I have Talk of the Nation on in the background here at work right now, and it seems that even NPR is getting in on the iPhone hype. Momentum has been building for Friday’s launch of Apple’s first mobile phone for months now — something you’ve likely seen if you’ve recently read websites devoted to […]
Well, it’s that time of the month again. The couple of days when my new issues of Wired, Business 2.0, and Fast Company all arrive to provide me with fresh reading material for a few weeks. Today my July Wired magazine showed up, with this cover greeting me: Several issues ago, Wired offered personalized magazine […]
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd has just published a fascinating essay called “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace“. In it, she explains how at least among teenagers, the two largest social networking sites are becoming more and more divided by social class. I’ll let you read it to find out what Danah says […]
Via 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog, I came across what seems like a really simple idea that looks like it actually works: the Skeeter Bag. What is it? Basically, a box fan with a mosquito attached to the front of it. Flip it around so that your CO2 (or your dog’s, livestock’s, etc.) blows out […]
I recently came across a very interesting online article from German magazine Spiegel, titled “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!“. In it, James Shikwati, a Kenyan economics expert, details how massive foreign aid to African nations is not only ineffective, but damaging to the receiving countries. Mr. Shikwati says that aid money creates an […]
Just the other day I was considering moving this blog into WordPress instead of the various versions of Movable Type I’ve been using to run this thing for almost four years now. There were a few reasons I was thinking about doing this: I’m a tweaker, and like to try new things I’ve used WordPress […]
There’s a term we use in programming and development to describe system interfaces that are designed with maximum flexibility in mind. They are said to be loosely coupled. In plain English, it means that applications have stable and consistent ways for other programs to communicate with them. More importantly, since there are clear boundaries that […]