Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Unfuddle (via Simon) seems like a perfect fit for startups. Project management, bug tracking and source control, and it’s got a free version too.

Is there any way that, using jQuery and the Taconite plugin, you can return HTML that’s not valid XML? I tried using cdata, but it doesn’t seem to work.

The amazing power of sequel on rails.

Great presentation on achieving your childhood dreams. Mine were:

• Write a book. Check.
• My face on a stamp. Check.
• Man of the year in Time magazine. Check.
• Nobel prize for peace. (This one might be a bit harder).
• Get interviewed in Humo. (Not there yet, but one day.)

3 out of 5, not bad so far.

I have a very strange jQuery problem: stuff works fine on my local install, but doesn’t work on the live install. For example, sign up at poorbuthappy.com, then go to http://poorbuthappy.com/test/ and click the “add friend” button. It should be ajaxy, but it’s not (well, kinda, you’ll see. The button just greys out, and it should change to a “remove friend” button). The PHP script is reached, but the jQuery “success” function isn’t fired. And I have other local Jquery bits that work locally but not live, while others do. It’s weird.. any ideas?

When Mozy starts backing up (2 gigs of automatic backup for free!), at some point it says “reticulating splines”. What does that mean?

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Scancafe sounds pretty good for the photographers among us: you send them your old slides and negatives, and they send back a DVD with scanned images, high quality. For 25$ you can get about 100 slides scanned.

When you actually look at the stuff on Digg’s homepage (today), it’s boooring. Dead, filled with “7 ways to X” and similar SEO spam. Digg’s out, as far as I can tell. The Yahoo homepage has a few similar problems, btw. (Specifically, check the URL’s. The spammyness jumps out.)

Strč prst skrz krk is a Czech sentence. Sounds like something from a Superman comic (who was that little guy that spoke like that?)

I moved my book website from iabook.com to petervandijck.com/iabook/ to avoid problems with domain name squatters.

My sites on Mediatemple suddenly got REAL slow a few days ago. Luckily they fixed the problem with more hardware, memory and some smart tricks, and the good side of this is that now those sites are really fast. Let’s hope they keep it that way.

It has become more and more clear to me that the biggest problem enterprises face in their IT selection is the software vendors, who try to sell monolithic “solution” that almost never delivers as promised. There is an inherent conflict of interest. Regardless of the advantages of a closely controlled environment, it’s almost bound to go wrong, because there is so much incentive to make it go wrong. So what’s the solution? Loosely coupled services that work well and are adopted bottom up can take care of a large part of an enterprise’s software needs. For the bits that do need to be closely controlled, I guess we’ll need the SAP’s of this world for this for a while longer.

(Damn these cryptic posts with no examples! Oh well, no time.)

I wonder why nobody has written about Google poisoning their search results with video links that without fail point back to Youtube, a video company that they own. And now Yahoo is doing the same: adding “useful” results to search, that point back to their own properties. Have the search engines decided that objectivity is no longer required? I always thought getting into the content game (buying Youtube) was a mistake for Google. Don’t get me wrong though, I think the evolving “mixed” search results are brilliant, I just think that the search engine that makes an effort to send traffic to properties they don’t own will have a much better chance of winning.

(I also think Yahoo needs to totally redo the yahoo.com homepage. It drives a lot of traffic I’m sure, but it’s really quite bad. I’ll keep that analysis for another post.)

Blip.tv’s learning section is great. Really well done, I hadn’t seen it before. Makes me want to do some videoblogging again :)