How far we have come. This video has some shots of old symbolics machines and Dr. McCarthy answering really bad questions on Lisp and AI.

From my perspective, it is purely about success. Too much of it will kill a company. At that point in time (mid to late 90′s), Yahoo had some really, really smart people. Once a company becomes enormously successful, it is really hard to keep those people. Once you lose the good people, you better have something in place to attract other good or great people. Yahoo did not do that, so here they are. It is amazing how these companies like Yahoo and AOL can continue to have valid businesses for quite some time.

All of this is not a bad thing, however. This is a form of corporate evolution. Those who were successful will go off and start or invest in other new and innovative companies.

This one feature will probably enable google to become significantly more relevant in the social networking space. Address book or contact management innovation here is long overdue.

I Use Couch DB from Couchio on Vimeo.

This video has been floating around and finally steve said it was worth watching. He is right. Kind of a cool story told in video of the Atari 2600 ET Creator talking about the creation of some of the games. There are two videos and I recommend watching both.

They key to this feature was modern browser support. Browsers just didn’t have the ability to allow you to drag a file from your desktop into a browser window and send that information to the site you were using. This is going to enable a lot of great things besides just ‘inline images’ in email.

Anyways, a sample screen shot is below. Just go to the link above and enable the feature. It will really make sending images so much easier.

As far as web-mail goes, I never expected it to get this far from back in the Rocketmail days. This feature is just another nail in the Outlook coffin. Webmail is now nearly as good and nearly superior to desktop mail applications. There are a few other problems still, but the plusses easily outweigh the minuses. Web apps continue to get better and better and better.

No more. After seeing people on github demonstrating how to get their dotfiles house in order, it seemed like the right time. This was an easier choice now than ever before because git has become as prevalent as ‘ls’. It is so fast and flexible. So I took the plunge.

I took a look at a bunch of blogs about this (probably more than I needed to). The two I seriously looked at are here: the ‘ryanb’ dotfiles technique and the ‘rtomayko’ dotfiles. Both were simple. Other people on the net had these extra tools built to handle the problem. Others kept their entire home dir in version control… as in all their music and photos! I respect their work, but this puts quite a bit of stress on the rcs system.

I used the ‘ryanb’ approach. Essentially, you do a git pull on a new machine, run a ‘rake install’ so the files properly setup symlinks. Done.

I used it today and I was pleased to have all my aliases and editor tweaks working on my new machine. I will never go back.