Thought leadership that does not translate to leverage through exclusive ownership is an excellent paradigm for success and creating value. Creating environments where as many as possible win as much as possible, is a more general and even more widely applicable truth super set of the above one, but it offers less useful and easy to apply cues, clues and information. Google does a great job of that in the field of web search, marrying users seeking information on topic X and commercial entities selling topic X centric information and solutions. The web does a great job of creating a publicly accessible place to convey, create and consume information and many aspects and sorts of culture and entertainment, largely without middle-men and gate- keepers, at least for the technically minded portion of the creative class. Palm seem to be making a good attempt at bringing this to the mobile industry, that has been very far behind the game in those respects, so far. Apple has ...
It's Blog Action Day, and 2009's topic is climate change. With the most enlightening read on my 2008 list being Earth Policy Institute's Plan B 3.0, I was really glad to see Plan B 4.0 released a while ago -- it is available in its entirety in both HTML and PDF formats online, which happily means we can augment the material using tools like Greasemonkey and MashLogic (I am one of the developers and maintainers of both extensions). Both extensions, in different ways, allow us to easily improve our reading experience by running code that someone else already wrote once, for material that was published by yet another unrelated person or organization, without any sort of organized cooperation among either of us. I find that notion incredibly powerful, and an uplifting thought about where decentralized cooperation is taking us online. When I read Plan B 3.0 (the paper copy I bought at the release party of the Swedish translation, as it were), I found myself wishing I ...
I had a near-Windows experience today. I have had an old 500GB USB disk sitting around, that I used for manual backups in pre-Time Machine times, back when I deemed FAT32 to be the comfy file system choice for hooking up a disk with any computer I might want to reach it from. Today, I think that sweet spot is NTFS. Especially as Time Machine doesn't want anything to do with FAT32 devices as backup targets. I figured the easiest way to convert the filesystem in place (as I didn't have any other disk around) was to boot up a Windows XP virtual machine in Parallels and let Windows do it. That procedure was perilous. If you ever embark on doing it yourself, here is how you probably want to do it: > net stop wuauserv The Automatic Updates service is stopping.... The Automatic Updates service was stopped successfully. > convert E: /fs:ntfs The type of the file system is FAT32. Enter current volume label for drive E: [...] > net start wuauserv The Automatic ...
The first time I saw jQuery's $(document).ready(callback) idiom, I thought it was a great idea: not only is it readable as plain English, grep(1) able (it is available as $(callback) too, but I advise against using that in larger code bases, where you might need to dig up all references to it, at some time) and intuitive, it also lets you provide a different document object you are waiting for. The first time I used it in the latter capacity I was a bit saddened to find that it was not quite that good yet; it always tests the same document that jQuery itself was loaded into. (At present time, meaning jQuery 1.3.2 and earlier.) The document object you pass isn't actually even fed to all the code that together implements the ready function. As we needed it to do that at MashLogic though, my colleague Dave took to fixing it so it does indeed work that way, as per the jQuery ticket that has been sitting around for two years (from someone else that apparently wanted and ...
I've been using git-svn for a while, to track projects still trapped in the subversion age, with git. It's not too messy to set up, though in order to get nice names addresses you need to map all the subversion identities to their corresponding name and email address. I recommend taking the time to suck out the entire repository history -- it's a one-time operation, and you get free offline history browsing and inspection. If you have the names and email addresses of all svn committers, list them in a newline-separated file, each line reading svn-id = Person's Name <email@address> -- I kind of started tracking a list of jQuery committers, but got bored and/or side-tracked before finding the last ones. Anyway, if you go through the trouble, pass along this file on the command line ( git svn clone -A committers.txt ... ) when you create your local copy. The docs for git-svn are not the best, and didn't mention how to import news into your local git repository for more ...
