An Entirely Other Day - Wide vs. Deep. on going from a programmer to a manager.

Air Canada computers back up after problem causes worldwide delays. come on people, print your bording passes at home and don’t check luggage.


the “lost pilot” of 24 from 1994. i was crying from laughing so hard. via boris.

MLB rips off fans who bought DRM videos - Boing Boing. they switched DRM providers and all old licenses just don’t work anymore. MLB is so ass backwards.

Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun! - New York Times Blog. the NYTimes used EC2 to generate a couple terabytes of pdfs and stored it all on S3. not too shabby.

Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!). makes an argument for establishing key infrastructure setup/config/etc early on.

When 4-person startup RedSwoosh got in a rut the other year they all went to Thailand for 6 weeks. and got a shit ton of work done. the company got bought out this year by Akamai.

Discovery Acquires ‘How Stuff Works’ For $250 Million say what?

China redirected Google and Yahoo to Baidu on the day the US gave the Dalai Lama an award. I’m surprised this wasn’t mainstream news.

BBC NEWS | Spam weapon helps preserve books. a novel idea that stops spammers and digitizes old books at the same time. via boris.

Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Over the last few weeks I had heard about this “last lecture” by Randy Pausch, a 47 year old professor from CMU who’s dieing of cancer. I stumbled across it this evening and I’d recommend it to everyone to watch.

Conflicts Of Interest: Why Do Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, Red Hat And Others Support The National ID Card?. everyone loses their scruples when there’s a chance for a fat government contract.

Bringing back the housecall (kottke.org). about a doctor who takes appointments by sms, follow-ups over video conference.

NTP, the patent trolls who robbed RIM of over $600M last year, are now suing the four major US wireless carriers. what douche bags.

Too-biased - Futuretalk: CouchDB. At Railsconf there was a serious undercurrent of being anti-database and wanting a replacement. Tobi kind of sums that DB frustration up and talks about the CouchDB project.

Seam Carving Photo Demo. It’s done in flash and you can try it on any photo. Works good on landscapes. it’s based on this video, which i linked to last week.

YouTube - Seam Carving for content aware image resizing. Demo of a pretty cool app for resizing images from SIGGRAPH this year.

Wired article about the life of Jim Gray and the high tech hunt to try and find him. not a single trace of his boat ever turned up.

InfoQ: Gemstone OODB to support JRuby, Rubinius. gemstone is some really cool technology that lets you create distributed object datastores. this, someday, will replace database persistence for most web apps.

YouTube - The first IT support call. “what do you call it? turning the page?”. via auriol