Yostivanich

“Writ­ing code is triv­ial. And fun. And some­thing I con­tinue to love doing. But if you really want your code to be suc­cess­ful, you’ll stop cod­ing long enough to do all that other, even more triv­ial stuff around the code that’s nec­es­sary to make it suc­cess­ful.” The code is triv­ial com­pared to the user experience.

“Users aren’t giv­ing any money directly to Stack­Over­flow, but Jeff knows he has to build a killer end user expe­ri­ence because that expe­ri­ence pays off in other ways. Your career has the same goals. Even though the devel­op­ers, project man­agers and end users may not pay your salary, they do have polit­i­cal cap­i­tal with your boss. They can make or break your career in an instant.”

“Iran’s Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad has defended his June re-election as the world’s “most free” despite ongo­ing oppo­si­tion claims that it was rigged.”

“
Google Chrome OS is an open source, light­weight oper­at­ing sys­tem that will ini­tially be tar­geted at net­books. Later this year we will open-source its code, and net­books run­ning Google Chrome OS will be avail­able for con­sumers in the sec­ond half of 2010. Because we’re already talk­ing to part­ners about the project, and we’ll soon be work­ing with the open source com­mu­nity, we wanted to share our vision now so every­one under­stands what we are try­ing to achieve.”

“Chrome, of course, isn’t an oper­at­ing sys­tem, but a quick-booting OS built around a sin­gle appli­ca­tion like Chrome would be a nat­ural fit for a net­book. With such an OS, Google could obvi­ously make it extra easy for users to access the full range of Google cloud appli­ca­tions through the browser—Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, etc.”

“In a direct chal­lenge to Microsoft, Google is expected to announce on Wednes­day that it is devel­op­ing an oper­at­ing sys­tem for a per­sonal com­puter based on its Chrome browser, accord­ing to two peo­ple briefed on Google’s plans.”

“Chi­nese police have arrested 1,434 peo­ple over riot­ing in Xin­jiang province, offi­cial state media say.”

“US Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has urged Rus­sia to turn from the past, empha­sis­ing the com­mon goals the US shares with its for­mer Cold War rival.”

“The Iraqi gov­ern­ment has banned all organ­ised vis­its to the grave of for­mer leader Sad­dam Hussein.”

“A report into how British police han­dled April protests against the G-20 sum­mit in Lon­don said Tues­day the force’s tac­tics were inad­e­quate and should be reviewed. The report by a government-backed watch­dog said police had focused too much on tack­ling vio­lence and not enough on allow­ing peace­ful protest.” You think.

“The Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union filed a friend-of-the-court brief today urg­ing a fed­eral appeals court to uphold an ear­lier deci­sion requir­ing Louisiana to issue a birth cer­tifi­cate with the names of both par­ents to a boy who was adopted by a gay cou­ple in New York.”

“For­mer Shadow Home Sec­re­tary David Davis cited the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, from Rochdale, who was jailed for life for being an al-Qaeda plan­ner. Mr Davis told the House of Com­mons that intel­li­gence ser­vices had allowed Ahmed to go to Pak­istan. Once there, they alerted Pak­istani author­i­ties who arrested him and tor­tured him, par­lia­ment was told. Mr Davis is call­ing for a judi­cial inquiry into at least 15 cases where tor­ture of ter­ror­ist sus­pects has been alleged. Using the legal pro­tec­tion afforded to MPs, he told the Com­mons there was a chain of evi­dence of com­plic­ity in tor­ture and pas­sive ren­di­tion.” To use a British phrase “bloody hell”.

“No one argues that the stag­ger­ing deficits run up by the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment in a bid to res­cue the econ­omy are desir­able, healthy or even sus­tain­able — not if the national debt con­tin­ues to swell at its cur­rent pace. But con­sid­er­able debate cen­ters on when and how vig­or­ously to start eas­ing off Washington’s bor­row­ing habit, with sub­stan­tial risks at both extremes.” How do we cut down the national debt?

