Project OrielEmbracing Change

* I hope everyone enjoyed last week games. This week, check out http://www.plasmapong.com It is one of the coolest renditions I have seen of the classic Pong game. No promises that I’ll have another game next week.
* “Ghostly and cool animation of flight patterns” http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/Documentationl2.html
* “Nearly everyone has made paper airplanes or tried origami when they were children. Take these memories further when you download dozens of 3D-Papercraft projects for free.” http://cp.c-ij.com/english/3D-papercraft/index.html 10 points to anyone who makes one and brings it into the office!
* For your daily dose of puppies, kittens, and other cute things: http://cuteoverload.com/ and http://dailypuppy.com/
* And for those of you looking for something more technical: A much discussed op-ed, “Microsoft is Dead” http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html by Paul Graham. Paul is the author of a popular spam filtering technique, and writer of the 2004 book “Hackers & Painters”.

Links!

* Due to *much* interest in games, I promised to send out a game link today. Yeti Sports @ http://www.yetisports.org/ I recommend the first game, “DC” where you want your Yeti to “… catch the penguin at the right moment and angle, then the penguin soars through the air. The further, the better.” I am not responsible for work time lost due to the games. Be sure to have your speakers on for the cute noises.
* Google Launches Free 411 Service (1-800-GOOG-411) http://labs.google.com/goog411/index.html if you don’t want to be connected directly, say “text message” and Google will send you the details directly to your phone.
* “Our applications, [are] some of the earliest revenue-generating Rails applications and have grown to cover a significant build out. There was a bit of learning how to do stuff, that’s applicable to anyone else. Like any infrastructure there’s a few boundaries (>10 servers, >100 servers, >1000 servers, >100 TB of storage) that when you’re crossing them, it’s critical to rigorously standardize.” http://joyeur.com/2007/04/19/on-accelerators
* A local company, Team Sport Technologies, creates “feature-laden websites at an affordable price for amateur sports organizations”. Annual Sales: > $1 million. Technology: Ruby on Rails. http://www.startribune.com/539/story/1127372.html

* Google on your phone: Did you know you could send a text message from your cellphone to 46645 (GOOGL) and receive weather, driving directions, movie times, local restaurants, dictionary, trivia answers, etc. See http://www.google.com/sms

* “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

* So what is Web 2.0? Think web applications that get better the more they are used. Tim O’Reilly originally coined the term in 2004: “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2

* Did you know 59% of all public web servers run open source software? See http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

* Picture: 5MB Hard Disk in 1956 http://www.popular-pics.com/pictures.aspx?photoid=422

Friday comes around so quickly! Welcome Jason to my “whatever caught my interest on the internet this week” list!

* April 22 is Earth Day. I’ve been putting off sending this link as it can be a somewhat charged issue, but I’ll step out and assume that everyone cares for the environment even if you don’t agree with global warming. The movie, An Inconvenient Truth, makes a compelling argument that global warming _is_ an issue, and that it is caused by our impact on the planet. http://www.climatecrisis.net/ Sarah and I watched it recently, and found it useful in renewing our conservation efforts at home. If you would prefer your facts with the bare minimum of interpretation, the National Climatic Data Center put together a nice summary for 2006 weather at http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/ann/ann06.html They said “The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record” and ended with “The past nine years have all been among the 25 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S., a streak which is unprecedented in the historical record.”
* Apple recently announced 100 million iPods sold to date. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/09ipod.html To put it in perspective, Forbes has a nice article http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/09/apple-ipod-xbox-tech-cx_rr_0409ipod.html?partner=yahootix about how few companies ship that many of anything, and that Apple got there faster than anyone before. BlackBerry? only 7 million. Razr phone? 60 million. Microsoft’s Zune? They haven’t even hit 1 million yet.
* Steve Jobs posted “Thoughts on Music” http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ a while back, and EMI responded http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html saying their music will be available in iTunes at higher quality and free of DRM. If you have interest in the DRM/digital audio format thread the music industry has struggled with the last couple years, you may find DaringFireball’s analysis of the change enjoyable. http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/some_facts_about_aac

Despite the day off, I wanted to let you all know that I was still thinking of you! :-)

* Micro Blogging via Twitter.com. If you set up an account, let me know! http://twitter.com/pedstrom TIME talks about the new technology here: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1603637,00.html

* I recently ran across an Intro to Agile article, but thought I’d link to the official principals at http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html. These may look familiar to some as they are based on the Agile Manifesto which I distributed to the team a year ago or so, commenting on how I felt it described in part the perspective differences between Renewal and corporate IT. If you want a more comprehensive discussion on Agile, check out the wikipedia entry @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

* See downtime for some of the most popular web sites on the internet: http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=116 For those interested, “Five 9′s” (99.999% uptime) is equal to downtime less than 5 minutes, 15 seconds per year.

* Yankee Group Report: open source email systems are the biggest threat to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=343

* Quote: “If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. And if in fact you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete.” – Joseph G. Gavin, Jr., discussing the design of the lunar module that landed NASA astronauts on the moon.