Our Project: Backseat Casting

Our project: Backseat Casting Mei Lu had a great idea for a fun social networking app.  She presented her idea well: Tom Hanks shouldn't have been cast as Dr. Langston in The Da Vinci Code movie. Who would have done better? It's a simple parlor game that everyone has played.  If they made your favorite …

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after Startup Weekend

Friday night I went to Startupweekend and pitched my idea for goal widgets.  I ended up working on another project, but a few people did show interest. I had planned on essentially reciting my blog post pitch, cutting it to about 5 minutes with time for audience feedback.   I rehearsed it a few times, and …

Startup Weekend Pitch – goal widgets

Here's my pitch for startupweekend. It's tonight at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, building 33.  Not overly ambitious, but not too difficult either. People are more open with strangers about themselves. I don't know why... Some people feel a need to express to the world: what they had for dinner last night their relationship status …

Exclusivity and Evolution in Social Networks

Researching social networks is fun. Twitter is probably the first big social media site I've been seriously involved in.  I have a fairly limited set of friends (about 30), only a few of which preceded my joining Twitter -- and most of those are only tangential. The nice thing I like about Twitter is that …

WordPress on the fritz

First, my gravatar image disappeared. Then my whole theme. Is wordpress.com experiencing technical difficulties? I then tried to upload a profile picture, but it added my photo as a favicon. What's going on?

Python testing tools

Python is getting to be quite popular as the language of choice for testers.    One nice thing about Python is the philosophy that there should be "only one way to do it" -- the exact opposite of Perl's mantra "there's more than one way to do it." This lends precision to Python scripts which …

Differences between print & echo in PHP

First, let me state that print has not been deprecated in favor of echo.  At least I couldn't find any evidence of it.  (You know who you are.) There are two clear differences between  print and echo in php. print always returns 1, echo does not return anything This means that print can be used …

Working with multiple versions of Rails

http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/8/6/quickly-switching-between-different-rails-releases-with-git 1. Clone the whole Rails repository so you can switch versions offline git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git 2. Checkout desired version from local copy cd /path/to/cloned/rails git checkout v1.2.6 3. Create a skeleton rails app with the version of rails from the local repository ruby /path/to/cloned/rails/railties/bin/rails skeleton-1.2.6 4.Copy the cloned rails to the skeleton app's vendor …

Signed up for Startupday

I signed up for Startupday, a conference put on by Seattle 2.0. So for $97.38, I'll go to the Meydenbaur Center here in Bellevue (I'm working in downtown Bellevue all this week) all day Saturday, September 26th.  I guess I'll go even if I've taken a job. I also paid $195.00 to get One Shore …

signing documents online with RightSignature

I had to sign a document today, and thankfully it didn't involve printing out, scanning, or faxing.  Tools like RightSignature will hopefully be more popular in the future.  I just need to work on my mouse handwriting.