For Monday, February 5 2007 –

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  Software is hard | Salon Books

  `Does that mean one of the problems with getting software projects done on time is the psychology of the people who are actually doing it?` Absolutely.

  Tag(s):

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I’ve finally gotten tired of telling folks that this and that will be fixed in the next release, and have finally gotten Tails to the point of a 0.3.7 release. Here’s are the highlights this new release:

• I created a test harness so that I can run Tails through the tests from the microformats repository. I’ve only gotten hCard and hCalendar tested, and they don’t all pass (some do to inconsistencies in the tests, others because they require some extensive rework of the parser which will come later), but the hCard parsing and hCalendar parsing is now better than ever, and the export functions produce results very comparable to Brian Suda’s X2V stylesheet.
• Exporting to vCard has been greatly improved. Partly through verifying my parser against the tests, but also because Tails will now generate a file with the vCard valid .vcf extension. This will required a update of the vCard Tails Script.
• Exporting to iCal is now supported with the iCal Tails Script.
• A number of minor parsing tweaks were made to produce better results.

Download Tails 0.3.7 here.

I’m glad to finally get this release out, as I have some UI changes I’m looking to forward to putting into the next release. Keep an eye out for it, I hope to get that out shortly.

I hope everyone is having a happy new year!

For Wednesday, November 29 2006 –

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  Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: Simplicity and choices for users

  Interesting discussion about UI design of the operating system shutdown.

  Tag(s):

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For Thursday, November 16 2006 –

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  The Fishbowl: Rigid Agile?

  "If losing a single resource for one day is a cataclysm that causes the entire iteration to collapse for everybody, you’ve got problems, and you’re putting the wrong kind of pressure on your team."

  Tag(s):

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For Monday, November 13 2006 –

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  O’Reilly Radar > Thoughts on the State of Search

  "…I do wonder where the next search innovations are going to come from, and I’m surprised to find that Google isn’t the obvious answer to that question anymore." - I need to try using other search engines more.

  Tag(s): google search
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  How to Fix Shows Like ‘Lost’ – New York Magazine

  This the reason I haven’t gotten into Lost - I’ve been well seasoned from my previous experience with The X-Files to know how this show is going to end (or rather, not end). The idea of closing it in two seasons is great one, and if the network is concer

  Tag(s): television
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  Otaku, Cedric’s weblog: Google vs. Yahoo

  Yahoo! wins. I wonder is this is something Yahoo! can use on analysts when they try compare them to the Wall Street darlings of Google.

  Tag(s): googe yahoo

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I just discovered the handy apt-file command in Ubuntu today while trying to resolve the dependencies need to install Hpricot. With this utility, you call search through all the packages in your repositories (installed and not installed) for a given file. For example:

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apt-file search stdlib.h

Will return a list of packages with that header file. In order for this command to work though, you’ll need to at least have ran this command once:

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sudo apt-file update

For Tuesday, October 31 2006 –

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  O’Reilly Radar > O’Reilly Labs Code Quiz

  O’Reilly releases Code Quiz in the image of Google’s Image Labeler. My first attempt (and only so far) yielded a score of 328.

  Tag(s):
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  Infothought: PageRank/Link-Buying Doesn’t Care About Blogger Ethics

  “But it can be misleading to see their[A-listers] unhappiness as the main story (though it can be an amusing sideline), rather than a reflection of the economic shifts and battles between commerce vs social, being played out in various ways.”

  Tag(s): advertising
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  Microsoft Introduces New Accounting Software and Services for Small and Home-Based Businesses: New online services with Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007

  Great move in offering a free version. Not only will this product give Intuit a run for this money, but the integrated third-party online services sounds a lot like it is targeting salesforce.com as well.

  Tag(s): business startup

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For Monday, October 30 2006 –

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  Official Google Blog: The Domino Effect Google hooks up Coke & Mentos guys with advertising partners. Check out the video, its pretty cool.

  Tag(s):

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For Sunday, October 29 2006 –

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  View From The Bridge: Augering In: The Death of an EIP Project but Survival of the Pilot Good insight on why VC do what they do, and a teaser for upcoming posts. Looking forward to it.

  Tag(s):

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It looks like the code for the notification box in Firefox 2.0 has changed – this update fixes that problem. The notification box will still work if you’re still on Firefox 1.x. Thanks to Jeremy for pointing this out.

Get the update here.