Btw - for the curious, this is not some kind of new revelation for me.. but I would say it’s been pretty much cemented from recent experiences & conversations with those who have even more personal experience on the topic. Oh and Norwegians send hi-fives to this day for the sacrifices of our Greatest Generation.
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
—Charles Bukowski, Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975
“I was called to the bathroom at the cemetery to take care of something. I walked in the bathroom and in the middle toilet right there . . . somebody didn’t shit in the toilet, somebody shat on the toilet. They shat on the wall, they shat on the floor. I had to clean it up, man, but before that, for about 10 to 15 seconds man, I just stared at somebody’s shit, man. To be totally honest with you, man, it was a really, really profound moment. Cause I was thinkin’, ‘I’m 30 years old and in about 10 seconds I gotta start cleaning up somebody’s shit, man.’”
—American Movie, 1999
“I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
—Fight Club, 1999
“My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men’s room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.”
—American Beauty, 1999
Via here. Thoughts. Disjointed. Need. More. Sleep. 
Unfuddle is the bomb. GitHub is pretty sweet too, if you know future developers will all be “elite” enough to hang with git.
It’s always a pain doing the back & forth dance between clients when trying to get them setup with their own Subversion repository.
Some developers just have their own source control, i.e. setup at “jimjohnson.com” (where the developer is Jim Johnson), and keep all client code on there (semi-permanently).
I would strongly urge clients to get their application’s source control setup such that if they need to switch developers, they do not have to pester Jim to migrate it over to Unfuddle, or wherever. Granted, it’s easy to zip things up — but then you lose all the commit history. Also god forbid Jim gets hit by a bus one day! That would be bad news on both sides of the aisle!
The Simple Trick
Visit this page and simply create a new account for your client, using his or her email address for the administrator account. That way if the client ever decides to move on, they’ve already got the keys to the kingdom and can simply change the admin password.
The lowest paid plan is free at Unfuddle… but hopefully the app will be so wildly successful soon that affording an upgrade will be well worth the investment!
This fad is probably ending its run by loldogs recently launched, from the makers of icanhascheesburger, it appears.
World Clock Deluxe is an OS X app that lets you setup a few select timezones, which can be configured to hover in the background of your desktop.
Very handy if you work with lots of different people spread out across the globe.
There’s an awesome rails scalability case study up at HighScalability.com:
In a short three months Friends for Sale (think Hot-or-Not with a market economy) grew to become a top 10 Facebook application handling 200 gorgeous requests per second and a stunning 300 million page views a month. They did all this using Ruby on Rails, two part time developers, a cluster of a dozen machines, and a fairly standard architecture. How did Friends for Sale scale to sell all those beautiful people? And how much do you think your friends are worth on the open market?
Friends for Sale App on Facebook. I hope there’s still room in the marketplace of ideas for new breakout Facebook apps. I’ll be trying my hand at some soon.
I called it about a month ago; it looks like Facebook has finally taken action and put an end to forced invites.
This is a really great move for Facebook and platform developers in general.
When competing for a user’s time, you are almost forced to use every tactic that your competitors are using.
If one app decides to engage in predatory practices, and their usage rate jumps ahead of yours because of this, you’ll be the one left holding the bag.
This new change levels the playing field and will give users a better experience all around.
Skitch is pretty much the closest thing I’ve seen to perfection from an integrated Web App + Desktop App experience.
It seems they’ve thought of everything — even selecting the copy & paste code to put into your blog engine requires just 1 click. (they handily paste it into your clipboard for you, with a sexy hover-over note explaining they’ve done so!)
Full-size:
Or view online.
One tiny quibble: the alt tag on the full-size code is “Skitch.com > sbraford” which I think confuses WordPress into thinking an HTML tag is being closed prematurely.
You are currently browsing the Shanti’s Dispatches weblog archives for February, 2008.
Shanti A. Braford blogs here.
If you really want to know, just read this.
