Daniel Wintschel is humandoing

I just finished reading a rather excellent interview that Jessica Livingston (of YCombinator fame) conducted with Joel Spolsky. The interview comes out of a book that recently went to press called Founders at Work. Joel’s getting a little cheeky in his old age, but he still captivates when talking of technology, programming, and addressing issues [...]

I’ve used IRC on and off for the past, um, 10 years or so. I’ve had a Mac for the past 5. For the life of me, I had not been able to find an IRC client for the Mac that didn’t completely and utterly suck. That is, until now. Enter Colloquy – the sweetest, [...]

If you thought Steve’s demo of Multi-Touch on the iPhone was impressive, you need to see this TED talk from Jeff Han, who is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Get the feed or download a zipped copy of the QuickTime file. This is multi-touch gone crazy. The keywords [...]

My favorite podcast, hands down, is the JavaPosse. There’s nothing quite like sitting back with a cup of coffee and listening to Dick, Carl, Tor and Joe yammer about Java (and/or technology in general) – especially if they’ve been drinking. A few months ago they launched a Google group in which I am an avid [...]

I found this new (to me) Ruby tidbit in a comment on a two year old blog post here. Basically, in Ruby, you can initialize a new Hash so that any time you reference a given value, keyed by a given key, if that value is previously nil, it assigns a default value. In “gooder” [...]

And yes, there’s a difference. I started researching AllOfMP3 about a month ago after hearing about it for the first time from a friend, while at their place for dinner. I read through all the spiel, the Russian Federation, Russian Licensing, The Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS), lawsuits, et cetera. One of the best [...]

Apparently at least a few people think that the iPhone will be a hit: Ticker Company Phone AAPL Apple iPhone RIMM Research In Motion Blackberry PALM Palm Treo I first saw a screenshot similar to this on a Flickr photo stream belonging to Dave Shea (a fellow Vancouverite, I might add). I jumped over to [...]

As we go through life on a day-to-day basis, we are surrounded with real-life scenarios that we often compare to programming scenarios. One great example of this was published by Spolsky a couple years ago in The Best Software Writing I. The piece was called Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit and was originally written [...]

I’ve come across two amazing looking non-profits in these past few days, one thanks to Mike Cannon-Brookes and another thanks to Bruce Tate. The non-profits would be Kiva.org and ChangingThePresent respectively. These are both phenomenal ideas. I haven’t used ChangingThePresent, but as soon as I saw Mike’s entry – I jumped in for the Kiva [...]

Yes. I’m aware. Maybe I’m the only one, but I can’t seem to keep a Rails app running on TextDrive for more than a day without it being killed-off by their reaper. I didn’t have time to move the site over the holidays, I was in Vietnam for a week, and then my parents-in-law arrived [...]