With latest iTunes update, quite silently, a very nice new feature appeared. Apple started to offer for download lectures from many universities, with wide selection of topics: from environment through politics to mathematics and computer science. Most of the lectures are videos, but you will find also audio tracks - albeit for some topics, audio is quite problematic. Can you imagine doing e.g. differential equations in audio-only ?
The best feature - the lectures are free downloads. See more details here or on iTunes.
Joel Oleson is suffering if you do not blog ! Sounds strange ? Read the article Join the SharePoint Blogging Revolution!
at http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/05/25/you-don-t-blog-i-m-suffering-because-you-don-t-blog.aspx
He makes several very good points - which have very little to do with Sharepoint - but I think the best one is helping the "organic indexing" of the Web space and helping the search engines out there better rank content. I wrote about this while ago.
"Corporate IT is dominated by bloatware. Time and time again we have to deal with expensive software purchased on golf-courses that just get in our way while sucking funds and development hours. Technologies that make it harder for programmers to do what they like to do best - make a difference for the businesses they are supporting. "
-- Martin Fowler
DHH is (obviously) David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) and RIA (in this context) means Rich Internet Applications. And here is the quote:
I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.
Found by accident - as usually - while searching for something completely different.
Visuwords - visual dictionary, showing semantic relations between words.
Universe by Jonathan Harris.
Wikisky - detailed online sky map, showing the positions & basic characteristics of space objects using a Google Maps like interface.
And two great videos: the 4 minutes video summary on what Web2 actually means and very funny presentation about PowerPoint presentations.
Even with having Wiki as the main documentation repository, not all documentation ends up in a Wiki. Some documentation needs to be managed as part of the source tree - e.g. Readme's, compilation instructions and similar. This information is usually either plain text or in some form of text processor format, mostly Microsoft Word compatible. Both have their selection of problems. Word documents are large, bloated, harder to version controlled and not readable in shell environment (try to cat or tail Word document :-)). The plain text format lacks visual structure and without headlines, bold/italic, font sizes etc is harder read.
"If it works, leave it alone — there's no need to understand it.
If it fails, try to fix it — there's no time to understand it."
"A one-question geek test. If you get the joke, you're a geek:
Seen on a California license plate on a VW Beetle: 'FEATURE'..."
— Joshua D. Wachs, Natural Intelligence Inc.
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." — Martin Golding.
During last two weeks I have been reading and playing a lot with Rails. Now I am in the state where I think I started to "get it" and understand how things work under the surface. Which means I am ready actually start using the framework for real work and become proficient as I get my hands dirty.
To get to this state, absolutely essential and by far the best book is the classic one - Agile Web development with Rails co-authored by the original Rails designer and one of the Pragmatic Programmers. Like other books, the first part is sort of step-by-step code tutorial, which leads you through creation of a Rails application, shows you how you access data, create UI, use scaffolding, etc etc. Unlike other books, this does not stop there and the second part of the book is an excellent coverage of Rails internals - ActiveRecord, ActiveView and templating system. Very well written and offering great balance between covering important features without becoming reference manual.
Repository of presentations - http://www.slideshare.net/ on variety of topics.
Specialize code-only search engine: http://www.krugle.com/
New Google product on vertical search - Google Co-op.
Running out of Security Now! and TWIT episodes, I have subscribed and started listening to few newly discovered podcasts.
I have started to listen to the .NET specific one from Scott Hanselman named Hanselminutes. There are couple of factors that makes it better that other geeky blogs out there. First reason is the content quality. There is very high signal-to-noise ratio, pretty much all content counts and both guys in addition to being smart are quite good at achieving right balance between keeping on topic and spontaneity.