Google Maps API Documentation
Google Maps API Documentation: The Google Maps API lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages.
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Google Maps API Documentation: The Google Maps API lets you embed Google Maps in your own web pages.
John Battelle's Searchblog: "One of the most oft-asked questions in search is 'what's next.' Yahoo hopes that My Web 2.0 is an answer"
Apple has posted a tutorial on how to create podcasts.
Microsoft Atlas: Response to AJAX: From O'Reilly editor John Osborn: 'For more information on the Microsoft Atlas Project -- a response to the growing enthusiasm for AJAX -- see the blog posted yesterday by Scott Guthrie, who heads up the web team at Microsoft.'
(Via O'Reilly Radar.)
.. the coolest toy I haven't seen for a long, long time .. I want to have one!! .. check the video .. just incredible ..
The Hydro-Foam is a remote control electric airplane/speedboat/race-car powered by a brushless motor and lithium-polymer batteries.
"A while ago (actually, any post I've done is now 'a while ago...') I wrote about Sabermetrics for Startups. I wondered if there was data you could collect in an interview process that would allow you to more accurately determine if someone, particularly an engineer, would be successful in your company.
I don't think I have all the answers, but over the last few months, I've honed in on three questions that I believe have a correlation with three key skills.
I'm not talking about technical skills. There are a lot more people far better than me to judge whether or not someone is technically qualified as a great coder.
I am talking about the intangibles. In particular, I'm talking about three key intangibles -- communicating, tinkering and passion for coding. In my experience, these things make a huge difference in someone being a great contributor to your startup.
So, here are the questions. They're simple and they aren't pass/fail. But, I think certain answers are more correlated with success. So, pretend you're in the hot seat, bright lights, uncomfortable chair... you get the idea. Here goes
1. Do you have a blog?
It was Joel Spolsky who wrote a great piece about great engineers being defined not only by their h4x0r skillz, but by their ability to communicate. Here's what the man himself had to say
The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas.By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless.
If someone has a blog, you know that they are starting to make communications and writing part of a basic set of habits. You know they value those habits enough to make time for them. A public blog improves the odds that the person sitting across from you (who has great coding skills) can also effectively advocate their ideas both inside and outside the company.
2. What's your home page?
Great engineers make their own homepages. When they hit the 'home' icon on their browsers, you're not likely to see My Yahoo or Amazon. They're disatisfied with their other choices out there and they take matters into their own hands (usually just a large list of links of favorite places to go, laid out 'just right'). My friend, Marc Hedlund put it this way, 'Jedi Knights make their own lightsabers and great engineers make their own homepages.' How true.
I think the trait indicated by making your own home pages is that the person is a 'tinkerer'. Tinkerers are great inside companies. They're curious. They're often not quite satisfied with the status quo and doing things the way others do. They're the ones that aren't often satisfied with the way your company is doing something. But, rather than complaining or asking, they go ahead and just fix the problem.
It's hard to know if the person sitting across from you is a tinkerer, but if they make their own home page, it's more likely that they are.
3. Do you contribute to an open source project?
One thing you're looking for in a great engineer is a person who is passionate about coding. Passionate doesn't mean all-consumed-and-working-24-7, but it does mean curious, deeply interested and committed. Besides the obvious benefits of being able to review someone's open source code for quality, design patters and architecture decisions, contributing to an open source project has a strong correlation to the person being passionate about code. They're less likely to just be about code-for-cash (not that there is anything wrong about that, it's just not usually right for a very small startup). That intangible, code-as-passion, can make a huge difference to a startup.
So, that's what I think. It's only been a few months of thought. If you've got other ideas, I'm all ears."
(Via Bnoopy.)
Screenshots of the next version of Lotus Notes, code-named "Hannover" .. pretty cool looking and all built based on the Eclipse/SWT platform
.. what a geek .. the ueber-use-case for AppleScripts .. it integrates iTunes, SMS, Skype and your cellphone in the ultimate way .. :-)
What DittyBot does:
You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory. DittyBot will play your selection to you over your phone until you hang up. Mind you, this all should happen within 1 minute of sending your song request (depending on the speed of your POP server). Sometimes it’s even quicker!
