I don’t normally link to 37Signals¹, but this lecture is worth watching. It’s one of the first inspiring lectures on business that I feel good about: it’s sharp, honest, and highly critical of the status quo. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, it should nudge you to think more realistically about the business of software.

1. You already read their feed, don’t you? ↩

Examples of declarative CSS transitions and animations, which are available in recent versions of Safari. Many of the Scriptaculous features are more elegant using this approach.

Fog Creek’s new sites slide into the painful state of design by “a committee of tasteless slobs,” a condition to be aware of, and run screaming from when encountered. The Fog Creek guys started over again, gaining sanity and a cleaner, honest design.

It was really cool. But they would sign three month contracts, and Miyamoto himself would say that he did not want any documents. He would just say, “Find the fun, and I’ll be back in three months to take a look at what you have.” –Lessons about failure

A good tutorial on Objective-C 2.0, highlighting improvements over 1.x. The language has changed a lot since the first time I touched it.

I used to have to boot to my Windows partition regularly to charge my iPod touch, a feature that’s been added to Ubuntu 7.10. Now I only need to reboot if I need to resync it, which I do far less regularly. Yes, I’ll be buying a Mac this year¹.

1. which fixes the problem ↩

The Presedents of the United States of America have a newish album on AmieStreet. If you love the Presidents, then the album is worth the 5 (or so) bucks.

AmieStreet sells artist-friendly, DRM-free, download-as-many-times-as-you-want music online. Pricing is pretty cool too: all albums start at $0/song, increasing as the songs sell and are recommended–and you can even make a few bucks recommending new music yourself.

I bought a few BNL live albums (and one of their new studio projects) before they were popular for less than a dollar. I’ve also found a lot of great independent music, have earned more than $5 in AmieStreet credits now, and purchased more than 30 albums for $25. A few of my favorite new artists so far:

• The Powerless, a band that rocks somewhere between Tool and WhiteStripes
• White Hot Knife, another new-rock band
• Towncrier, a gamier U2 folk-rock band
• The Blue Jackets, a new-rock punk band somewhere between the Ramones and Pistols (but fresher)
• Breakestra, some top-dog funk
• The Mighty Imperials, another swingin’ funk/soul group
• Jets Overhead, a great, laid-back folk-rock sound
• The Dead Trees, a really fresh, raw folk-rock band with some slick vocals
• Some Velvet Morning, a single’s-only band that sounds a bit like The Killers

… the cost of adding a feature isn’t just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. … The trick is to pick the features that don’t fight each other. –John Carmack

Here’s the C++ Frequently Questioned Answers, a good antithesis to the C++ FAQ Lite.

Mister Peabody compares UNIX fork()s with Window’s CreateProcess() family of function calls.