you want to start something?

I seem to be running a link blog here. I guess it’s because I write at 4 other blogs and none of them are link blogs. Anyway, I digress.

16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn makes me laugh out loud.

Excerpts:

3. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”

15. Your true friends love you, anyway.

Tags: Made me laugh by mj
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Guy Kawasaki points at an interview Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google with the iinnovate Podcast guys.

The line which seems to be doing the rounds on the blogsphere is:

“You don’t learn very much when you yourself are talking.”

This is a rather old saying but it’s been popularised by one of the gurus of the modern world (where everything can be shrinkwrapped and given a Web 2.0 sheen).

This got me thinking about blogging. Unless you get comments, blogging is a one way conversation. Now, Scoble would tell you it’s all about starting conversations – so how do you turn it into a conversation?

The plan seems to be to read. I read 128 feeds and I currently contribute to four blogs. So I read/listen to four times as many feeds as I create. Is that a good ratio? I also read reddit/digg, Slashdot, MacNN, MacRumors and the links they lead to.

How many feeds do you read? Do you comment on blogs? Ever actually digged something? Do you see value in Twitter? Do you think Radar is compelling? These tools are all about getting the end user into the habit of sharing information.

Tags: Commentary, infurious by mj
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We currently have four projects on the bench out of a list of around 20 possible ideas.

• We have a new hire which technically brings the number of people in Infurious up to 4. This is good, right? It means we can do more stuff which is good.
• Project #1: Some commissioned work for a local IT company. It’s not desktop development but in the end beggars can’t be choosers and we have to start bringing in the pennies somehow. This is, of course, the recommended route for startups who intend to bootstrap their way. We have a good rapport with this company and the project will be finished in another month which means we can get back to doing what we really want to do.
• Project #2: Some more commissioned work. Again not desktop apps but then see Project #1 for why.
• Project #3: designed to help you keep things better organised. More on this later. At the moment it’s been a long hard slog in working out how feasible this is with probably about a hundred hours spent working on Apple’s code trying to see why they did some things and why they left some other things out.
• Project #4: I’ve got two words for you. InfuriousTV. And I’ll leave it at that. (It’s just a code name as a company name plus the word “TV” isn’t a very good name. Take a hint, Apple!)

Tags: Code, Startup, infurious by mj
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I’ve signed up to Skype Pro and SkypeIn. While using the SkypeOut service, it’s flawless. While communicating with other Skype users, it’s flawless. What is wrong with this service?

SkypeIn

In short. It doesn’t work. We have two SkypeIn numbers, both in the +44289581**** region which is the “local” Northern Ireland number. I’ve managed, over the last week, to get a successful connection to each of them once from landline and mobile, at around 7 pm in the evening.

It doesnt try to connect. It just reports “Number error”. It doesn’t attempt to connect to my Skype voicemail. The call just fails. And it’s still failing today, a week since I first reported the fault.

Skype don’t get back to you for 4 days when you report a fault so I’ve had my first response where the nice tech support person told me it was working fine and started to ask me to reconfigure my Skype settings to, surprise surprise exactly the settings I had. Another suggestion was to get a new number. When I pointed out that we had two numbers already, I was then to be passed onto the PSTN team.

Now…I have little doubt that the local PSTN exchanges will be held to blame. It will just depend who is more slippery, BT or Skype, in the big blame shift.

Compare and contrast this to my experience of SIPGate. The voice quality wasn’t quite as good due to their generic software client and there’s no option for video or anywhere near the same IM community. But it works And the equivalent of SkypeIn is free. And works. And is in the +44289099**** area which just looks like another Belfast number.

I’m frustrated and out money now for SkypeIn and I don’t have a solution that works. 4 days for response is pretty terrible (especially as it’s a minimum …all of my SLAs are based on maximum turnaround times).

I feel doubly annoyed as Skype hoovered a comment on one of my other blogs about how I would use Skype when playing games. Great – I didn’t link to them they just gobbled my comment as some positive PR? Well, gobble this.

All in all. Shoddy.

Tags: Bedouin, Commentary by mj
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The Mac has a fabulous development environment. It’s true. No, really.

You only have to go through some of the more hardcore Mac development blogs to see the issues that are presenting themselves. Some of the big names in Cocoa development are technically hobbyists – they have day jobs and yet they can make some fabulous, rich desktop applications in their spare time.

Apple has been steadily modifying the presentation layer of the operating system. We had Quartz Extreme in Jaguar, Quartz Composer in Tiger and we’re about to see Core Animation in Leopard. These technologies allow developers to create some amazingly complex motion graphics with comparstively little work.

Here’s an example (cribbed from TUAW.

Japanese Designer Futurismo Zugakousaku has used Quartz Composer to generate some dazzling motion graphics, which can conveniently be used as screen savers in OS X (place the QTZ files in /Library/Screen Savers/). His Quartz Composer Samples page features 33 QTZ files for download, some of which are simply mesmerizing.

He claims to have made each of these in less than an hour. Zugakousaku says of himself: “I want to make a work like a new surrealist of the new generation.”

Tags: Commentary, Cool, Mac, infurious by mj
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