Normally, I just follow my own Bloglines account, checking those blogs that I’m subscribed to. I always try to force myself skip on as many posts I can. But every once in a while I go on a rampage in search of new good blog (-posts). Here is a round up.

• Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me: lists the 10 things the author thinks software development has thaught him. My favorite: “he business likes to say that all the features are as crucial. They are not. Push back and make them commit.”
• Here is a post on Particletree (bookmark that site!) that talks through the 4 ways of delivering JSON objects from the server to the browser client. Also this other post that talks through paging through JSON/Ajax data plus preloading the data.
• A nice aggregation of articles talking about business models on the web
• Update: another really nice post on Amazon’s technology and what the advantage of using their systems give. (I’m not completely buying into it, but thats a post for another time — Microsoft shoving all their apps onto Amazon and Amazon not going to budge underneath the pressure??)

For me personally, Skype is kicking it for real. Recently they released Skype Prime which is basically a payed service number (0900 in the Netherlands) but then for everyone and their mother: it is really easy to setup -no 3rd parties involved- and as such I think Skype will see a lot of Consumer to Consumer calls which is a space where a lot of people might want to participate.

Check out my Skype Prime badge:

Just got back from a week of skiing at Kaprun, Austria and I thought it might be nice to share some of the video and photos that were made in the process.

Video:

Photo’s:

www.flickr.com More of Jilles’ photos tagged with kaprunq4y6

Some forums have a really good signal to noise ratio, and the Joel on Software boards are on of those. Right now there is a really interesting discussion happening on “what little software secrets do you know that noone seems to know?”

The entire discussion can be found here: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.394956

But let me highlight a few excerpts of handy material:

Just type =rand() anywhere in your [Microsoft Word document] to autocreate a block of text. For more text, pass it a numeric parameter like rand(2). 200 appears to be the max value.

Or, how about when all the capitalization is wrong in your word document?

Fix capitalization in Word:

Highlight the text, and press Shift+F3 until desired result. It allows you to select from All Caps, No Caps, Proper Case and Title Case. Much better then erasing the sentence and re-writing it.

Or for our webdevelopers out there:

In Firefox, if you are working on a page and just care about the HTML source of that file, simply open the source once, and then refresh the source only (similar to a webpage: with CTRL+R), instead of reloading the whole webpage and then view source again.

And for our Windows developers:

When [you] have a messagebox (a.k.a alert box) hitting CTRL-C will copy the text of the messagebox to the clipboard.

And I was allways doing CTRL-ALT-DEL, T to get to the task manager, but this tip is even faster:

Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens up the task manager.

I have something similar like the tip below. For example I can type “ci 12556″ and it will show check in 12556 in Trac. Or I can type “bug 432″ and it will show me bug 432 in my bugtracking system. However, I constructed that allways by hand, here is an easier way to do it:

In Firefox,

-Go to the main page for this group.
-In the search box, right click and choose “Add a keyword for this Search…”
-Name it “Joel” (or whatever you want)
-Keyword = “jos” (or whatever you want)
-OK

Now in the address bar, type “jos hungarian” and it will show you all results for hungarian in these groups.

There you go, hope there was one tip there that you found usefull!

Recently made a few purchases, without doing so much as leaving the house. I really love how that works, really convenient.
First off, I bought a new black, 2nd generation iPod Nano 8GB. I don’t have a ultra large music collection, but I really like the device’s design (duh!) and experience.

(Clicking on the above image will take you to an annotated version)

Second up, I am completely addicted to Lost nowadays and I just finished the 1st Season, so I bought the first part of Season 2 second hand off of Marktplaats.nl. I am anxiously not putting it in the DVD player because I know it will be a ~15 hour time drain instantly.

And last but not least my first shipment of new books came in from Amazon, including:

All except the “The Book of Atrix Wolfe” book came in, which I bought second hand on Amazon.com. You can see my entire book collection at: http://ojilles.listal.com/owned/books (RSS feeds are available there as well).

All this should keep me quiet for a little while…

Herewith a small post, that I will probably revisit later, about my Ski plans for the upcoming season 2006-2007. See the below Google Map indicating the four places that I am most likely going to visit.

Can’t wait to start skiing again! As I said, I’ll probably do a another post describing the exact plans and updating the map with images and the like.

