Entries from March 2006 ↓

For a business application developer, the thought of someday being able to write games for the XBOX is just plain cool.

Google Finance just launched and it’s awesome.

Try dragging the stock chart. Or clicking on the letters in the chart to see what news was released on that day. They even have blog posts in the bottom right.

Take the quiz and find out.

Also check out Top 10 Ideas for Amazon S3 Applications.

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”

— Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition)

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Writely has been purchased by Google for an undisclosed sum, just a few short months after being mentioned here on this blog. Coincidence…?! I’ll let the reader decide.

Here’s a good analysis of why this wasn’t just a couple of guys writing code in their spare time who happened to win the Google lottery. Writely was started by two guys who’ve worked with document management systems for years and have produced word processing and paint programs for the MAC, the first cross-platform (Windows/MAC) WYSIWYG editor, and worked on Macromedia’s re-write of Dreamweaver. Guys writing code in their spare time, indeed.

Thanks to Adnan for the heads up.

If you haven’t heard about this, you should check it out. Amazon just released something called S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service.

It’s a web service that allows you to store and retrieve objects from 1 byte to 5 GB each. The cost is a menial $.15 per GB-month for storage and $.20 per GB of data transfer.

People are already talking about how this will create cool opportunities for programmers to throw together useful apps without a huge investment in storage equipment. Things are about to get interesting…

On another note, something called Live Clipboard was announced today. The best way to understand it is to use this demo. One more step towards eliminating desktop applications.

I received a ton of comments and emails about my most recent article Timeline and Risk, which is my most popular article to date. Check out the comments if you haven’t already – a very interesting pattern emerged of people suggesting that I quit. I’ll come back to that point in a future post because I don’t have time to write about it right now, but let’s just say I don’t consider that a feasible solution.

I had a good conversation with one of our senior managers about the article. He agreed with my thoughts on the subject, but interpreted the other manager differently than I had. It was a good chat and I appreciated that he took the time to discuss it with me.

On another note, I apologize for not posting much during the past few weeks. I’ve been working crazy hours trying to wrap up a major project that goes to QA in just over a week.

As counterpoint to that, I’m leaving for Maui in the middle of the week, so I’ll be incommunicado for a few days. I’ll be sure to do some snorkeling for you.