Cisco buys Sipura. This isn’t exactly new news, but Cisco bought Sipura yesterday. Sipura makes a number of VoIP products, including the SPA-841 phone that I’ve been using for the past few weeks. They’re generally considered to have the best SIP implementation of any of the cheap vendors, and they make good, solid products for… Continue reading Cisco buys Sipura

Designing from the outside in. I was talking with Jason Fried of web design firm 37Signals recently. He believes that contrary to the normal expectation that applications are built on top of frameworks, applications should always be designed “from the outside in.” That is, at 37signals, they try to design the usability and function of… Continue reading Designing from the outside in

Choosing a daily GTD action plan.  high octane moron: Revolving workflow strategies I employ an informal Getting Things Done action strategy that’s similar to the one Chris lays out in his post. I often have a theme for a given day, where I choose an approach that’s suited to my mood, my energy level, and… Continue reading Choosing a daily GTD action plan

A Bishop and a Reverend walk into a bar. Last weekend I ported the Reverend bayesian classifier from Python to Ruby (thanks Jon for the original pointer to Reverend). What I didn't realise was that Lucas Carlson was, simultaneously, working a similar library… ah well, there's a good chance we'll roll my work into his… Continue reading A Bishop and a Reverend walk into a bar

Stemmer gem. The unreleased version of Bishop uses Ray Pereda's port to Ruby of Martin Porter's word stemming algorithm. I've used this code before and I noticed Lucas uses the same code. Despite it's size it made sense to us to package it as a RubyGem so that others could make use of it without… Continue reading Stemmer gem

The Case of the Missing COA. Isn't it wonderful how easy Microsoft makes it to be one of their customers? All you have to do is find a reseller or OEM who can be trusted to supply you with “Genuine Windows” software and pay your money. And then activate it, of course, and you'd also… Continue reading The Case of the Missing COA

ProNet: Firefox to make your life easier. Most of you who are doing heavy web development work have told us that you're using Firefox as your browser of choice, and if so, there's a few absolutely indispensable extensions that we'd recommend adding to your toolkit. … [Six Apart News]

The Land of the IT Cheat Sheets. SearchSMB has compiled a nice list of IT Cheat Sheets on topics ranging from C++ to XML, from cabling to Excel. This is a definite bookmark for LiB! Some of the resources are not “IT” as I think of it,… [LibrarianInBlack]

T-Mobile Offers Street-Level Coverage Maps. T-Mobile cell and hotspot subscribers can use this to find out specific coverage areas: This is a marvelous tool and one all carriers should emulate. It shows specific levels of expected signal strength for T-Mobile's cellular network–this would help plan for GPRS use as well as voice–and has a checkbox… Continue reading T-Mobile Offers Street-Level Coverage Maps

Speeding up Safari. It seems like every month, Safari runs just a little bit slower on my PowerBook. Some sites are worse then others—I can’t visit cnn.com or newegg.com without staring at the spinning beachball of death for 5 or 10 seconds. Even worse, whenever this happens, Mail or NetNewsWire tend to go away as… Continue reading Speeding up Safari