Mac-on-Mac makes it possible to run Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, OpenDarwin or Linux for PowerPC in parallel with the Max OS X installation in a Virtual Machine.
Io is small prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects), Self, NewtonScript and Act1 (prototype-based differential inheritance, actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).
..interesting.. I always liked prototype-based languages
Scripting Web services with E4X, Part 2: E4X, ECMAScript for XML, a simple extension to JavaScript that makes XML scripting very simple. In Part 1, we demonstrated a Web programming model called AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and showed how some new XML extensions to JavaScript can make it very simple. In this second article, we use E4X to build the server side of this interaction, and we show how to implement simple Web services in JavaScript.
Comic Life has won 'The Best Product New to Mac OS X' in this year's Apple Design Awards.
Congratulations .. what a cool application!
Video of Steve Jobs speech: In his Commencement address, Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs urged Stanford graduates to follow their hearts. A pancreatic cancer survivor, he told the Class of '05, 'Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.'
The Axis of Alteration: Greasemonkey, Aardvark, and Platypus:
Recently, I’ve been playing with Aardvark, Greasemonkey, and Platypus. These are all Firefox extensions for the user to manipulate webpages.
Aardvark allows for transient modifications of your current page. You can mouse over the ‘objects’ on the page, like tables, to delete them, isolate them, change their width functions, and more. This is useful for making bad pages printable and making really bad pages legible. It’s also useful for killing that one really annoying ad, but I’ve got a more specific extension for that.
Greasemonkey adds Javascript and DHTML to a page. It is also capable of making HTTP and XML requests of its own and injecting those results into the page. These scripts consistently add functionality to a page, instead of the transient editing of Aardvark. There are scripts for anything as simple as taking out the text adds in Google, or doing picture lookups on LiveJournal, to tricky stuff, like adding an MBTA overlay to Google Maps, and implementing a Javascript drag and drop interface to your Netflix queue.
There are nerds that write these Greasemonkey scripts. However, Platypus’s goal is to create a front end for simple user webpage manipulation, and to save those actions as a Greasemonkey script. Basically the rapid editing of Aardvark, and the consistent application of Greasemonkey.
These extensions are a really fascinating way to quickly add power user features to webpages and also to add functionality to pages that are unlikely to ever implement these modifications.
(Via N I V I.)
This article describes some of the issues that come with supporting a scripting language in your Java application and compares Groovy, JudoScript, Pnuts, JRuby, Jacl, Jython, Rhino, and BeanShell in a variety of ways to help you make the right choice.
A tribute to one of Silicon Valley's most influential and forgotten researchers at Xerox Parc event: "The tributes to Mr Engelbart went on and on, long after the allotted time for the event, with many stories told publicly for the first time. It was priceless material for future archaeologists exploring this fascinating spot on earth."
.. I like appliances ..
Socialtext -- Enterprise Social Software: "The Socialtext Appliance provides all of the capabilities of the Socialtext Workspace in a hardware appliance designed for minimum administration and maximum security."
There are a few SWT custom widgets available over there. Not as much as Swing, but the number is increasing as the number of developers that adopt SWT is growing. Here are some of them:
Mathias Muller gives some more links:
Not very sure if I have forgotten something. Please, let me know about it and I'll update the summary.
(Via Martin Perez's Weblog.)
..nice presentation comparing the different client approaches..
Web Application Solutions: A Designer’s Guide: "Web Application Solutions is a guide that helps designers, product managers, and business owners evaluate some of the most popular Web application presentation layer solutions available today."
Based on technology from MTG, the Freesound Project looks like an intriguing source for podcasters and others:
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to
* browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a ‘sounds-like’ type of browsing and more
* up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
* interact with fellow sound-artists!We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn’t been a solution.
(Via Blogarithms.)