Update: (2007-06-16). The one in Val Thorens didn’t pull through, as it was really close to the one in Zermatt and proved to be logistically improbable. Anyway, 3 ski trips in one season is really helping your condition on the slopes. Definately recommended!

In a recent blogpost, Edward de Leau talks about his notion of “Leanardo” — the person that is primarily responsible for innovation. I tend to agree in principle that these persons are really scarce, and even if you know someone then there is still timing to wreak havoc.

Edward goes on by providing 3 innovative ideas which he intents to revisit in a few years time to see if some came to frutation. In my blogpost I try to make a shortcut and safe Edward a few years:

1 - A site that will crawl the internet in search of structured data (XML) of products that are being sold. After the aggregation, the business model would be similar to existing classifieds sites including features, monitizing eye balls and Google AdSense.

However, such an application already exists. Instead of forcing people to write XML files and put them on a server, EdgeIO allows people to make blog posts on their already existing blogs and aggregate that. Additional revenue stream is redistributing the aggregated content “EdgeSense“.

2 - A Todo list site that brokers between people without time and with time.

This one I have not seen yet in the form I think Edward is seeing this. I envision a generic Todo site like Tadalist, including its “share todo” feature, but then with price brokering system where the person who has the Todo and the person that is willing to execute the Todo can agree a price (and potentially setting up an Escrow service).

3 - A meshup between Google Earth and anything else with a physical location.

GlobeAssistant is a company providing technology to stream locations out of your database into a users Google Earth application. A prime example is the leading Dutch Real Estate site Funda.nl (try this link if you have Earth installed).

For the past 6 or 7 years I have gone to Westendorf, Austria with friends and family for a week long wintersports holiday. Westendorf not being the biggest city ever we quite know the place and always book well in advance. This year however we couldn’t book the 9 rooms we needed in one of our usual places. Which brought up the question of “which other appartments are there for rent and how close are they to the slopes?”.

I remembered finding a map/photograph of Westendorf with all the appartments, hotels, apres-ski bars painted on it. I tried to find it again, but couldn’t. Booted up my really old laptop and found it there. So, in order to make sure both I and you will be able to find it again in the future, I’m hosting a copy here on the site. Go check out the map of Westendorf.

Update: Seems that this year we will be staying a week at Mesnerwirt, Westendorf. (Impression video’s: outside, room, wellness, restaurant - we have aten here a lot over the last couple of years, great atmosphere!, and the (in-)famous Kellerbar!)

Update 2: Found some footage on YouTube of places where I have been. See:

• A little piece of the boarders playground at Westendorf
• The 111th track, which is a long (7km?) ski way that it fairly flat but where you can reach great speeds (unlike the guy filming the movie).
• The new Ki-West track
• Tirolian folk dance. This was recorded by someone I don’t know but last year I have been there myself as well. Highly recommended!

Ofcourse, people have been publishing video’s on the net for a long time. The interesting effect of this - to me - it that this turns the net into a “Funniest Home Video’s” for everyone. For years now people have been buying camcorders, but the reaching an audience with that was still pretty hard (e.g. you needed to get your video’s aired on television. Not so anymore — as already happened to writing (anyone can start a blog and gather a crowd).

Just to show the big diversity out there, here are three video’s I just found on the net:

• On guy performing the first level of Mario Bro’s.
• Snakes on a plane, rap home edition
• Brianiacs ripoff, but professionally done!
• 20 something second Rubrik Cube’s solve with only the left hand. (But really, Rubrik Cubes are for children.)
• Mentos and Diet Coke. And more, and more…(Interesting enough, same search on Google Video’s doesn’t turn up any results)

That last one gets me a bit scared, wondering how big an incentive the net wil provide for those that don’t think about the stunts they perform to get some traffic for their video’s.

Oh, and remember comments on weblogs? People are doing the same on YouTube. Take this lady for example (commenting on a comment, on a comment…) with a rap. Hey, if you are there, you are only so far away of couples ‘fighting it out’ on YouTube ofcourse.

Just ran across the site off Basil Vandegriend, who wrote an article back in May about project management for software development projects. In that article he shows an application that shows the relation between the four factors that play a role in project management: time, resources, scope and quality with which you can visually show their relation.