Blitzweekend project: getting real with GoalR

Saturday, March 1st, 2008

Ever since I attended 37 signals "Getting Real" workshop I've want to put some of their design principles to the test. My company is Syntenic, a boutique consulting and services shop primarily focused on web operations, performance optimization via application delivery controllers (load balancing and server offload) and 24x7 high ...

Can code be bad for the planet?

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

Alistair has an interesting post on Earth2Tech, the thesis of which is that inefficient coding practices can lead to environmental harm. I almost misled myself into thinking AC is blaming virtualization and SaaS/IaaS (infrastructure as a service) on creating such inefficiencies. Rather, he skipped past the obvious environmental benefits of server ...

Web 2.0 nomenclature – a flash in the pan or real gold nuggets?

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Austin at Billions with Zero Knowledge is blogging at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference. This got me thinking again about all this of web nomenclature hoopla which seems to have spread like the Code Red worm (see below) with monikers such as "office 2.0," "enterprise 2.0," "identity 2.0," etc.... Anytime ...

Spread ’em!

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Organizing information is about to get easier. It has been more than 20 years since the spreadsheet application Lotus 1-2-3 became the first true killer application for the personal computer allowing us to organize and analyze information faster and in more useful ways. By the time I was in university ...

The Wild Kingdom of “Spore”

Monday, March 20th, 2006

Spore looks to be a truly amazing game in the works from the original creators of Simcity. It seems to combine elements of some other classic simulation strategy games such as Populous and Civilization, crossed with the more modern "god" games such as Impossible Creatures and Black and White. One ...

Adding Adwords

Monday, February 27th, 2006

So I opened a Google "Adwords" account, mainly to figure out how it works and whether the links really are relevant to the content I post. Basically the idea is Google gets to advertise on my site, and will dynamically display ads which are relevant to whatever content is on ...

Google hosting takes its first steps

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Google takes baby steps into hosting as we predicted here. Looks like they are starting with e-mail, which as we have mentioned is probably their "stickiest" service. Interested organizations are encouraged to sign up for the beta service here. What they say: Bring Gmail to your domain. This special beta test lets ...

Protect your Windows PC for free

Sunday, January 29th, 2006

First in a series of articles about useful things: how to protect your personal computer running Windows when it hooked up to the internet, and do it for free! A combination of Anti-Virus, Firewall and Anti-Spyware is essential for any general purpose internet user running a windows PC, here are my ...

Google Hosting – why Google will target the hosting industry next

Monday, November 21st, 2005

On the road to the top, everyone makes a few mistakes right? Several interesting new software releases this year have resulting in Google admitting their lack of planning. The minor annoyances experienced here are really just side effects of being unwitting test subjects in their labs: Google Web Accelerator - "Thank ...

Put on your safety googles: a trip to Google’s Labs

Monday, May 30th, 2005

Just a suggestion... Check out the simultaneously useful and distracting Google Suggest: as you type the search field expands into a drop down list providing anticipatory or alternative searches and allowing you to see the difference in the size of the result sets for each of them. A great way of ...