For Friday, October 27 2006 –

• 
  Consumer Reports’ unfortunate advice - (37signals) Good post on consumer ethics. A lot of good comments too.

  Tag(s):

• 
  Feld Thoughts: PHP vs. Ruby <? vs <% – Ruby wins every time. Also, the Ohloh website is worth checking out.

  Tag(s): php ruby comparison

• 
  Traffic vs. employees - (37signals) Despite the issues with the numbers pointed out in the comments, it is still a very impressive showing for craigslist.

  Tag(s): business craigslist traffic

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For Thursday, October 26 2006 –

• 
  The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day I didn’t even realize he had lost his voice. Great story.

  Tag(s): dilbert

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For Sunday, October 22 2006 –

• 
  STUMBLING ‘STUDIO’ SKIPS A BEAT By DON KAPLAN - New York Post Online Edition: Seven I hope this isn’t true - Studio 60 is the best show on TV right now.

  Tag(s):

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I’ve been holding on this release of my Tails Extension for a while now and finally got my butt in gear to get this out. Here is what’s new:

• Added geo microformat support. Not very pretty, as it just shows the coordinates, but if you update this Tails script you’ll be able to map these geo coordinates to Google.
• Added support for more hCard attributes. Honorific suffix/prefix, organization name/unit - it should be all there now.
• Fixed bug where your IM URL will show as your primary over a normal URL in an hCard. This can easily occur if you used hCard creator to create your hCard.
• Updated icon to a cleaner one, and updated the extension to show a custom extension logo instead of the generic Firefox one. Thanks to Dmitry Baranovskiy for providing the graphics.
• Updated hCalendar to display more dates properly. Date only or time only values should now display correctly.
• Made some small fixes in hopes to correct some problems reported by users.

As before, this release will be available initially as a manual update, I’ll be updating the auto-update mechanism a few days later if all goes well.

For Saturday, October 21 2006 –

• Macbook Random Shutdown Amanda had the shutdown problem happen to her last night. Now hopefully we can easily convince Apple to fix ours.

  Tag(s): macbook apple hardware shutdown

• Moore’s Law and Grey Velcro Interesting story on how making something inconvienent for the user is actually a usability feature.

  Tag(s): thinkpads usability

• News - Gaim 2.0.0beta4 is released, really looking forward to playing around with libgaim

  Tag(s): im gaim

• Bits & Pieces Wow.

  Tag(s): videos

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For Friday, October 20 2006 –

• Apple - Education - Why Mac for Computer Science - Video
  Apple turns 37signal’s Jason and David into rockstars.

  Tag(s): apple 37signals video ruby rails marketing

• Scrybe - the online productivity suite I’m dying to try - Download Squad
  Very cool looking productivity tool about to come to beta.

  Tag(s): calendar todolist

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For the most part, I agree with Cedric:

One of the main reasons why people like dynamically typed languages is precisely because they don’t have to specify these types. Is it really so shocking that this convenience comes at the price of not being able to perform any operation that requires type information on this code?

This problem has always reminded me of the ‘Help me help you!’ scene in Jerry Maguire - if you don’t tell your IDE your intentions, then there is always going to be limits to what your IDE is going to be able to do for you.

Having said that, it took a couple of years of JBuilder, Netbeans, and Visual Age before we got the great refactoring capabilities of Eclipse and IntelliJ. I would not be at all surprised if someone out there figures out a good solution to this problem.

As I noted before, I wasn’t too crazy with Google Reader’s new sidebar. So I decided to do something about it. Go out and grab Greasemonkey (if you haven’t already) and then install this script. Here’s a screenshot:

I logged in to catch up on my feeds the other night and found that Google has done a major update to their Reader application.

While I do understand that the previous version of Reader was pretty anemic in functionality (I sort of considered that part of Reader’s charm), it is dissappointing they decided to be just like every other RSS reader out there. It now has the obligatory feed tree on the left hand side, which is pretty useless if you prefer to read news in the river of news style that was the center piece of the original Reader UI. There is also way too much blue on screen, and I found myself getting lost when I cycle through posts because of the auto-expand feature. Also gone is the ‘keep unread’ feature, which I used quite often in the old UI (the new UI also seems to have problems with keep unread items if you had some marked as such before you switched over).

However, all is not bad. Reader now list posts in a format very similar to Gmail, with the benefit of being able to see more posts on screen than with the previous UI. Cycling through posts also seems to be much more responsive than before.

Overall, I think the change is a pretty good step forward for Google Reader as it now has all the features you commonly see with other aggregators, and the UI is comparable if not better than most online aggregators out there. Hopefully, Google will make the necessary changes for the UI to be a better experience for those of us who prefers the river of news style of reading.

In addition to fixing a bug with uninstalling Tails Scripts (thanks to Cédric for finding this), I’ve also added a details view for viewing all the fields of a microformat (just click on the bolded object label in the object list).

To get this update, you’ll have go to the Tails home page and manually download it. I’m holding off the automatic update until I have had more time to play with it. Please post any issues by commenting to this post or on the Tails home page, or by creating an issue on the Tails project page hosted by Google Code.

In addition to this update, I’ve also added a Tails script to search for inbound links to blog entries via Technorati and a script to check a blog entry or bookmark for popularity using Socialmeter.

Here’s a screenshot of the object details view: