This is the funniest Daily WTF I’ve seen in a while. Especially this one:
“As a programmer for military contractor, Alex didn’t quite expect to find this in the code for a weapons launch system …”
private static final Logger logger
= Logger.getLogger("DickBagMcButtMunch");
LOL
Well, this is what happens when you run a weblog network and pay no attention to it.
Spam posts (not just comments - that’s normal) on every single blog and we didn’t catch it for 4 days! (this guy was clever - I’m sure the Turkey Day timing helped him a bit)
Of course, I expected this to happen a lot sooner. It just always seems to happen when you have the least amount of time & energy to deal with something like that.
Update: luckily we’ve got some great writers that can help out in this area. thanks guys! I just had to grant them all proper access to the blogs n stuff. hopefully the link above to the blogpost spam will stop working in a bit!
I’m subscribed to Joel Comm’s newsletter. It’s interesting because he’s deeply plugged into that semi-shady world of Internet Marketing. Some of these guys make hundreds of thousands of dollars within a few days of launching their products. Sometimes, even a million.
It’s a refreshing change of pace from the TechCrunch world — where you might see many “startups” blogged about daily, some of whom I’m quite sure will never even break $10k in revenue (for the entire history of their company).
But this recent email from Joel started the old “omfg this has got to be another bubble” alarm bells ringing:
I know it is the day before Thanksgiving in America…
And I know that I’ve already sent you an email today…
But some things just can’t wait. I just discovered a
new site that is about to publicly launch, and I’d be
doing you a disservice by not telling you about it!Please read on…
For those who were online in 1999, you may remember
the very first “Get paid to surf” program. It was
called AllAdvantage. Basically, by displaying the
AllAdvantage toolbar while you surfed, you got paid.And when you referred people to the program and they
surfed, you got paid.It worked VERY well, except that the management team
at the company messed up the opportunity.Don’t get me wrong. I earned THOUSANDS with this
program. And it was incredibly viral.Since then, I’ve been waiting for a similar opportunity
to arrive.It just has!
http://www.makemoneywithjoel.com
Ugh.
In other unrelated news, Happy Thanksgiving ya’ll!
The Twitter guys have released a Jabber Implementation in Ruby.
Install with:
sudo gem install xmpp4r-simple
To send a message
jabber = Jabber::Simple.new('rex@friendosaurus.com', 'password')
jabber.deliver("bront@friendosaurus.com", "Hey! Can you help me fend off a T-Rex?")
That looks pretty easy. Or to get received messages, then set your status:
jabber.received_messages do |msg|
puts "#{msg.body}" if msg.type == :chat
end
jabber.status(:away, "Slaying dinosaurs in the Jurassic garden.")
Looks like someone at Yahoo! needs a little Jelly to go with their peanut butter.
Sure, some of the points make sense.
But since when was General Motors the paragon of an agile, profitable corporation?
Ok, so you can bookmark things through Yahoo 360 or del.icio.us, two competing Yahoo services. And…?
It sounds like this Yahoo VP read some old management philosophy book (or memoir) & got all amped up about reengineering Yahoo as if it was 1960s General Motors.
If he did have a Jerry Maguire moment there at the Y! HQ, I hope he at least got a slow clap as he entered the building. 
It seems like everyone has an opinion on bottled water, and why you shouldn’t drink it. Or why it’s a waste of money. Or that you can get some disease if you reuse bottles, but only if left in the refrigerator. (that urban legend via my girlfriend & the Oprah-watching set)
So, to settle this once and for all, here’s a simple algorithm to help you determine if it’s OK (by my arbitrary standards) to buy & drink bottled water.
How to Determine the Best Drinking Water Option for You…
A: Does your tap water taste good, right out of the tap, to you? (sorry, have to ask)
If yes, your solution is #3 (see below).
If no, please continue.
B: Do you live in an area where the water is clean enough that using an inexpensive Brita filter on your tap water, makes it taste good (or acceptable)?
If yes, your solution is #1 (see below).
If no, please continue.
C: Can you afford roughly $25 - $35 per month for quality drinking water in copious volumes?
If yes, your solution is #2 (see below).
If no, your solution is #3 (see below).
Solutions
1. Brita Filter
Buy an inexpensive Brita Filter that can be filled up from your tap and stuck in your fridge. The filters need to be changed out every few months, and sometimes you find little flakes of a charcoal-like substance in your water. Othan than that, these are great!
