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Jack Baty – Director of Unspecified Services

Nothing to say? Then say nothing.

For those bloggers who go a day or two with nothing interesting to write about, for god’s sake don’t waste everyone’s time apologizing for it. Just sit there quietly until you do have something to say. Save us the trouble of seeing your blog title finally light up in bold or whatever in our aggregators and eagerly clicking the link, only to find there’s still nothing to read.

Anil Dash: Many years of sucking

anil dash on the Windows Add Font dialog. Here’s an excerpt from his note to Microsoft… “Please understand: You have about fifty five thousand employees. That’s bigger than the town I grew up in. That’s enough to fill a stadium. I know everybody still wants to see the company as being just Bill Gates, even though he’s not even CEO any more, but you’ve got piles and piles of humans lying around.

Imaginary filesystems in Apache

Moving my weblog to movable type broke a number of links which probably should still be available. More mod_rewrite rules and the important stuff is back. Basically, between Alias and RewriteRule, the virtual and physical file layouts can be almost completely different from each other. It’s cool. Confusing, but cool.

Do users prefer Rich Internet Applications?

I just read an email (spam), that said “… plus all the rich functionality and fluid interfaces users prefer.” It occurred to me that I honestly don’t know if this is an assumption or a fact. What about people who grew up on the net using a web browser? My daughter, for example, absolutely refuses to use Outlook, Eudora or any other GUI mail client. She won’t use anything but Mozilla to read her mail via one webmail service or another.

Mailinator

Mailinator is a new service which allows anyone to create throwaway email addresses when they don’t want to give a real address, yet need the given address to work. Type in any address, like and you can check any mail sent there by simply entering “foobar” and clicking “Go”. No signup, passwords or other nonsense required. Their FAQ is fun to read and the tagline is “It’s like flicking a booger at spam.

Broken RSS feeds

After moving things around here recently I seem to have broken one of the legacy RSS feeds at /news.rss. The real feed is at /index.rdf, so a little mod_rewrite magic was required to fix it… RewriteRule ^news.rss index.rdf Sorry ‘bout that.

The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

adaptive path: the nine pillars of successful web teams Forgot about posting this one a while back, but it’s worth mentioning now. Jesse James Garrett diagrams nine competencies which make up successful web teams.

Firebird 0.6.1 or whatever

Firebird 0.6.1 rsn This isn’t going to be Firebird 0.7 since we haven’t met our goals for features and fixes but we think it’s important to get the autocomplete crash fix (and a few other fixes) into the hands of all the people currently using 0.6. I’ll take the autocomplete crash fixed now, if you don’t mind.

Media Player Classic

If you’re like me (and you are), you loathe the latest 2 or 3 releases of Windows Media Player. Make it all better with Media Player Classic. It’s about a 700k download and a single executable. No installer, no bloat, just plays movies. It also supports Quicktime, AVI, Realmedia, DVD and anything else you might need. Really nice change of pace for a media player.

Wikis on NPR

I was evangelizing Wikis today at the office – badly. Mary mentioned later that she heard about Wikis on NPR earlier in the day and was very curious about them. Seems NPR was doing a better job than I was. I’ll try to find a link to the story.

Tim Bray: The Door is Ajar

Tim Bray, once again worth the read… “People, on average and in the long term, arenÂ’t stupid and arenÂ’t patient and arenÂ’t cowards. When thereÂ’s an obviously better way to get the job done, they go out and get it, and management canÂ’t stop them, and Forrester and Gartner canÂ’t stop them, and Accenture and EDS canÂ’t stop them, and not even Microsoft can stop them.” He’s talking about many things, but the relevant example is in the browser space…