Jahr: 2009

David Ascher – Getting insight into one’s own email: „The “start page”, which makes a lot of sense in Firefox, never made a huge amount of sense to me in Thunderbird. In particular, it’s shown only when a folder is selected, and no message is selected. That’s hardly a logical time to show the (colorful,…

Eric Ries – Fear is the mind-killer: „When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. […] For some, this was an absolutely terrifying experience. „What if I take the site down?!“ was a common refrain. I tried to make sure…

Adam Shand – Lessons Learned from Previous Employment: „Surviving the loss of a key person, is never as hard as you think it will be. […] The one thing that managers hate, more than anything else, is being surprised. […] Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer. […] One of the primary jobs of…

Grant Ingersoll – Exploring Lucene and Solr’s TrieRange Capabilities: „Now, however, thanks to the new org.apache.lucene.search.trie package (currently located in the contrib/queries area of Lucene, but it may move to the Lucene core, see below) and it’s addition to Solr via a FieldType, Lucene and Solr users can take advantage of much faster range searches.“

Timothy M. O’Brien at O’Reilly Radar – Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa: „On Tuesday, Google introduced a feature called Rich Snippets which provides users with a convenient summary of a search result at a glance. They have been experimenting with microformats and RDFa, and are officially introducing the feature and allowing more sites…

RJ Owen at InsideRIA – New York Times AIR reader released: „As a whole, the application does a better job replicating the „newspaper“ experience than reading in the browser. […] Clean design and great execution make this a stellar user experience, and something other companies should strive to emulate. Even more impressive, I’ve had this…

Scott Adams – Calendar as Filter: „I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life. You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information…

Jon Udell – Can the Noosphere Save Us?: „We are all continually discovering useful knowledge that we want to share. Until very recently, it was costly to transmit that knowledge beyond the local sphere: friends, family, tribe. Now, suddenly, it’s free to address the whole world. The only cost is your time. Of course that…

Simon St. Laurent – Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access: „The general practice set by Access’s creators from the beginning was to do as much as possible through visual interfaces rather than through code. In that, perhaps more than anything else, they struck a balance that made Access approachable while still letting it…

Rick Jelliffe at O’Reilly Broadcast – Announcing the date of the FOSS revolution: 2032!: „So why is retirement important? It is because I suspect that if FOSS can present itself in a form that is convenient and fun for retirees to take up as a hobby, it will have access to an incredible reserve army…