Miscellaneous Archives

Another fantastic product: YouMail. Manage your voice mail through this website. I thought it was a dumb idea at first, but then again I thoguht YouTube was silly when they first launched (originally as a video dating site, I must note.) I signed up for YouMail today, and I gotta say it’s easy, clear, simple to use, and free. You can check your voicemail, see the caller’s ID (even if the caller isn’t in your address book), read a text transcript of the voicemail (in beta), set personal greetings for specific numbers, and receive MP3 emails for each voicemail message.

Thought it was interesting to see the number of followers and followings the presidential candidates had. I’m loosely following the candidates’ use of the internet in their campaigns. In general, Obama does seem to have a much stronger online presence than any other candidate, twitter stats aside.

I couldn’t find what appeared to be the official twitter sites of McCain or Huckabee. If you find them, please let me know!

Twitter Profile	Candidate	Followers	Following	Updates
	Obama	13,467	12,796	74
	Clinton	1,565	0	56
	Ron Paul	1016	0	85
	John McCain	N/A	N/A	N/A
	Mike Huckabee	N/A	N/A	N/A

(All data current as of March 3, 2008)

Interesting article in the Guardian. Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site.

Perfect blend of technology, user interface design, imagery, culture, and journalism.

One of the most important parts of web development is platform testing. I develop using the latest Firefox on Mac OS X Leopard, but I obviously need to make sure everything is okee-dokee on all browsers. What most lay people don’t realize is that a website that looks beautiful on one platform can look like crap on another. Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? I found the answer here.

Here’s what you get when you combine 8,000 people, LAN bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second, a Cisco CRS-1 router capable of handling 1 billion simultaneous gamers, and one giant arena: DreamHack 2007. Good times.

Photo from nytimes.com

Seth Godin on CSS. Not sure what to make of this to be honest. Wonder what sparked his desire to suddenly blog about it? Regardless, Seth: we here at Bust Out couldn’t agree more. Have your web team read this book, or this one, or this one. We like them all. Cheers!

Thought provoking article about the square peg, round hole syndrome. Oftentimes it makes sense to do what you know, as long as it works of course. It’s nice to see someone explore, even in a restrospective, the many facets that go into making a particular technology decision.

I was doing some research today on using the acts_as_ferret plugin for an upcoming Bust Out site, when I quite accidentally stumbled upon this interesting post regarding how terrible and misleading the plugin apparently is. The tone certainly seems disproportionate to the offense. And I’m no enterprise search architect, but I understand that distributing an index when running in a cluster is a fairly common architectural approach. I sure wouldn’t want to buy this guy a free meal he didn’t like.

I don’t mean to pick out this post in particular, especially as the blog advertises itself as some sort of open source debunking machine. I also don’t mean to oversimplify the (non)-validity of critical postings, as constructive criticism and community policing are both valid reasons for (negative) open exchanges. However, the frequency with which I see fairly narrow, one-sided rants about freely provided software - free to use, free to make all sorts of modifications to and likewise free to ignore, is disconcerting. It seems few things are free these days.