Gadgetopia

Eric Allman: This is a really interesting Wikipedia article about an apparenty interesting guy that you interact with indirectly everyday. The quote is even more interesting. Read it.

I read this book on the plane to and from Chicago. Eric Meyer is apparently a CSS God, although I hadn't heard about him before this book came out. (Update: See the comments turns out I had heard of him...) In the end, the book wasn't for me. If ...

Eric S. Raymond tells a story of how Microsoft recently tried to recruit him Your name and contact info was brought to my attention as someone who could potentially be a contributor at Microsoft. I would love an opportunity to speak with you in detail about your interest in a ...

Eric Meyer, in addition to working the turntables and personally speeding up the entire Internet (at least if you get your news from Apple), has come up with a really slick set of CSS rules and Javascript that can take a garden-variety web page and turn it into a dead ...

Barbary Software: Cool little monitoring app written by an independent programmer in 17 weeks and 5 days of evenings and weekends. Barbary Monitor continually monitors software and computer systems, showing at a glance which systems are working and which aren't through a simple "green is good, red is bad" display. ...

MySQL Gets Functions in Java: Neato. First step down a long road to making MySQL just as functional as other options. Eric Herman and MySQL's Brian "Krow" Aker have released code to allow the DBMS MySQL to run Java natively inside of the database.

Listamatic: A nice look at using CSS to style lists. "Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list using samples from Eric Meyer, ProjectSeven, SimpleBits and others."

The Jargon File: Eric Raymond, king of the hacker geeks, maintains this, the be-all and end-all of computer geek-speak. The Jargon File is a listing of thousands of hacker terms and phrases and what they mean. From the relatively simple "flame" and "Suzie COBOL" to the really obscure like "lots ...

Twenty-One, Mosaic: In that special place where LEGO and mathematics meet lies true geek. Can a square be partitioned into a number of smaller squares such that no two of the smaller are the same size? Casual pondering might lead one to think this geometrically impossible. [...] Artist Eric Harshbarger ...

Steve Friedl's Home Page: I've unknowingly linked to Steve Friedl several times, but never explored the rest of his site. He's a freelance IT consultant in Southern California. His site has gems like this primer on SQL injection attacks, a fantastic article on how to be a good consultant, his ...

The Art of Unix Programming: Eric Raymond, hacker extraordinaire and open source champion, has finished his masterwork, "The Art of Unix Programming." And, just like he did with "The Catherdral and the Bazaar" (which is available in XML or PostScript, natch), he's giving it away on his Web site. It's ...

Yeah, this is a GREAT idea: People wanting to contact extraterrestrial beings through www.TalkToAliens.com can dial a premium rate US number and have their call routed through a transmitter and sent into space through a 3.2-metre-wide dish in central Connecticut, US. The service, launched on 27 February, will cost users ...

Armed and Dangerous: Open souce champion Eric Raymond goes ballistic on SCO in an open letter. "I'm not sure which possibility is more pathetic — that the CEO of SCO is lying through his teeth for tactical reasons, or that you genuinely aren't capable of recognizing honest outrage when you ...

RIAA sued for amnesty offer "California resident Eric Parke, on behalf of the general public of the state, filed a suit Tuesday against the trade association because of its amnesty, or 'Clean Slate,' program, a provisional shield it introduced Monday that allows people to avoid legal action by stepping forward ...

At yesterday's meeting of Apple's board of directors, Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, was elected to the board. Link. Schmidt joins the uber-elite crew of Bill Campbell, Chairman and former CEO of Intuit Corp., Millard Drexler, Chairman and CEO of J. Crew, Albert Gore Jr., Former Vice ...

Encouraging people to contribute knowledge: I m a little confused about this, I guess. Is Google trying to take on Wikipedia? The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal. Earlier this week, we ...

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries: Something got in the water out in Redmond, I think. First the Zune thing from earlier today, now this. One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse ...

Where do you go to read good content? I got to thinking the other day that most Web content is ephemeral short bits of content you can read in 30 seconds or less (like blogs) or news articles written in inverted pyramid format which encourages you to stop reading ...

A Washington Post article reports that a Hopkins, MN teenager has been arrested in connection with the Blaster-B worm. "A court official identified the teenager as Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, of Hopkins, Minn., known online as 'teekid.' A U.S. official in Washington also confirmed an arrest was made early Friday. ...

How to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth: This guy was staying at a hotel, and someone was sucking up all the bandwidth on the network with a P2P app. He found an inventive way to get him off. I notice that his IP in the ntop interface changed into ...

Biculturalism: Joel Spolsky Windows programmer extraordinare has written a lengthy review of Eric Raymond's book "The Art of Unix Programming." He expands beyond this, however, to examine the cultural differences between Windows and Unix developers in general. What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There ...

If you've ever lost a monitor to VBScript (from frustrated punching, mine has dents), Eric Lippert provides some solace in that there's at least a reason why it behaves that way. In JScript you can do something like this: if (blah != null && blah.frob == 123) and it works ...

Law of Demeter: I just finished reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas. I didn't think the book was all that good (see below), but it did talk about a really great principle that I've seen articlulated numerous times before. The Law of Demeter (LoD) is a simple style rule ...

If you don't read the New York Times, you may not know that Firefox has a two-page ad in today's edition promoting itself. This got me thinking: with all the momentum behind Firefox, what is to become of Opera? If I was working for Opera, how would I feel about ...

Biculturalism: This is old Spolsky, but it's still good Spolsky -- In this essay from 2003, Spolsky responds to Eric Raymond's just-published (at the time) book, "The Art of Unix Programming". That book is a classic that just drips with old-school Unix disdain for anything else. (Don't confuse that statement ...

I spent some time over at Yahoo! Answers today. I had a question (it's here, if anyone else wants to chime in). I believe in giving back, so I spent 20 minutes or so trying to answer some other peoples' questions as well. After this experience, I'm prepared to say ...