Category: Geekery

  • PHP on Rails

    The funny thing about working with Ruby on Rails is that its made me a better PHP developer. A client wanted something developed and chose being able to support the app with their in-house PHP experience over Rails’ speed of development. I’m now using tools like DB_DataObject to emulate some of what I love about […]

  • NPR’s most interesting podcast

    Browsing through NPR’s Podcast Directory, one in particular stood out; not for its content but for the way it was created. Most of the podcasts are simply NPR shows, but NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories is assembled based on the audience’s reaction to NPR news stories. People tend to share stories they like, so in theory […]

  • Red Flag on the Field

    The next time someone freaks out on live TV, will the broadcaster flip the “Copy Never” bit to control the damage? Read my full post over on PVRblog.

  • del.icio.us search and tag tip

    Searching del.icio.us is slow, finding links by tags is fast. Always look for a bookmark by tag first, then search when that fails, and then fix the tags. For instance, I was looking for Notes on developing a web service API so I typed http://del.icio.us/revgeorge/webservices into my address bar. When it didn’t show up, I […]

  • Point / Counterpoint

    POINT Here’s a bunch of archives By The Onion America’s Finest News Source The Onion has opened up its archives to the world for free. We used to think that charging for access to the archives was a good idea, until we did it. Our accountants have compared the ad revenue for non-protected content against […]

  • Geeks want to help too.

    One of the things I saw about the relief efforts for Katrina is the number and diversity of missing persons sites. Geeks want to help too. One of the problems that was obvious to the geeks was that there were data about missing people that needed to be shared, and so the geeks pitched in […]

  • Happy Birfday Opera!

    The Opera web browser turned 10 today. Opera is the browser that created tabbed browsing, and is best known as the web browser that still costs money. That’s not entirely true—you can also run it for free if you agree to have Google Ads displayed in the browser on every page you visit. It runs […]

  • Mr. Brin, Mr. Page, Tear Down This Wall!

    [Update 2006-01-18: As of yesterday, Google supports S2S!] Talk, talk, talk. Everyone’s talking about Google, well, you know. Aside from the standard Google buzz, Google Talk is getting a lot of interest because they implement the open Jabber instant messaging standard. To over-simplify, Jabber is to instant messaging what SMTP is to email; right now […]

  • Google Maps thoughts

    After the bajillionth Google Maps site it hit me: Google Maps is at its core a nifty UI widget for a common type of data. The OS doesn’t provide a widget for dealing with location data, and the web browser as a subset of OS widgets certainly doesn’t (hello combo box!). That’s like 10% of […]

  • Greasemonkey and Microformats

    I’ll pontificate on this later, here’s the short version. Some people include information about events in web pages so that if you have the right tools you can import them straight off the web to whatever calendar program you use. This format is called hCalendar. I created a Greasemonkey user script that will find those […]