From the monthly archives:

April 2008

Eric Sink on Windows XP and Listening to Customers

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

Eric Sink on Windows XP and Listening to Customers: “My overall posture toward Microsoft is still friendly. I still use Windows every day…I’ve used Vista, and while I didn’t find it to be a compelling “must-have” upgrade, I rather liked it. But none of this means that I’m going to give my blanket agreement to every decision Microsoft makes. In this case, I object to Microsoft’s plan, not because Vista is so awful, but rather, because ignoring customers is so wrong.”

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It’s been said before, and Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite says it again: The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is to improve your ability to communicate.

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Slave Leia Pillow Fight

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

There will be more substantive tech articles soon, I promise. But I can’t resist posting a photo titled Slave Leia Pillow Fight

6 women in \"Princess Leia Slave\" costumes having a pillow fight
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Update: Here’s the original photo, and you’ll find more in this Flickr photoset.

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How to be a New Media Douchebag

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

The video New Media Douchebags in Plain English was posted back in October, but it’s new to me and might be new to you:

The video’s four-step program for becoming a new media douchebag is pretty simple:

  1. Don’t do any real work.
  2. Talk, type, tag, text and Twitter a lot of stuff. The greater the volume, the better!
  3. Be sure to hate a lot of stuff. And tell folks!
  4. Celebrate the other new media douchebags out there.

According to Valleywag — for whom the four-step program above could count as a mission statement — New Media Douchebags in Plain English is a parody of Google’s Google Docs in Plain English .

[Thanks to jwz for the link!]

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Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick: “Google can reorder search and news results from the last day, week, a few months, or entire year by adding a small string to the end of the search URL. Just add this string — &as_qdr=d — to the address bar and hit enter. You’ll get a custom drop-down box that lets you re-order results based on date.”

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I must admit that my reaction to Sarah Lacy’s article, Twitter Raises $20 M? That’s News, Why? was “Sarah Lacy still has a job? Why?”

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What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Startup

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Startup: “Most of the times when we discuss startups, we only discuss success stories. We just see the end result of entrepreneurs making multi-million dollars. We talk about what a great life that entrepreneur must be living now. We always neglect the other side of entrepreneurs’ life. The painful life.”

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The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment: “I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performing some basic tasks.”

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Assassin’s Creed, I Wish I Could Quit You

by Joey deVilla on April 28, 2008

I’ve played Assassin’s Creed only on XBox 360 and I don’t recall the procedure to quit the game being as byzantine as it is on the PC version, shown below:

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How to Get Skype Running on 64-Bit “Hardy Heron”

by Joey deVilla on April 27, 2008

How to Get Skype Running on Your 64-Bit Linux Box: If you’re running Linux on a Core Duo or AMD64-based machine, you haven’t been able to run Skype on it…until now! If you’ve got a 64-bit machine running the latest Ubuntu — version 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron”, enter the following on the command line and you’ll be Skyping away (and not just text chat, but audio and video as well): sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2; wget -O skype-install.deb http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu; sudo dpkg -i --force-all skype-install.deb; (there’s also stuff for getting Skype to work on previous 64-bit Ubuntus and dealing with a webcam that refuses to work).

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