The Pool Room
June 2008
87 posts
“For years, I felt guilty about the fact that I was a music-lover that had never bothered to become a musician. It didn’t occur to me that the attitude I had adopted from the music was an equally valid musical expression of its own kind.”
—Rob Weychert | Editorials: “Something in the Air”
“The most knowledgeable and influential people that are relevent to your company are often under the radar. There are tons of really helpful angel investors out there that never blog, never show up at Meetups, Tweetups, MashMeshing, or what have you. They need to be sought after. Ambitious startups need to turn over every rock. They need to go to the successful people in their space and ask them who’s been the most helpful, whose opinion they respect. Find out who’s in a VC firm’s friend of the family network—who are the individuals invested in VC firms. Too many people rely on blog traffic and Twitter buzz to figure out who to contact versus their actual potential clients.”
—This is going to be BIG! - Sound and fury folks… signifying, well, you know…
“We’ll try.” These are the saddest words a programmer has ever spoken, and most of us have spoken them more than once. These words are often the preface to months of grueling effort against a deadline we know in our heart we cannot make. At the end, we come up tired, burnt out, beaten, and short. Management hates us, we hate ourselves, our families don’t know us any more or have fallen by the wayside. The software, if it works at all, is nothing to be proud of.”
—We’ll Try via Charles Miller in an internal discussion
Move Over, AJAX, ARAX Is Here →
eweek.com
*smacks forehead*
Yet more stupid shit for people who refuse to learn Javascript. These type of projects offend the craftsman in me. The results are rarely elegant.
The real solution is pretty simple; just learn Javascript. It’s a simple language and there are plenty of good libraries to ease the pain of working in a browser.
The main problem working with Javascript lies with browser incompatibilities, not the language and I believe that’s been solved now. These compile-to-javascript projects are for suckers.
Anyone who works with web-apps that require Javascript, but doesn’t want to learn the language is working in the wrong field.
“I went back in and changed that so it did say something to the point of hCard is this sort of tool, use it here. Don’t use the word hCard. Don’t use the work OpenID. Don’t use the word OAuth. I don’t want to see that anywhere on the page that users are looking.”
—Adactio: Articles—Building Portable Social Networks
“This is the kind of flexibility you rarely see in anyone, esp in someone as young as Obama. Always look for ways to submit, to surrender. Decide what’s important to you and give up on everything else. Who cares what word you want to use — you want me to reject, then I reject! Permalink to this paragraph”
—Blow up the Beltway (Scripting News)
“The “Web OS” meme is harmful because it’s about technology. But the Internet’s killer app is people, has always been, will always be. Every single step forward has involved finding new routes and patterns and tools for people to use interacting with other people. No exceptions.”
—ongoing · Not an OS (via adactio)
“Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.”
—The Green Issue - Climate Change - Environment - Energy Efficiency - Consumption - New York Times
“Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.”
—The Green Issue - Climate Change - Environment - Energy Efficiency - Consumption - New York Times
“This was my penny-drop moment: constructivism states that all children learn how the world works through their interactions within it. And we had suddenly changed the rules. We had infused the material world with the fairy dust of interactivity, creating the Pinocchio-like Furby, and, in so doing, at created a new ontological category. It is not a category that adults acknowledge – in fact, many adults find Furby slightly “creepy” precisely because it straddles two very familiar categories – but, in another generation, by the time these children are our age, that category will have a name, and will be accepted as a matter of course.”
—the human network » Blog Archive » Little, Big
“New hires need to agree with the philosophy of simplicity and constraint, Dorsey said. “And they need to take a craftsmanlike approach to their work. For all 16 people in the company, this is what we love. We love this product, we have our families on it, it’s the main way we communicate, the craftsmanship in making this product has to be evident. It’s a labor of love and we want to show it,” he said.”
—Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Talks About Its Business Model - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek
“It’s rumored that the iPhone will include GPS capabilities, and the Twitter API includes capability for a user to send his location, which would allow iPhone users to geotag their Tweets, Dorsey said.”
—Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Describes Upcoming Upgrades - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek
“Popular Twitter users create a chain reaction — when they update, their followers are more likely to update, too, leading to usage surges. “When you get an update from a friend, you are likely to update as well,” he said. “We have to design the system for that kind of flash-mob behavior.”
—Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: Improved Uptime Is Top Priority - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek
Play
“It’s ironic that CAPTCHA can be defeated by those who are sufficiently motivated, when they’re the very same people the test is designed to protect against. Just like DRM, CAPTCHA systems ultimately fail to protect against the original threat, while simultaneously inconveniencing ordinary users.”
—Beyond CAPTCHA: No Bots Allowed! [Privacy and Trust] (via adactio)