Cost: $10 to $20 for a pitcher and another $30 or so every few months for the replacement filters
2. Arrowhead Delivery
Since I live on the third floor of an apartment complex, I’ve tried to find inventive ways to get other people to carry up really heavy objects (like 5-gallon water jugs) up the stairs for me.
Arrowhead Water offers a home delivery option which will deliver 4 of these 5-gallon jugs (more than enough for a months worth of water) for only $25 to $35 per month (varies by area/zipcode).
Cost: $25 to $35 per month
3. Tap Water (no filtration)
Get used to how your tap water tastes, or, live beyond your means like a king on bottled water that’s more expensive per liter than crude oil! (hint: it’s actually not, if you order in bulk)
JumpBox, a local Phoenix-area startup, just launched this week. It was founded by two Phoenix entrepreneurs — Sean Tierney and Kimbro Staken.
I was quite impressed when Kimbro & Sean demo’d the app at Refresh Phoenix the other week.
If you have a web application that a customer or client needs to have onsite, JumpBox could be your answer.
It lets you build a server from scratch - say a default Fedora Core 4 Linux OS with Apache/MySQL/PHP installed and preconfigured to your specifications. You then load your application software and custom configurations onto the server.
Next, using JumpBox tools (which I understand are still undergoing refinement) - you basically make a clone stamp of that entire OS disk image.
You can then deploy that disk image to any server that supports Xen Virtualization. The image can be hosted at a data center, onsite, remotely, etc.
The trend lately has been for hosted webapps to host of all your data on their servers and make it available via API, etc. (Basecamp, Google Docs, Mailroom, etc)
I can see JumpBox shining for deployment of those applications that are notorious for their dependency hell and nightmarish setup complications. (*cough* Trac)
Simple Subversion, Trac & Other Open-source Team Tools
I would love to see a JumpBox stack that featured:
Slightly OT: until it gets easier to setup a Subversion/Trac/etc. stack (perhaps via JumpBox), I would highly recommend checking out Unfuddle. (especially if you just love the simplicity and headache reduction, generally speaking, of hosted webapps)
They are a fully-hosted service (featuring liberal amounts of AJAX and built in Ruby on Rails) that can power your Subversion, Ticket / Bug Tracking, and Project Milestones needs.
More at JumpBox.com.
Aaron has a great post about what it’s like to work at Wired now that reddit has been acquired by Conde Nast.
It seems like there are usually three reasons why companies (well, it’s always people, somewhere, at the companies, who make the decision) want you working in an office:
Startups usually have the first two reasons - which are very valid. (though, you don’t need to be in a shared workspace 100% of the time to accomplish this)
The third one falls amazingly short, and seems to be a major reason why many big companies have you working in an office. It’s sad that managers or CEOs think that if they just have a bunch of “warm bodies” in the office, that things are actually getting done.
A lonely, dark, quiet night from 9pm - 5am can be about 3x as productive for me as some days of a regular 9-5pm. Heck, make that 10x, or infinity-times (due to a division by zero error) as productive compared to those days that you just can’t seem to get much of anything done.
I’m probably just a “bad programmer” in this way, but I try to explain to my lovely girlfriend Abygale, how some days it’s hard to even get the ball in gear and start coding. She doesn’t have this problem - she can show up at work and start doing loan stuff (I still haven’t figured out exactly what she does, but it involves a lot of paperwork).
I’ve developed the bad habit of using my Amazon Prime subscription like it’s nobody’s business. (also just have a bunch of older books lying around that I don’t know what to do with now)
You can browse through the list of books I’m giving away on my Bookmooch profile here.
If you see something you like, please signup at Bookmooch so that we can both get points for sharing books.
A few example titles from the eclectic collection:
View the rest here.
Update: It’s too big of a pain for me to have to ship these books. If you see anything in the list above you’d like, let me know. Otherwise, I’m laying off Bookmooch for now until I have more time to run to the post office every once in a while.
When Kiva first launched, I sensed a bit of skepticism from people who I talked to about the idea/website.
Since launching one year ago, Kiva.org has:
Via Kiva’s press page. PBS Frontline also just did a special on Kiva. Hopefully it’ll be up on YouTube eventually, so you can see Kiva in action.
I’ve lent $100 so far. And dang, it feels good to be a micro angel investor.
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