What a title for a book. The book was recommended by Joel Spolsky, he calls the book mandatory for what managers in his Fog Creek Software should read. That was what peaked my curiosity at first, then I read that the book is from 1936 and I was really intrigued. So I thought I’d order the book and see what all the fuss was about. And glad I did! The book is full of interesting anecdotes and advice that still rings as true today as the day they were written. It’s funny to read examples from the 1899, but that really doesn’t make them less true, on the contrary, it just shows that he was onto something fundamental in the human nature. The book touches many aspects of life, from business, to family to friends. On wikipedia all the advices are summed up, but I really recommned that you read it for yourself. It’s worth it.

Nemo is not quite dead yet. It’s been a long time since the last release, as I’ve been super busy with external contracting work at IOLA so I havn’t really had time to work that much on Nemo. There are some interesting things coming up in the Nemo space in the future, so far I can’t say much about what they are since they are still quite a bit up in the air, but be sure that Nemo is not dead yet :)

Just finished reading Jeff Jarvis book What Would Google Do. It’s an interesting study of applying google thinking to a wide range of other businesses. In the book he mentioned the Is google making us stupid article, which mulls over what happens if we can just search for everything, do we even need to remember anything anymore? And what happens if we shift our reading from books, to blog posts, to 160 letter twitter posts. Does that make us more stupid? Of course not! The only thing that twitter, blogs and facebook is making us better at, is choosing the right medium to convey our message. That is to say, in a more effecient way. Some ideas are best presented in a book, some in a blog post and some in twitter. Too often books could be cut in half (anyone else noticed that the sweet spot for books seems about 200 pages?) and sometimes a blog post might as well have been a twitter status update. It’s all of matter of choosing the right medium. ...

I recently finished up a big project at IOLA which used two major components: Javascript and c# (.NET). It was interesting for me to see the big difference in the libraries for these platforms. For Javascript we used the excellent jQuery library. For .NET we used the very buggy Devexpress library. jQuery, like Javascript, is very simple. .NET on the other hand is overload with interfaces and concepts. What is interesting of course is that this philosophy shines through in libraries build on top of both platforms. ...

Was reading through some old blog posts today and found an interesting talk about Coroutines and Concurrency. The talk is pretty long but presents some nice ideas about how to split a problem up and making it more modular using yielding. It seems like python has extended this a little so that you can actually use generators to consume messages also. What I found particular interesting though in the talk, was when he briefly showed a decorator. Decorators are really powerful and seems to bring about the best of lisps macro extensability to Python without loosing the excellent syntax :) I googled a bit and found the following list of patterns that you can do with decorators.

A minor bugfix release for the 1.1.0 series was released today. Special thanks to the many contributors.

I was wondering why it wasn’t possible to playback a movie over a ssh connection using remote X11 forwarding and mplayer. It seems that the latency is simply just too high. I’m not exactly sure if it’s a ssh or a X problem. This was on a wireless link, which might be part of the problem. While researching the problem I found this pretty cool patch for openssh that should give better transfer speeds. It’s in gentoo as the hpn use flag (even a patch for openssh 5.2). Sadly it did not seem to solve the problem. The movie was still very laggy. Then I tried adding a -C to add compression. This help a bit, but it was still painfully slow and uses quite a bit more cpu on the server side. Also the sounds will come out on the server end, so this might not work very well if you’re not in the same machine as the server :) ...

My lovely girlfriend Milda made ginger cookies again today :) The last batch of cookies went so fast that this time she made 3 plates full of goodies. The recipe needs the following ingredients: 100g butter 100g sugar, recommended brown 150g honey 1 egg 400g flour a bit of salt 1 tee spoon of baking soda 2 tee spoons of blended ginger 1 tee spoon of cinnamon 1 tee spoon of hot wine spices 2 table spoons of sour cream ...

Finally the day has arrived when mms 1.1.0 has been released. After 9 release candidates the release is finally here. The last couple of months of only focusing on bugs has really payed off. Everyone was only fixing bugs which means that we where able to squaze in 67 bug fixes in 2 and a half month. See photos of mms running in the flickr group.

This is a list of scripts that I have been collecting over a long period of greasemonkey use. The extension to firefox just keeps getting better and better all the time. Flickr Allsizes+ - Now with nag screen galore, but still very nice to snatch bigger resolution pictures. Cross recommendations - This really makes browsing random pictures on flickr much more interesting. Last.fm Chart changes - See which tracks goes up and down in the most played tracks of yours. Aaverage plays on artist pages Lyrics - My favorite for last.fm, adds lyrics to the track pages. Normalised charts - Show charts by amount of play in time instead of number of plays. Good for artists like Opeth with long songs :) Top tracks on artist pages IMDB imdb runtime fix - Show runtime in a sane way instead of in minutes only Enlarge actor images - on hover. Not really that useful, but the pictures are small. Google/Gmail Block unwanted results - like the damn Experts Exchange described here Replace http with https - for better security