Fnord.

Interesting, this. A thought-provoking list of tips from Amazon on how they succeeded. I particularly agreed with this one, having had some uber-stoopid interviews in my time:

Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.

I really agree with that one! There are other gems, too:

Only way to manage as large distributed system is to keep things as simple as possible. Keep things simple by making sure there are no hidden requirements and hidden dependencies in the design. Cut technology to the minimum you need to solve the problem you have. It doesn’t help the company to create artificial and unneeded layers of complexity.
…
People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.

Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work. Write the tools if necessary.

The whole thing merits a close read IMHO. Good stuff.

Somehow, I really picked up the taste for carbonated water while travelling to Diego’s wedding. The carbonation adds a little zip and zing that I like, and the lack of sugar also appeals. I tried bottled water for a while, but the appalling waste of recycling plastic bottles for every 1.25l was too much. So I did some net-research and found a soda siphon: (also spelled syphon, or called a seltzer bottle)

It works pretty well, and the waste is just a 5cm CO2 canister that (hopefully) recycles easily. So far, so good, if you discount the siphon arriving with missing parts that required two weeks to find and get.

Of course, before the parts even arrived there was a post on Cool Tools, explaining how to make your own for even cheaper and simpler. Damn!

All thing considered, I’ll just use the siphon for a while. If I develop an unquenchable thirst, maybe the CoolTools setup will be required.

Via techyum, the Brio flying boat:

The vehicle comes as a kit and runs on an ultralight Rotex Austrian 52-66 horsepower two-stroke engine that’s sold separately. Its propeller functions as an airscrew, so on water the thing operates as an airboat, the sort of boat used in shallow-draft environments like swamps. When flying, the airscrew is a “pusher,” the term for a propeller at the rear of the plane.

Man, this is as good as the flying car that I also can’t have.

Paul Graham nails it once again:

A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.

Best description of the process I’ve ever read. Go read the rest.

Paul Graham is one of the reasons I started blogging, I wanted to see if I could write essays like he does. I disagree with some of his opinions, but he’s a magnificent writer on a range of subjects.

The reason? Access to the Tech Shop:

 This is from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It’s a membership-based shop for building damn near anything. I’d write more praise, but I’m depressed and need to go do something else now.

Sigh.

Good news, this:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.
The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

I have to give them props for a) noticing that traffic was search-based and not front-page based and b) changing based on that:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Good all around.

One of the really useful applications on the Blackberry is a password manager. It’s part of the base OS as of version 4, storing passwords in an AES-encrypted database. Even if you lose the Blackberry, your passwords/PINS/sekrets are safe.

Oddly, the iPhone has no equivalent. Even the free software out so far doesn’t have one. I’m debating trying to code one up myself, which if I reuse code might not be too hard. Hmm.

Only thing I’ve found so far is jkPassword.com, which does a good job of looking native. No good if you’re offline, though. (Found via this thread)

Instant messenger apps are also a work in progress.

I had no idea this would be such a PITA.

Update: Setting blog-via-email-from-iPhone, using the Postie plugin for wordpress. Seriously painful.

Via Science in the News:

A female shorebird was recently found to have flown 7,145 miles (11,500
kilometers) nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand - without taking a break for
food or drink. It’s the longest nonstop bird migration ever measured,
according to biologists who tracked the flight using satellite tags.

The bird, a wader called a bar-tailed godwit, completed the journey in nine
days. In addition to demonstrating the bird’s surprising endurance, the
trek confirms that godwits make the southbound trip of their annual
migration directly across the vast Pacific rather than along the East Asian
coast, scientists said.

Nine days of non-stop flight. Longest ever measured.

Whoa. Full article here.

We just replaced Chris’s ancient Palm V (actually a clone, the IBM version we got from woot.com) with a new Palm Z22. Here it sits, on its first charge, next to my iPhone box, and I had one of those ‘his and hers’ pictures to take.

Did spur a bit of thought, though. Chris is actually sane about gadgets, and they don’t do as much for her as they do for me. I still feel guilty about the cost difference, since the Z22 is about $80 on Amazon these days. It’s a great unit, though, and I wish they had shipped something like it years ago. Inexpensive, durable, plenty of memory, color screen, small and light.

For me, I’ll be curious to see how the iPhone fares as a PDA. I’ve been impressed so far with the calendar and addressbook, but am peeved that Notes don’t sync and there’s no built-in to-do list. We shall see!