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Opening a particular Word 2007 document in Word 2008 can yield this error: Seriously? Can’t Microsoft get their own implementations to cooperate better? And this has just been approved as an ISO standard?

Via Bill de hÓra. Run this from the command line: 1 history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head I get: 1 108 ls 78 cd 53 sudo 29 python 13 cap 9 django-admin.py 9 ruby 8 vim 6 easy_install 3 bzr 1 ex 1 python2.5 1 ln 1 mksir 1 cat 1 cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc In short: I have trouble with my default python installation. I am trying Django for small project. I was hit by the Leopard keyboard repeat freeze bug. I am poor at spelling simple commands.

Thanks to Johnny Chung Lee, everyone and their mom seem to be setting up their own Wiimote whiteboards these days. I tried it too but disliked the pen-based interaction. So, I built a simple glove that allows you to pinch an object to drag and drop it somewhere. Here is what you need: IR LED in the 920 nm range (a bag of 20 cost me ) 1.5V AA battery a glove battery holder (with optional velcro to fit it to the glove) some wires a Wiimote software (I tried Uwe Schmidt’s java based Mac version). The first beta version looks like above after some soldering. ...

The swedish usability consulting firm inUse did a usability review of four mobile phones including Apple’s iPhone, the HTC TyTN, Sony Ericsson W910i, and Nokia N95. Users performed common tasks such as making a call by dialing a number manually and then by calling a person from the address book, change volume during a call add a new contact to the address book, create a new calendar event and more. The result should be useful for those who are trying to convince their IT department: ...

I have been playing with the excellent ARC framework for a small legal information project (more on that soon). I am beginning to think that many RDF usage scenarios involve data in files (stored in a file system) combined with a triple store that preferrably should be kept in sync with the files. Inspired by Niklas Lindström’s Oort I wrote a small plugin to do that in ARC. The plugin extends the ARC2_Store class with a sync_with_folder($path_to_folder) method. Here is the source code for the initial version if you want to play with it. Rename the file to ARC2_FilesystemSynchronizerPlugin.php ansd save in the ARC plugin folder. ...

You may ask yourself “who is that?” or “wtf?!” but the fact is that in the near future he will have a much greater impact on your life than you may think. Here is why you should head over to his blog and post a random comment about Yak shaving and, if possible, create a link containing the words “Yak shaving” pointing to his blog. With a little bit of effort and luck Google will pick it up and Niklas will be the number one result for people from inner Mongolia. ...

Two interesting quotes from Dietrich Kappe: So no, we don’t hire architects. We hire developers. In a small team, there is no room for management deadwood. I agree completely. My view is that the title “Software architect” is a misnomer for what most architects in the software industry do, or at least what they should be doing. It is part of the weird trend that career advancement means getting away from actual programming for some reason. Maybe that is part of a bigger problem when the only way to get a higher pay is to become a manager of some sort? A couple of years ago, most programmers I knew aimed for a project management position. Programming was a dirty job that you had to put up with during the first years in consulting. ...

This pretty much speaks for itself. If I am not mistaken our own packet pro Patrik Fältström is visible in the audience at the end of the clip.

I met Ola Bini at the local Geeknight the other day and we had a brief chat about platforms, Ruby and RDF among other things. Ola mentioned that he wasn’t sure that Rails wuld run on IronRuby - Microsoft’s implementation of Ruby for the CLR. I have been following what John Lam has been writing about their progress (and I correctly predicted him joining Microsoft:-) and it appears that running Rails is a goal of the IronRuby project. But, will that be of interest to Microsoft? MS recently launched the first version of an MVC framework for the ASP.NET platform. This seems like an attempt to satisfy the curiosity of .net developers that have seen screen casts and office mates develop apps in Ruby on Rails. The framework is part of the Visual Studio 2008 offerings. ...

I own the domain name standards-schmandards.com which I use for my accessibility blogging. Recent events have made me wonder if I shouldn’t use it to cover recent events regarding IE8 instead. Or, as Mark Pilgrim elegantly writes: Said the monk: If you give me non-standard markup, I will render it according to standards. If you give me standard markup, I will not render it according to standards. What do you do? The student sat for a long time and said nothing. Then, without looking up, he raised one finger and said, “There is only one web.” Many years later, the monk was enlightened, but by then it was too late. ...