Author: Jake

Last week’s kerfuffle about foursquare and how it exposes you to would-be burglars was hilarious to me. More accurately, it’s Twitter that poses the risk, which isn’t a new problem. Foursquare encourages people to socialize their game-playing by adding friends from Facebook, Twitter and GMail. As with any service, this is to their advantage. Although, I… Read More

Ruby enthusiast and friend of the ‘Lab Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) just released a maintenance update to his ActiveRecord oracle-enhanced-adapter, bringing it to version 1.2.4. This will be the final version of the adapter for Rails 2, after which he’ll move it to Rails 3. Last month, he updated ruby-plsql. As you know, we’re big fans… Read More

I did some printer support over the weekend, which reminded me of the whole “facebook login” fiasco from earlier in the month. Long story short, the person I was supporting couldn’t get Windows to recognize the printer. The PC tower was under a desk and in a difficult spot to reach. The area was so… Read More

Halfway through a blah post about Google Buzz, I ran across this post about the correlation between Facebook relationship status and happiness. I’ve largely ignored Facebook for a while now, and it didn’t occur to me until Pete Warden released his initial observations about Facebook and US geography how much statistical gold exists there. Turns… Read More

A post from Signal vs. Noise titled “Computers shouldn’t make people feel like idiots” has been open in a tab for nearly a week. Reading it, and other iPad coverage, has me torn. I know that I exist in a world populated by geeks, and I know that many outside this world are uncomfortable with computers.… Read More

Thought of something interesting (see disclaimer) yesterday, namely observing the evolution of how design solves problems with software. Take a common requirement for the interwebs and its viewer, the browser, like wanting to view more than a single web page at a time. In the first few iterations of browsers, this was possible only by… Read More

So, Google has been busy announcing products this week. Lost in the Buzz news was this bit that Google is planning to build its own high-speed fiber network. Mmm, fiber. Their goals are: We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll… Read More

Writing and maintaining a blog requires a fair amount of effort. Hence the rise of micro-blogging, which is almost frictionless (one of my favorite interface-isms), creating mountains of content, a long tail for blogging as it were. That’s actually pretty funny, since blogging was initially the long tail of online content publishing, which was kind… Read More

Rich has been a big proponent of Posterous for a long time. I’ve been meaning to try it out, so here goes. I saw this link in my Reader today, pretty interesting stuff. I <3 data visualizations, as you know, so it was a gimme. Not sure how he got access to all the data… Read More

I’ve been thinking about comments lately, mostly because several interesting points have converged to draw my attention. First, Cult of Mac pointed out that John Gruber’s Daring Fireball will now have comments, via another site, i.e. DaringFireballWithComments.net. Next, Engadget turned off their comments because the had “really gotten out of hand”. Then today I see… Read More

Have you noticed the subtle change to the VirtualBox logo? Probably not, but thanks to ReadWriteWeb for pointing out the change. VirtualBox is one of several open source projects that Sun oversaw, and in his strategy briefing last week, Larry Ellison announced that VirtualBox images will be deployable on Oracle VM, which is great news.… Read More

Last week, you got not one, but two posts by authors not named Jake. I felt lucky too. Matt (@topperge) gave us his rundown of “no brainer” features in advance of the iPad announcement. As a giggle, let’s score his accuracy: Books in the App Store: Win. Apple announced a new app called iBooks, delivered… Read More

In case you were unplugged, Apple announced a tablet last week, called the iPad. By now, the jokes have died down and the geek world has been furiously dissecting the pros and cons of the iPad. It’s what we do. My quick take is the same as its been for a while: I don’t need… Read More

Wednesday was an interesting day, with two very interesting announcements happening at the same time, one in the consumer space, one in the enterprise space. I’m talking obviously about the Apple event to announce the iPad and the Oracle-Sun strategy announcement. It’s well-known that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have been friends for many years,… Read More

As with last week, the geo news has been hot and heavy again this week, but before I get to the tidbits I’ve found interesting, let’s talk about why geo matters or doesn’t. Unlike social, you shouldn’t be guilted into geo. Not that you were guilted into joining Twitter or Facebook, but the riskiness of… Read More

If you read here, you know I love data and data visualizations. So, you won’t be surprised to hear this post from Hot Hardware immediately intrigued me: “TomTom’s IQ Routes Prove Americans Aren’t Speed Demons”. Aside from the blatant advertising, the conclusions, initially published by Tele Atlas, TomTom’s map business unit, were great data points for me,… Read More

Yesterday, Vince posted the third installment in his “What is WebCenter” series, and as promised, he dives into the design points with more detail. After reading all three parts, it should be clearer that WebCenter is a lot of things and is therefore, difficult to describe in a terse manner. To date, we’ve been working… Read More

Word leaked yesterday that the EU was set to approve the Oracle-Sun acquisition, and today, it’s official. Justin announced that Larry Ellison will hold a live webcast on January 27 to unveil the corporate strategy for the combined companies. Here’s the official description: Transforming the Way You Buy, Run, and Manage Your Business Systems Find… Read More

Earlier in the week, I posted about Next Jump and their use of data and algorithms to target offers at consumers who are most likely to buy. Their results are impressive, 60% click-through on offers with a phenomenal 11% rate converting browsers to buyers. Apparently, 5% click-through with 2% conversion are consider very good rates.… Read More

Wow, geo is a hot topic lately, with coverage, announcements and features dropping every day. Here’s a summary of what I’ve seen lately that caught my interest: Gowalla appears to be preparing an API. MyTown has 500,000 users, even though no one talks about it. Yelp is adding location checkins to the next version of… Read More