You know the drill: open browser, new tab, type 'www.facebook.com' and in moment you can see who of your online buddies is up to something interesting. This is exactly what I did. Only I did not end up in well known Facebook page, but on something really fishy:
This is definitely NOT facebook. How come I ended up on 'quiz.us' site when I typed in www.facebook.com. Or did I ? Let's do it again:
I stumbled upon this pretty nice little application or service - depends how you see it. It is called reQall (obviously would have been recall, but recall.com as every good domain is taken.
What it does is that allows you to set a reminder in the future to do something - at given time and date: buy X, call Y, do Z. Nothing to earth-shattering about that.
What is neat is the way how you do it. Actually, many ways:
From the author that wrote Tipping point (on my reading list) as well as Blink - which I listened to but found rather controversial. I was very curious what will this one be about.
The book is about success and people that managed to achieve extraordinary results. It touches several topics, I will pick three of them that I found most interesting. It starts with interesting observation - if you look at the MONTH of the birth of junior NHL hockey players, you'll discover that over 50% of them was born between January and April. Certainly not anything like normal distribution. The point is that cutoff-date for signing up children into hockey training in Canada is January 1st. At the age when this happens (5-6 years), kid born in January has significant physical and mental advantage against kid born in November or December. As result, the early born children perform better in their category, and as result they are more likely to make the selection between the talented and perspective. Those selected get much more opportunities to play and practice, which causes them being really better players than late born ones - a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. As result - if your kids are born after August, better reconsider the NHL dreams. If you believe what M.G. is saying, I mean.
This is public answer to all who were asking why is my blog so badly neglected. Short answer is: It is because I am pretty active elsewhere and did not really find any additional time to allocate. If you are busy person, now you know, see ya later. If you are curious what elsewhere means, read on.
Last year and before, blogosphere and this blog was *only* part of the social networking space I was paying attention to. Since about 3-4 months I started to really pay attention to Facebook. I originally joined to find out what my son and couple of friends are up to and somehow I started to see value in this channel of communication. Recently, even my nephews and children of a very good friend that moved from Ottawa to Europe. So Facebook became the "generation bridge" and channel for stuff out of workspace.
I was happy user of the iWork Suite 08 since I moved to OS-X. It somehow better matches the way I am thinking and does much better job than Office to get me from idea to acceptable looking rendering of that idea in the form of document, spreadsheet or presentation.
In past two month I was involved much more interaction with the requirements, business analysis and project management part of the process. Which inevitably means much higher exposure to documents creation, collaboration and exchange. iWork gives you reasonably good compatibility with Office document formats, which means that you can easily import almost every Office document modify it and export it back so that Windows user will see almost all of your changes. Almost everything will be just fine. Unfortunately, almost is not the same as everything: it often breaks fine details of formatting, reviewer comments and does not really work for more complicated Excel spreadsheets. Especially those spreadsheets which project manager-ish people so love to create.
The double backup word in the title is not an oversight. If I would be talking about "almost perfect backup solution", it would be Time Machine - which has proven, despite it's minor annoyances (see this) to be very unobtrusive and functional. As long as you have Mac and Leopard, of course.
What I am talking about here is second level - an offsite backup, that you may need in case you house burns down, gets flooded or your computer with time machine disk gets stolen. I do not live in tornado valley, earthquake zone and crime rate around Westboro is fairly low even compared to low Canadian levels, but anyway.
Since few months I have slowly switched all my online notebooks to Evernote. In case you are not familiar with it, it is a great service. You can clip pieces of Web pages, type in notes, attach documents and multimedia files (pictures, sounds) and store them online to be always available through nicely done Ajaxian Web interface. The notes can be tagged, organized into notebooks and full text searched. One of the killer features is that for uploaded pictures, Evernote will do OCR and include the photographed tex into full text search
I first time discovered Ruby back in 2006 (yes, I know, I was late to the game), and immediately fell in love with it. The dynamic nature of the language, the consistency, pure esthaetics and practicality certainly changed the way how I saw software development and programming languages.
Since that time, I made several attempts to integrate Ruby into my professional life and make it part of the toolbox. It was cool to play with Ruby in my spare time, but I wanted to use it on projects whose main development language/platform was mainly Java. Use it as scripting, glue language. Use it as toolkit language to e.g. generate test data, access databases, convert files, build projects and maybe even build a piece of Web applications (admin apps for example).
In theory, exchanging mainboard on Macbook has no impact because all your data is stored on your harddisk that is untouched. In real life, there are few minor surprises.
First, your MAC address of the network card had changed. This is something you will not notice, unless Murphy's law plays funny game with you, as it did with me. When arriving back to the office, I was able to connect to WiFi network, but the ethernet was stubbornly getting the "internal IP" - 169.254.x.x address, which is pretty much useless from connectivity point of view. We are running two separate networks - both NAT-ed, one on WiFi - mainly for guests, other internal. Not getting an IP address did not make any sense: the cable was OK, because other machine worked just fine with same drop/cable. The Ethernet connection was OK, because it worked when assigned IP address manually.
Back in November 2007, when I was buying Macbook Pro, I did order the AppleCare option, which added several hundred dollars to already pretty expensive notebook price. For moment I was tempted to go without it - after all, Apple makes top grade, high quality hardware and considering pretty low failure rate I have seen with my Windows based notebooks between 1998-2006, why to pay more ? Little did I know how much mileage will I get from the extra cost :-(.