“For the sec­ond time in three years, Mike Hutchins, a laid-off auto­mo­tive engi­neer, is prepar­ing to enroll in job retrain­ing at a local com­mu­nity col­lege, this time to become a civil engi­neer­ing tech­ni­cian. But he has no idea if he has cho­sen the right path.” Higher edu­ca­tion may not always lead to a job.

“Dion and I both have some cor­po­rate IT expe­ri­ence under the belt, and because of that we just couldn’t bring our­selves to write yet another typ­i­cal table-based data­base CRUD app; hence, the space theme and gra­tu­itous canvas-based UI. So the Tools Direc­tory is our sec­ond canvas-centric web appli­ca­tion released this year, but we promise to use the DOM API more for the next one. ”

“I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be apply­ing the Com­mu­nity Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs. ECMA 334 spec­i­fies the form and estab­lishes the inter­pre­ta­tion of pro­grams writ­ten in the C# pro­gram­ming lan­guage, while the ECMA 335 stan­dard defines the Com­mon Lan­guage Infra­struc­ture (CLI) in which appli­ca­tions writ­ten in mul­ti­ple high-level lan­guages can be exe­cuted in dif­fer­ent sys­tem envi­ron­ments with­out the need to rewrite those appli­ca­tions to take into con­sid­er­a­tion the unique char­ac­ter­is­tics of those envi­ron­ments.” Awe­some news for the open source ver­sion of C# in Mono.

“Just like it is the law of the land that phone num­bers are portable from car­rier to car­rier, it should be the law of the land that phones should be portable from car­rier to car­rier. Any­thing else is anti-competitive.”

“Dr. Finkel and Mr. East­wick write that this does not mean men were just as selec­tive as women. But the sci­en­tists sug­gest that the expla­na­tion for the gap lies in social con­di­tion­ing rather than evo­lu­tion.” Social con­di­tion­ing could play an impor­tant role in dat­ing, crazy though.

“The end result (many vis­i­ble and invis­i­ble changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past. Not just for Gmail, but for all of Google Apps — Gmail, Cal­en­dar, Docs, and Talk.”

“The level of peo­ple falling behind with con­sumer loans in the US hit a new high in the first three months of 2009, the Amer­i­can Bankers Asso­ci­a­tion said.” Ouch.

“Com­mu­nity col­leges could become a tool to help eco­nomic recov­ery in the United States and a model for devel­op­ing coun­tries debat­ing how to improve their edu­ca­tion sys­tems, Jill Biden, the wife of Vice Pres­i­dent Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a long­time teacher, said Tues­day.” Cheaper edu­ca­tion leads to a more edu­cated society.

“Now, cit­i­zens will have the oppor­tu­nity to send let­ters and mes­sages to elected offi­cials directly from Face­book. Bi-partisan Polit­i­cal and dig­i­tal strat­egy firm Grass­roots Enter­prise has launched an tech­nol­ogy, called “Actions,” that orga­ni­za­tions can use on Face­book to allow sup­port­ers and vis­i­tors to send mes­sages and let­ters to elected offi­cials or other tar­gets directly from Face­book.” Pretty cool.

“It’s more just another indi­ca­tion that vot­ers won’t have an infi­nite amount of patience with Obama on the econ­omy, and if by 2012 the econ­omy still hasn’t improved (in which case, we’ll be refer­ring to the reces­sion as “GD2”), or has double-dipped, or has improved slug­gishly at the cost of a huge run-up in the national debt, Obama is going to be in trou­ble in Ohio as well as most of the other 49 states.” Regard­ing Obama’s weak polling in Ohio.

“Maybe you heard that a new Face­book iPhone appli­ca­tion is almost com­plete. Maybe you’ve also heard that prob­a­bly the best fea­ture is that it will allow you to upload video right from your iPhone 3GS to the social net­work. Well you don’t actu­ally have to wait for the new app to do that — there’s one that does it already. And it’s really, really fast.” Cool.

Extrap­o­lat­ing is fun.

“try­ing to evolve! fail­ing miserably!”

“CSS sprites are a huge time sink. They waste my time, they waste your time, and they also waste the time of mil­lions of other front-end devel­op­ers. It’s about time to do some­thing about it.” I like this.

