Tomorrow is the Lupus Walk, and I’m only $5 short of my (modest compared to last year) fund raising goal. Between my brother in law, a coworker, and a neighbor, I’ve seen first hand the effect this disease can have. If you take a look at the Mayo Clinic page on Lupus, you’ll see that the treatment options are not great right now, so more research into a cure is vitally important. The good news is that recent research does show promise. ...
When you nail it, you nail it. Commenter Chris from Felix Salmon’s blog explained the financial crisis in two sentences: The person most willing to take on risk is the one unaware he is doing so. He charges no risk premium… The resulting market equilibrium is that the guy who is unaware of the risk ends up loaded with it. Then the music stops. Investment banks took risky investments and manipulated them until they looked like safe investments, then sold those “safe” investments to people who didn’t know better. Cynics could argue that this is the only purpose that securitization and derivatives serve. ...
Since I watched the Tim Fitz video that I linked earlier, I’ve been thinking about continuous deployment. Whether you are really going to deploy every day or not, the idea that your code base is always in a position where it could be deployed immediately is enticing. As Tim points out, getting your code into that shape means that you’re getting a lot of things correct. So I thought I’d break it down a bit and look at the steps required to get an application in shape for continuous deployment. From the presentation, it seems like the major steps are as follows: ...
“Loud pipes save lives” has always been one of my favorite bits of Harley rider wisdom. It turns out there may be something to it. Hybrid cars are twice as likely to be involved in accidents with pedestrians and bicycle riders as regular cars.
I’ve discussed continuous deployment before. The idea is simple – ship more often – ideally, with every single commit. The last post was about blog post explaining continuous deployment by Eric Ries, CTO of IMVU. For more on the concept see this presentation by his colleague, Tim Fitz, on the same subject. I am very much intrigued by this concept, if only because it frustrates me when release cycles slow down so much as applications mature. ...
Tyler Cowen on Twitter: Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force. If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way. What’s interesting to me about Twitter is that it is different things to different people. Some people get lots of value from Twitter search – I hardly use it. But I find Twitter to be invaluable as a place to sound out ideas and keep in touch with people in my network. And I have very good luck seeking advice on Twitter. ...
A couple of years ago I described the bubble pattern. It’s basically a three four step pattern: Clever investors find a class of asset that is undervalued. Dumber investors find out what the clever investors are buying, and pour their money into that class of asset. Bankers work as hard as they can to increase the supply of assets in that class, despite the fact that these assets are no longer really a good investment. The bubble bursts. Chris Dixon explains how this pattern has manifested in venture capital. ...
Last week Firefox developer Alexander Limi posted about rough edges in the Firefox installation experience on the Mac. His article attracted a ton of thoughtful responses, and he posted a follow-up today discussing the options he looked at and describing the new installation experience that will be featured with Firefox 3.6. The problem and solution are an interesting case study for user experience designers. Most Mac users are fine with the way the installation process, but clearly it is confusing to some users, and when you’re talking about an application with millions of users, it’s a big deal. What I liked about the way this worked out is that Limi clearly put a lot of thought into his original post, and the community responded with a ton of good ideas that led to an even better solution that the one he came up with. Now a lot of people are going to benefit. ...
I’ll be participating in the Walk to Cure Lupus for the third year in a row this year. You can see my post from last year about the walk. I’m soliciting donations this year as well and you can find my personal page here. As I mentioned last year, I have friends and family members who suffer from the disease, which can be debilitating or even fatal. I’d really appreciate it if you could donate to the Walk. Nearly all of the money goes toward research, and it’s a cause that’s important to me personally. ...
Google has thrown their hat into the ring when it comes to dealing with the Internet Explorer 6 issue, creating an IE plugin that replaces the IE rendering engine with Chrome. I think it’s a pretty brilliant idea, but I’ll be curious to monitor the adoption rate. My guess is that people who are stuck using IE6 for whatever reason won’t install the plugin, given that they haven’t installed any of the other excellent, free options that currently exist. It does let Google take another step away from supporting Internet Explorer, though, since now they can demand that users install the plugin. ...