MindComet

Estimation

XKCD is a webcomic with a very broad geek leaning for comedy. Today’s struck home as I’ve frequently wondered how Windows’ estimation process can be so far off. I still hold that the file copy estimation issues are the main reason to use Apple computers.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Admin on Jul. 20, 2009

Podcast: The games we play

Have you ever wanted to know what games the geeks of MindComet play (or have played for that matter)?  Well, here’s your chance.  Listen in and be prepared to be amazed (or scared).

oops_ep0003_20090716.mp3

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Andrew Riley on Jul. 17, 2009

Bit.ly and the Plan

It drew a lot of raised eyebrows when the link shortening website http://bit.ly raised over a million dollars in funding. Link shorteners are a dime a dozen and on top of that they’re taking a lot of heat for destroying the integrity of the Internet by creating failure points for these links. So why would someone invest in them?

Bit.ly started out as a link shortener with a handful of analytics. Up until then the analytics were extremely sparse and hard to come by. But Bit.ly dove in and provided minute by minute analytics for clicks, sources, twitter conversations and more. They innovated a field that had been blindly simplistic. But their plan doesn’t stop there. The capital they raised is going to help them build a news site. Just like the sites which share the trending topics on Twitter, Bit.ly is going to share the most popular links on their service.

Currently they do this through a twitter bot that sends the top link every hour, but what they’re talking about is akin to a Digg competitor, a destination site that provides this information.

Now, this could be a fool’s bet. Digg is still trying to come out on top financially, and it’s a competitive market with the YCombinator graduate Reddit, the also fast innovating StumbleUpon (and their beta link shortener Su.pr) and a whole host of others. Entering a crowded market requires one thing: innovation. What is Bit.ly going to offer that these others don’t? It will more deeply integrate Twitter and other social networking services.

It could also be that Bit.ly is cruising to be acquired. Twitter has already switched and blessed them as Twitter’s link shortener of choice (sorry TinyURL, you didn’t innovate) and the rumors abound that Twitter would be well off to internalize the link shortening, as they did for Twitter search. And since Twitter has a nice war chest (though no solid income to continue building it) they can afford to make Bit.ly a good offer.

In the end I think Twitter will wait to see what Bit.ly does with their platform, and if they like what they see then we’ll see a merger or acquisition, assuming it isn’t too late and Bit.ly’s innovations don’t take them past Twitter into the next phase of this ‘microblogging.‘

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Admin on Jul. 07, 2009

Podcast 02: A List Apart Survey

Join us for our second podcast where we go over the “A List Apart” survey results!

oops_ep0002_20090618.mp3

Additional show notes after the jump.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Andrew Riley on Jun. 26, 2009

Podcast 01: Blogs we read that you should read too

Join us for our first podcast here at Oops, My Geek is Showing. In this episode, we suggest and discuss various blogs we use on a daily bases. We also discuss our various methods of retrieving updates from these blogs as well as how influential blogs are in our daily development careers.

oops_ep001_20090519.mp3

Additional show notes after the jump.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Chris Mitchell on Jun. 18, 2009

I guess I’m getting old

It looks like I’m old in the computer world   After being a developer for ~15 years I can look back fondly at the “old school techniques we certainly don’t miss“.  I do fondly look back at some of the things talked about but it’s true, I don’t miss it.  Frankly I’m glad that with the exception of some applications I don’t really have to think about the Big O of my sorting/search algorithm or have to write finicky TSRs in Pascal (that would frequently reboot or cause you to reboot your system).  I am surprised that linked lists with unprotected memory didn’t make the list.  If you think writing TSRs would reboot your system a lot you’ve never tried allocating your own pointers in an OS with memory that was just right for the clobbering.  Yes, I do realize this is just a form of me telling you about “tying onions to one’s belt because it was the style of the time” but that’s a story for another day.

Be sure to thank your programming forefathers for their sacrifices so you have things like virtual memory, protected memory, OS based threads, dynamic arrays and making geek… sheek.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Andrew Riley on Jun. 12, 2009

Google ups the stakes for web developers

Today Google released Page Speed which is a competitor to YSlow.  Both are Firebug add-ons for the wildly popular Firefox.

The good news is it looks like Page Speed does everything that YSlow does and then some!  On my first run Page Speed warned me about using descendant selectors in my CSS and suggested that I could better compress some images on the page.  Better yet, it linked me to the suggested compressed version of the image so I could simply save it off and upload it.

Overall if you are a web developer it behooves you to have both YSlow and Page Speed installed in your Firefox so you can always make sure you are delivering the fastest user experience on the web.

Read More & View Comments

Posted by Andrew Riley on Jun. 05, 2009