A number of people have asked me to provide an RSS feed for my site. And I will. I started looking into this last week, when John sent me a link to his perl script screen scraper, but I’m busy starting up a business, so I only have little time.
But what I’m not getting yet, perhaps because I’m slow, is how are you people using these RSS feeds? Do you use an aggregator, and if so, which one? Tell me more!
My Nikon Coolpix 700 broke when it fell from my desk onto the floor. The battery cover won’t stay closed now, because some tiny piece of plastic broke off. It looks like it’s going to cost around $150 to get it fixed, which is a bit much, given that the going price for this camera seems to be about $330 (subtract a bit, because this model has extra RAM), and it’s at least a couple years old now.
I know I’m slow, but I’ve only now learned of BookWatch and blogdex (thanks to Bubber).
This is where I used to live in New York. This counter would’ve shown 7, if I’d still been living there. :-)
My blogging package has been upgraded. Now includes a Google link and small style enhancements.
Visit What’s This Site Running to download.
My ratings package has been upgraded. Only change is that the new version includes the GIFs used to display the current rating.
Visit What’s This Site Running to download.
As Denmark’s celebrating the technical-trouble-infested start of a new micro-payment system, I thought it was worthwhile to point to this splendid article from a year and a half ago by Clay Shirky: The Case Against Micropayments.
Jubii, a major Danish internet portal and Yahoo! rip-off, decides to cease support for Netscape, according to an article in Computerworld. Less than 1% of their users are using Netscape.
Couldn’t Jubii just write simpler HTML? It’s funny to compare the designs of Yahoo! and Jubii. There’s a pretty clear difference between US design philosophy (=functionality) and Danish design philosophy (=prettyness). :-)
Tomorrow night’s the night: The Eurovision song contest.
As you probably know, there’s a new rule, introduced a couple years ago, that all countries are allowed to translate their songs into English for the international contest.
In fact, I have a hunch that the Danish entry, “Show me who you are”, was originally written in English, and only then retrofitted into Danish, not the other way around.
Why? Look at the lyrics. The Danish version says “Du er her, og du er ej” (you are here, and you are not). “Ej” is a very quaint variant of “not”, never used in normal speech. It’s something you use in lyrics when you have no other way of making your sentence work. By contrast, the English version says “But your mind goes running free”. Much easier on the tongue.
The chorus is even worse:
Vis mig hvem du er |
Show me who you are Tell me what you think Let me get close Not on sidetrack |
Again, the nasty “ej” pops up. This time in the chorus. If you find yourself using “ej” in a chorus, you know you’re in trouble. Or you just don’t care. Constrast again with the English version:
Tell me who you are
Show me what to do
Let me be the one
That you hold onto
Again, this makes much more sense and sounds a lot better.
It’s interesting how the new rule actually lowers the quality of the songs in Danish. Not that I care. As you know, I think we might as well switch to English for everything right away :-)
Uploading some photos from our cross-country (US) drive back in the fall. It’s good to get the photos out there, but it’s depressing that it’s taken so long.
Just recalled Philip’s comment when I was reading Martin Fowler’s Analysis Patterns: “Don’t take advice from someone who says you should program your applications in Smalltalk!”
Guess he has a point. It’s at least worth to work with a discount factor: If someone tries to tell you how you should develop software, look at the software he’s built himself. Is that the kind of software you dream of building? Is it great software?
If not, he may still have valid points, but factor in a discount factor of .2 or so.
Isn’t it interesting that computer scientists have a complete disregard for the most successful software company in the world, Microsoft.
Who’s there to look up to as role model? MS doesn’t really have any competition in the desktop software market. Who’s there to challenge them?
Bottom line is that there are no real competitors to Microsoft, which is a shame. Only the top three are even close, and they’re MS, IBM and Oracle. And neither IBM nor Oracle have any guts nor talent to go after Microsoft’s core business. All the rest are way down the list and they’re mostly in niches.
Why, oh why, does it have to be so hard to get around MS in this industry?
A rule of thumb that I’ve coined since I did ACS workflow is Pind’s Rule of Five: Before trying to design a general solution to a problem, implement at least five different instances of it, different in as many aspects as possible. Only then will you know what the right generalization is.
It’s going to take longer than if you just dive in, but the result is going to be a lot better. Workflow would definitely have benefited from this strategy.
This is the strategy I’m currently pursuing by building a bug-tracker, that’s everything I want it to be. Then building a couple more workflow-centric apps that’s everything I want them to be. Then I can take a step back and ask myself: How can I best refactor these, so they’re all built on a shared workflow infrastructure?
That way you don’t lock yourself into a stiff system that won’t let you do something you’d like it to do. And you don’t create a generalized solution for something that it later turns out, you don’t actually want.
A crucial component is to let time pass and let the app prove itself with users before you accept your solution and start generalizing it.
Briliant! I’ve just activated fastmail’s new spam filter, and they’re catching around 40 spam mails per day for me. What a relief! Outsourcing rules.
Exactly one month ago, as I was desperately trying to file my US tax return at the very last minute, I ran into an obscure bug in Turbotax.
At first, I’d told Turbotax the truth, which is that I now live in Denmark. Unfortunately, that meant that I couldn’t file electronically, so I went back and changed it to a c/o address in the US. That worked, except I kept getting an obscure error: Even though I’d specified that the address was in the EU, Turbotax kept insisting that I’d specified an address in Denmark, when I’d checked a hundred times that the address was in the US.
I looked and looked, until it finally hit me: What if I change the address back to ‘foreign’, go to the page where you specify the country, delete the contents of that field, then go back and change the address back to ‘US’, perhaps that would work?
Turns out it did! They forgot to clear the ‘country’ field when you choose a ‘US’ address type. (Yes, I’m a geek!)
I’ve moved to Trepkasgade 4, 1.th, 2100 Copenhagen Ø. About 2.7 kilometers from the old place, and about 800 meters from the office. Same phone number and other contact info.
I'm a coach and entrepreneur in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read more…
