Category: Technology

Eminent Technology A little on the expensive side, but I love the new way of thinking. When building an audio speaker, it becomes very difficult to reproduce anything near or below 20Hz. The problem is the speaker cone can’t move enough air. These guys decided to use a fan instead. Why not? Fans move air…

Lawmakers take aim at patent speculatorsSpeculator of mundane patents casts a long shadow It’s good to see that legislators are even looking into patent reform. There are several issues at play here. First, there are the trolls that buy up vague patents and sue anyone even remotely related. They know they wouldn’t win a court…

Planetary Imagery: 30 Years From Voyager SpacecraftI admit it. I’m a space and aircraft nut, but the Voyager program appeals to my engineer side as well. It has returned some of the most fascinating data, and it survived years past its expected lifespan. Voyager I & II have been operational for 30 years now. Not…

EDIT: A lot of people asked for a plugin of this library. You can find it on GitHub. Part of my current project screamed for some basic searching. In typical Ruby development fashion, the first thing I think of is “someone else must have done this already.” Sure enough, there were several, but the one…

Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles – Salon I have to admit, I never thought of checkers as being a game that needed to be solved — never mind that it would take 18 years and several CPUs to do it. Now, it’s time to solve chess, but that might take a while. Checkers…

I came across this excellent post on Philipp Keller’s blog: Tag History and Gartner’s Hype Cycles. I agree with Philipp’s take that we seem to be in the area of disillusionment. The question remains, however, whether tagging really is on the rise in the way that most of us expect. Don’t get me wrong, I’m…

Ruby is an amazingly productive language, and Rails is an awesome framework. However, you need to be aware of what you are getting into. There are lot’s of items that make life difficult for your web server. Some of the biggest culprits are has_one, has_many, etc. They are so powerful, but use them wrong and…

Corunet. El blog – Automatic CSS: The stylizator I came across this the other day. It’s a nice trick to get an idea how others are handling their CSS.

Derik Whittaker : Definition of ‘Done’ Having managed more than a few successful projects to on time completion, this definition is one of the hardest things to get right. Too many developers forget what done means when estimating tasks. Done is when it’s coded up, right? Done means it is really done. The software works,…