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“BusySync lets you share iCal calendars on a LAN and sync iCal with Google Calendar.” Well, if it does that, that’s pretty nifty. Worth checking out.
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“The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world’s best repository for raw data — a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table.”
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Tom Carden links up a few more visualisation blogs he’s following that you might not have heard of.
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“The easier way to monitor servers and web applications.” Single-server plan is free; looks like it could be very handy indeed.
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Linked a thousand times over, but some great stuff in the main body. Alas, a shame to see the intertards lay into a very fair Michael Bywater, who at least showed up to the comments.
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“I’ve never been satisfied with folks trying to build services that generate ‘eyeballs’ just to ‘monetize’ that traffic with ads.” Charlie rightly lays into the monetizers.
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“Dweller is a simple roguelike targeted for Java enabled mobile phones” lovely – straightforward, classic ASCII Rogue on your j2me mobile. Two thumbs up!
Gamecamp
20 April 2008
It’s been linked up all over the place, but I may as well link it again: the Guardian are running Gamecamp, a one-day unconference about games and play, on the third of May, and I’m going to be there, cooking up some nefarious quiz-shaped entertainment with some of the usual suspects such as Dan, James, Lee, and a few others.
Obviously, it being an unconference, everyone attending is encouraged to talk, and I’m working on thinking up a session – but about what, I have no idea. Or perhaps I have too many. I’m hoping to do something along the lines of tight criticism – something detailed and focused. And I’m not sure what sort of games to talk about yet. But I’ll work something out, and I’m looking forward to what the other participants will bring.
Like most events suffixed -camp, it’s going to sell out fast. Tickets are available from Monday April 21st. If you’re interested in coming, good luck getting one. It’ll be fun to see you – and if you’re interested, I’ll gladly corner someone for a game of Lost Cities…
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Simon Wistow with a sensible, insightful post – starting from Andy Baio’s remarkable discovery of Milliways – on how the web (and bloggers) need to grow up, and how telling smart people “you don’t get the web” isn’t actually an answer at all. Bravo.
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“masquerade – an OpenID server based on Ruby on Rails.” Server, not client-library. Looks quite nifty, and well worth knowing this is out there.
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“In the great pantheon of contractual obligation records, there is the noisy, the brassy and the phony. And then there is Van Morrison’s Bang Records Sessions.” Worth a listen, for sure!
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Silly, overproduced, over-expensive video to pep up the Microsoft sales team for managing to get their heads around the sheer number of SKUs for Vista. This is what Big Companies think is a valuable use of money
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“…the fact that Flickr has users who are passionate and articulate about what they love about the site is an asset. It’s also potentially a headache.” A great piece by Tom Ewing on debates about brand values with an engaged audience.
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“Over the Air presentation by Tom Hume and Bryan Rieger of Future Platforms about the PrimeSky project they did for the Royal Observatory at Greewich.” Lots of well-executed ideas piece together impressively. A good example of how to think this way.
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Some great points here, especially 1, 2, and 3, which apply equally to many forms of design.
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“A JavaScript and regular expression centric blog” – worth it for the title alone.
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“A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.”
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Some great talks here, and fantastic video – high quality, and slides throughout. Impressive conference, and great to be able to download it.
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Disney are shutting down VMK despite its continued success and large userbase; as a “promotion”, it’s run its course. Some of the comments are very affecting. Lessons to be learned about the implicit contracts you create when you build worlds.
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Yahoo expand their Exceptional Performance best practice; there are some interesting new tricks in here that might seem counterintuitive, but you can actually implement “right” if you think about it. Great that somebody (else) cares about this stuff.
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“Here are all the recordings from Webstock 08 and Webstock06.” Comprehensive, and from the looks of things, nice high-quality formats.
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“UFO: Alien Invasion”, an open-source clone of the X-Com/UFO games, now has an OSX port available. That requires trying out, then.
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“FixtureReplacement is a Rails plugin that provides a simple way to quickly populate your test database with model objects without having to manage multiple, brittle fixture files.” Looks very handy indeed.
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“With money, it seems, it is not familiarity, but unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.” People are less good at estimating the value of unfamiliar currency, no matter what it says on it.