“The US has “absolutely not” given Israel a green light to attack Iran over its nuclear pro­gramme, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has said. His remarks fol­lowed week­end com­ments by Vice-President Joe Biden that the US would not stand in the way of Israel’s response to Iran’s nuclear ambi­tions. Mean­while, US mil­i­tary chief Adm Mike Mullen said Wash­ing­ton should keep mil­i­tary options on the table.” Biden please just stop talking.

“Over the past 24 hours we’ve had a num­ber of read­ers tell us that there is an OpenSSH exploit in active use. We can­not con­firm its exis­tence, other than a DOS exploit for OpenSSH that is on Milw0rm. If you have any con­crete evi­dence of this (not rumors or URLs to blogs where peo­ple are dis­cussing that there might be a prob­lem) please let us know via our con­tact form. Again, no rumors and no links to dis­cus­sions of rumors please. We need reports of active exploita­tion or other evi­dence that this a real issue.”

“We’ve still got a ways to go before we start see­ing glu­cose mon­i­tors and blood pres­sure pumps pop up with iPhone sup­port, but some health and disability-related apps are already begin­ning to emerge. One of the first is a new appli­ca­tion called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hear­ing aid appli­ca­tion that was just released on the App Store, and is avail­able for $9.99.”

One of the coolest bits done by Mozilla for web devel­op­ers. A list­ing of web devel­op­ment tools.

“Gmail, Google Cal­en­dar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enter­prise and con­sumer ver­sions — are now out of beta.” Google is also now really push­ing the paid ver­sions of Google Apps.

“When you cre­ate an at-home good prod­uct, you may have to sac­ri­fice a bit of in-store siz­zle. A prod­uct that exe­cutes on the basics beau­ti­fully may not seem as sexy as com­peti­tors loaded with bells and whis­tles. Being great at a few things often doesn’t look all that flashy from afar. That’s ok. You’re aim­ing for a long-term rela­tion­ship, not a one-night stand.” Though I think some com­pa­nies (Apple) do well at both the in store and in home experience.

“Three months after a jury ruled that Ward L. Churchill, a for­mer Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado pro­fes­sor, was wrong­fully ter­mi­nated for his polit­i­cal views, a judge on Tues­day refused to give him his job back. Chief Judge Larry J. Naves of Den­ver Dis­trict Court ruled that the university’s regents were effec­tively act­ing as judi­cial offi­cers when they voted to dis­miss Mr. Churchill in 2007 after a fac­ulty com­mit­tee con­cluded that he had com­mit­ted aca­d­e­mic fraud. As a result, Judge Naves found, the regents were legally pro­tected from Mr. Churchill’s effort to reverse their rul­ing.” Huh that rul­ing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

“Just to fol­low up on a story from last month, St. Louis Car­di­nals man­ager Tony La Russa has now offi­cially dropped his law­suit against Twit­ter. La Russa had been suing the ser­vice for some­one who was pre­tend­ing to be him and was seek­ing ““unspec­i­fied dam­ages.” He got none of those, nor will he get any­thing else from the startup.” This was a stu­pid lawsuit.

“I want our site not only to have an up-to-date cat­a­logue of our prod­ucts avail­able for free, but I think that we could fig­ure out a way to have peo­ple order prod­ucts and pay for them online as well. Think about it: we could be the first sporting-equipment sup­plier in the world to offer this ser­vice.” In 2007.

“Sci­en­tists in New­cas­tle claim to have cre­ated human sperm in the lab­o­ra­tory in what they say is a world first. The researchers believe the work could even­tu­ally help men with fer­til­ity prob­lems to con­ceive. But other experts say they are not con­vinced that fully devel­oped sperm have been created.”

“For the sec­ond time in 8 days, a power out­age inter­rupted ser­vice at one of its data cen­ters. And again it was the Dal­las cen­ter that was effected. This time how­ever, Rack­space was able to get things up and run­ning fairly quickly, and more impor­tantly, com­mu­ni­cated well through its blog and Twit­ter through­out the down­time.” Again Rackspace?