Chao Lam

Looks like a good article we can learn from.

Jing sounds like an interesting, eh, project.

Google has a thoughtful post on this topic which we are wrestling with ourselves. It’s a well-reasoned positioned and I’m glad they showing “don’t be evil”-style leadership in this difficult subject.

Marc Andreesen has an inspiring article that really resonates with this Silicon Valley techie “Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley’s image“.

However, in the age where web2.0 startups can literally be developed and launched over a weekend (and more commonly in 3 months), one aspect of Hollywood’s culture that I would love to learn from: how does Hollywood quickly assemble small ad-hoc teams that have come to produce great works in very short periods of time (and then just as quickly disband to work on the “next big thing”? how does that happen? can Silicon Valley learn from that? is it intrinsically tied to the dying studio model? I hope not.

Along with the new prototype 1.6, here comes scripteka – a repository of prototype scripts and plugins – cool!

New York Times has a good write-up about it. I wonder if CoolChaser users would like to inform their friends of their new layouts on Facebook!

37Signals had a nice posting about whether to use Personas in product design. Their answer:

We don’t use personas. We use ourselves.

This is another way of expressing a geek’s credo of scratching one’s own itch. But it has a nice ring to it. We too have tried using personas because like others we’ve wanted to get into the head of our users, but the approach has never given me a warm, fuzzy feeling that we’re on the right track, and Jason Fried put it succinctly:

I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels.

Not that Wii (which I love too) but this biking accessory:

I use it 2-3 times a week to fetch Shuya to our Nanny-share. She loves it too (I know because she’s starts fussing when I arrive in the Element rather than the bike It’s a snap (ok, 30 mins for klutzy me) to install, and you can easily take the seat off (20 secs) for solo rides.

It’s definitely one of my best buys: I’ve gotten so much use of it, on a per use basis, it cheaper than diapers

JRuby (Ruby implemented in Java) is supposedly faster than the navtive Ruby implementation! How counter-intuitive – it’s also hope that Ruby can be sped up a lot more!

JRuby 1.1 is in beta now, it claims support for Rails 1.2.5. What about us laggards still on 1.1.6?

Also begs another question – how’s Ruby 1.9 coming along? Is it still due by Christmas?

Wow, even now I’m still amazed by how small SD cards are. And now, they come with Wifi?!

If wifi can be squeezed into an SD Card cost effectively, what else will have wifi soon? My keys (that ol’ favourite Java example)? Stuffed toys?