FearAndLoath.Us

Super Soda Fountain

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:57:45 +0000

I want one of these for my house. It dispenses 104 different sodas produced by the Coca-Cola company.

http://www.undertheradarblog.com/blog/coke-freestyle-touchscreen-mobile-interactive-machine/

How to minimize office politics

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:12:48 +0000

This makes so much sense, I’m surprised I haven’t heard it before.

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/23/how-to-minimize-politics-in-your-company/

webpagetest.org

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:28:26 +0000

This is a nice tool for graphing how IE7 loads each file for a given web page. It even provides a checklist of items that can be optimized. Apparently, there are quite a few improvements I can make on this blog, although I don’t think performance is the real reason that my readership is small.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100824_3GAX/

Wanted: Non-iPhone User

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:25:16 +0000

Ha! I didn’t realize that a phone was as sensitive a topic as politics or religion. Maybe, E-Harmony should add smart phones to their “29 dimensions of compatibility”. I think this guy is overreacting. It’s not like his roommate is one of those Emacs users.

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/08/06/guy-moving-to-new-york-wants-a-roomie-who-doesnt-have-an-iphone/

ZooKeeper - A Reliable, Scalable Distributed Coordination System

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:55:32 +0000

This is a nice explanation of why you would want to use such a lightweight distributed service and what the caveats are.

http://highscalability.com/zookeeper-reliable-scalable-distributed-coordination-system

Testing python module installation against multiple versions of python

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:00:21 +0000

Tox still requires that each version of python be installed on your system, but it uses virtualenv to create a separate directory layout that the module you are testing can be installed into without affecting the libraries on your system. Since the virtualenv symlinks all base python files into the new directory structure, it doesn’t take long to generate, but that’s why you need each python version installed already.

http://codespeak.net/tox/

Development Culture

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:04:51 +0000

This is an interesting analysis of common developer attitudes.

http://andyjko.com/2010/07/13/mozilla-summit-2010-and-dev-culture/#comment-103

One Frame of Fame

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:59:09 +0000

This is an interesting application of crowd sourcing, and you still have time to be a part of it. I bet the idea wouldn’t work near as well if they tried to get a bunch of people to just sing one note of the song.

http://oneframeoffame.com/

Mobile credit card processing on the cheap

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:45:38 +0000

This is yet another technological device that’s amazing not because it’s new, but because it’s so much less painful and expensive than previous incarnations.

https://squareup.com/features

Using BitTorrent to deploy updates to thousands of servers

admin — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:03:14 +0000

This is a very interesting application of BitTorrent.

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/murder-fast-datacenter-code-deploys.html