kuniform

Here’s a great interview on CNET with the founder of Pandora, the music Ai service. Nifty. Pandora observes what you listen to and then suggests more songs that sound similar. In essence, you end up making your own radio station. Neat.

One of the crazier aspects of the interview is how the founder did 348 roadshows before landing his first round venture. Now, that’s persistence!

Yow! I love using Bloglines as my RSS feed reader. First off, another great find by Ajaxian, cssdocs.org. Basically, it’s an autocomplete interface to the entire w3c’s CSS spec. A nifty example of how Web2.0, in part a presentation layer upheaval fueled by AJAX, can work at its best.
Today’s Sunspots at 37signals has a bunch of great links on shopping, death, getting the most out of high potential people at work, and what I take as the begining of the end of the Web2.0 hype curve. And on that note, here’s post from a few weeks ago by Bill Thompson pissing in the wind of the Web2.0 “revolution”. In it he argues that AJAX and Web2.0 is a presentation layer-only fad in which the true promise of distributed systems is being ignored in favor of fads. He’s right, but only to the extent that the means matters more than the ends.

In other words, if you are enabling networked social software, does it really matter what’s on the backend or which backend is being used? Joel Splosky gets all Frederick Brooks about this point, making it clear it is not the means—i.e.—tools or methods, but understanding the requirements that matter:

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.... If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.

Dion Almaer at Ajaxian.com posted a nice find: a series of video-recorded Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON) presentations regarding Advanced Javascript implementation. These are presentations Crockford did at Ajax Experience and teaching internally at Yahoo!

I use Textmate for all my web work on the Mac, and it rocks. I especially like the bundles, which give Textmate keyword coloring, keyboard shortcuts and other goodness for specific languages. On their blog, the Textmaters mentioned the Getbundle bundle by Sebastian Gräßl but offer the wrong link to it. The one in this paragraph (or in the Textmate blog’s comments) are right. Anyway, Getbundle handles what used to be a messy process quite elegantly.

What’s more, is that Ross Harmes released a Yahoo! User Interface bundle that cuts down on all the typing needed to implement the YUI library. He has installation instructions and an overview, and the YUI blog has a screencast of it.

Luke Wroblewski has this interview series up on his website. It’s interviews with all the pattern language luminaries, Jennifer Tidwell, Martin Welie, Bill Scott, et al.