Management Screen?

In a project I have been working on I have had the need to revisit an old plugin of mine: the Contact Form plugin. When designing the inquiry management screen the plugin I thought it would be a nice user...

Data Porn: Trends in the Economy and Technology

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley gives an amazing 10 minute talk on the trends we are seeing in the economy, Internet and technology. She draws few conclusions, and let's the amazing amount of data she presents speak for itself. For...

An OpenID-powered registration system I actually like...

One of the challenges many face with OpenID is the process by which you convert an OpenID URL into a local username or identifier of some kind. This process is essential for services that want to offer friendly URLs to...

Is mod_php falling out of favor with hosting providers?

Recently I received a comment on a post about modperlite alleging that modphp, an Apache module mod_perlite is modeled after, is falling out of favor with hosting providers. That is quite an allegation - one that I initially shrugged off...

Mint: a review

About five years ago I abandoned the last of my brick-and-mortar financial institutions so that I could manage my money exclusively online. I left Bank of America in favor of eTrade because I believed that as a modern Internet...

The end of social networking monopolies?

The impedance associated with building a network of connections within a social network is a huge risk to innovation on the Internet for two primary reasons: Existing networks have no incentive to innovate because they own the network. New companies...

Agile QA Practices: A Better Way to QA

The past several years the Internet has been transformed by a slew of new web based tools and applications. A key success factor in all of these applications is adherence to a development methodology in which product teams release fewer...

How to Dramatically Speed Up Your Web Application: An Introduction to memcached

Six Apart often speaks of how its technology and contributions to open source help many of the most popular Internet applications scale to unprecedented levels. One of these tools is memcached, yet as important and ubiquitous as it is, it...

Idea: "Preemptive OpenID Authentication"

It is amazing how OpenID is really picking up steam. Just in the last 30 days Microsoft, AOL, and Digg have announced or deployed support for OpenID, a simple delegated authentication protocol invented by Six Apart. But my first reaction...

The Crusade Against Nofollow

I could not believe my eyes when I began reading this week of a growing desire to kill nofollow. The premise behind the argument is simple: nofollow doesn’t work. The truth is that is does work. It just didn’t succeed...

Wow Tim, you really touched a nerve

From the "Been there, done that, how many times?" department: Tim just posted this to Oreilly Radar: Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup,...

Microsoft to Support OpenID

In a rash of OpenID posts this week, I figure one more won't hurt. Especially news like this: Bill Gates recently stated in an interview that Microsoft intends to support OpenID. This is incredibly significant as it helps address the...

Feedback for "OpenIDNS"

So on Saturday I finally got around to documenting an idea I have had for a long time to find a way to make OpenID a more grokable concept for the average less technical user. On Sunday someone wrote a...

Spec Love for an Idea

Hat tip to Dmitry Shechtman for giving form to what started here simply as an idea. Introducing SMTP Service Extension for Yadis Discovery....

What OpenID needs to succeed

I think I remember the conversation I had with Brad Fitzpatrick and Randy Reddig that inspired us to create OpenID (and by "us" I mean Brad). The conversation started with my trying to understand why more people simply don't trust...

Six Apart Podcast

Earlier this week I talked about how I have been "experimenting" with podcasting. I wrote a little how to on the subject and introduced people to the Professional Network Podcast I produced a couple of weeks ago. Today I sat...

How to make a podcast

Working at Six Apart I take for granted how connected (or unconnected for that matter) people in the world are. I work in an office which often gives me the feeling that I am living in some William Gibson novel...

Alpha and Beta Testing

In early October I had the honor of speaking to a class of MBA students studying product management at the Haas School of Business. Michael Sippey recommended me as a speaker last year, which in my book is high praise,...

YouTube helps to screw the little guy

A couple of days ago a friend of mine released a film they had literally been working on for years. It is only 3 minutes long, but as soon as you watch it you will know realize the magnitude...

Microlabels

I remember spending almost an entire evening speaking with Marc Canter and a few of his microformat evangelists at the Syndicate Conference last December about “structured blogging” and “microformats” and not once did anyone ever correct my misunderstanding about it...

Flickr Leaves Beta Phase

Flickr exits the beta phase and enters the “Gamma” phase. I have always appreciated Flickr’s sense of humor, but this? “Gamma” to me implies finality and completeness, which we all know isn’t true. No matter - it still made me...

Standardizing the Atom Thread Extension

I have been an advocate for the Atom Feed Thread extension for quite sometime, and am an active developer of it. Within Six Apart I have helped deploy the extension across over 1 million Friendster blogs, I have developed my...

Announcing Feed Manager for Movable Type

In my work with the Atom Working Group, which I admit, has been scant recently, I have become really impressed with the number of Atom Extensions being defined and developed by the community - a testament to Atom’s extensibility. One...

Google Calendar and Atom

Google today launched Google Calendar. I am sure plenty of people will blog about it, so I won’t bother with a review of all its Ajaxy-goodness. What I thought was interesting, however, is that Google Calendar does not support RSS....

Why we need a "design standard"

Republished from The Style Contest - "The general concept behind standards is to provide predictable building blocks for others to build with so that the need for re-invention is minimized, to lower the costs of creation and innovation, and to reap the benefits of shared infrastructure."

eTech Wrap Up

I almost posted my eTech Round Up post on this blog, but Anil encouraged me to post it to ProNet. I told him I would be a little snarky to which he replied, "god forbid we show a little personality...

Gluttony for Punishment

I have finally pulled the trigger on ushering the process of getting TrackBack accepted as a core Internet standard. I may feel differently in a couple months, but for some reason I have always wanted to be a key player...

A new logo for Atom?

I have no idea what inspired Mena, but she took it upon herself to design a new logo for the Atom protocol and syndication format, and it’s hot. Who knows if it will be adopted by the Atom community, but...

What's wrong with Microsoft Project

I came across this article because they happen to link to Test Run, but I think it is an excellent analysis of how Microsoft Project is beginning to fail in delivering value to modern software development companies, especially one that...

Increasingly disenchanted with iTunes

I, like many people I know, love buying music on iTunes. It is so refreshing to be able to buy music a la carte. Who wants to buy the entire Dangerously in Love album when all you want is the...