Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Official Google Mac Blog: Vidnik Vidnik is our newest application in the Google Mac playground. It’s a simple program for using the built-in camera on your Mac to create movies and upload them to YouTube.
• TUAW Faceoff: Screencasting - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
• Ruby/Rails Links (AllTop)

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• The Django Book
• Mule Design Feed Store
• Cynical Peak Software - Rivet Rivet allows you to access your digital life on your Xbox 360. Browse, play, and view all of your pictures, movies, and video through the Xbox 360’s media blade right in your living room.
• Anatomy of a Twitter Bot

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Spills, Site Cleanup and Disposal | Mercury | US EPA
• Port Map and TCMPortMapper
• god - process and task monitoring done right Like Monit, only awesome? God is an easy to configure, easy to extend monitoring framework written in Ruby. Keeping your server processes and tasks running should be a simple part of your deployment process.

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Git.tmbundle - Gitorious cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles git clone git://gitorious.org/git-tmbundle/mainline.git Git.tmbundle
• Mac 101: fine tune your Mac’s volume - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) You can also tweak the volume by holding down the option shift keys and tapping the volume up/down keys on your keyboard. Note that this is a Leopard-only trick.
• AppleScript: Control your Mac with an e-mail - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Adobe Fireworks Tutorials and Downloads Best of | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine
• Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) enables people to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications in an upload-and-go manner, which is very reminiscent of the PHP way of deploying.
• Git Magic - Preface
• DryIcons
• Ajaxload - Ajax loading gif generator
• Capistrano A tool for automating tasks on one or more remote servers. It executes commands in parallel on all targeted machines, and provides a mechanism for rolling back changes across multiple machines.
• Django Pluggables Find reusable applications for your Django project, quickly and easily!
• InsideRIA: LFFS (Learning Flex from Scratch)
• Safari 3.1, Mac OS X 10.5.2: Bookmark syncing issues with iPhone, iPod Touch, .Mac defaults delete com.apple.safari RegisteredSafariSyncClient

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• someecards.com | ecards for when you care enough to hit send | home
• Those pesky dot-underscore files - Macworld | Leopard?s Unix tricks Type dot_clean /path/folder to join the dot-underscore files with their parent files. Read OS X 10.5?s manual pages (man dot_clean ) for more information.
• FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts
• Git - SVN Crash Course
• 11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• API Reference: Safari JavaScript Reference for iPhone OS
• .htaccess Editor
• Cheap Flights, Airline Tickets, Cheap Airfare & Discount Travel Deals - SideStep
• Em Calculator

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• From iPhone SDK to Simple App in Less than 45.2 Seconds — iTouch My iPhone 1. Open the Xcode app 2. Select File -> New Project 3. Select the Cocoa Touch Application 4. Select a name and save it in the Documents folder 5. Once the project appears, click Build and Go 6. The Aspen iPhone Simulator will load 7. Close Simulator
• Are ad networks for loser/weak publishers?
• How to enable single window mode in Safari | naquah.net defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• CSS Trick: Creating a Body-Border - CSS-Tricks
• Yahoo! Search Blog: Making Sitemaps Easier to Manage and Scale a Sitemap can now be hosted on a different host and path than the URLs it contains. For example, say you have a Sitemap (sitemap-www.xml) for the URLs on http://www.example.com but you want to put that Sitemap on http://sitemaps.example.com.
• How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)
• GCam 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker Record video clips from an iSight webcam/DV camcorder

My friend Justin Thorp posted a piece yesterday called “Our current biggest online revolution isn’t user facing…“. Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait.

I had a few other thoughts on this topic, some from life at MQ, some from projects at CD:

Developing “shiny objects” is tempting for organizations because it can be a buzz builder, the benefits seem visible, and is likely to quickly get slapped with a label as “innovative” or “game changing.” At the end of the day however, it’s usually the small and incremental changes — the “unsexy” functionality which is the most useful and provides the most value.

The important lesson for your organization is to find ways to make your stakeholders see the value, or “shininess” in the “dull” features, whether it’s your client, your bosses, or your board of directors. It’s very easy to fall into a trap of trying to hypnotize users into an trance-like state, sometimes fooling them (and yourself) into believing that you’re actually providing more value to the product than some “unsexy” tools of under-the-hood features. What’s sometimes hard is to stand your ground and make a strong case for features that do add value, but aren’t apt to get you a write-up on a tech-blog.

Here’s a quick example that anyone who has worked on the back-end has experienced: Tell your client that half of your development was spent on infrastructure — features that the client can’t make “tangible.” They don’t get it and want something they can “play” with and fight you. If you win, your work is thankless when traffic surges and the application scales without an issue. If you concede, the application grinds to a halt and now the client has nothing to play with anyway.

The next online revolution is distributed. This makes the argument even harder because now these already non-shiny tools and features aren’t serving some centralized application you can visualize, but empowering functionality to an army of decentralized applications and being used in ways a single organization could not conceive of or execute upon. In a fast-moving Internet, where companies are still slow to migrate from “page views” as a performance metric, making distribution shiny is going to take a lot of polish and elbow grease.