Nokia Acquires Trolltech — Trolltech
Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech …
Apparently, tis the season to acquire Open Source companies. I’m guessing this means that Nokia is finally willing to admit that Symbian doesn’t cut it. Wonder if this means that TrollTech won’t be so open to building stuff for the OpenMoko platform?
A friend recommended this as a second career is this programming thing doesn’t work out….
Chief Beer Officer - Job of the Week - Portfolio.com
While “chief beer officer” might sound like a jokey nickname for your football-watching buddy who’s responsible for buying the suds every Sunday, there is at least one person in the country who has this actual job title and gets paid for it: Scott Kerkmans.
I admit it - I’ve had pinball on the brain lately…
Pinball Coffee Table - Instructables - DIY, How To, games, home
This is a coffee table built from the playfield of a pinball machine. It is pretty easy to build and best of all, it lights up! It was inspired by a bar in Seattle called Shorty’s, which has tables similar to these in its booths. My girlfriend and I both love pinball. We met at a pinball convention, and we both regularly attend pinball events and tournaments, so this was the perfect gift for her as well as being fun for me to build.
Normally I don’t blog much about Rackspace here - but I’m pretty excited about this:
Top 50 employers - Rackspace Managed Hosting (32) - FORTUNE
Rackspace Managed Hosting
Best Companies rank: 32
2006 Revenues (millions): $224
Headquarters: San Antonio, TX
Bulldog is back on list of Top 10 most popular dogs — Newsday.com
For the first time in 72 years, the bulldog has muscled its way back into the Top 10 most popular breeds in the nation, coming in 10th last year.
One of these is the funny - the other is crazy - you make the call
Startup Developers: Telling Schmucks from Superstars (5 min quiz)
They developed this quiz to tell if someone is a startup super star.
The Startup Developer Superstar Detection Quiz
1. You’re more of a pragmatist than a perfectionist. [Yes/No]
2. You’ve muttered “I’m up anyways, might as well code” at 4:30 a.m. at least once in your life.
3. You understand why the above is misleading because time is continuous, not discrete and the probability of any individual having muttered anything at exactly 4:30 a.m. is near zero. But, you answered yes to #2 anyways, because you’re practical and know what was actually meant.
4. Your sense of satisfaction from software development is a function of how many users are delighted with what you’ve built.
5. You can argue both sides of a technical debate most of the time, if you had to. Some of the time, you actually do, just to better understand the tradeoffs.
6. You’ve been impressed with someone else’s code at some point in your life.
7. You’ve reused someone else’s code at some point in your life, and resisted the temptation to rewrite it.
8. Given a weekend, you could build and launch a trivial web application from start to finish in a language/platform of your choosing (C#,Java,PHP,Python,Ruby,etc.). And, since you’ve actually had weekends, you’ve actually gone ahead and done this.
9. You’re strangely comforted by the fact that the list of languages in #8 is alphabetical and not in descending or ascending order of quality/power/coolness/etc as you really don’t have the time for a religious war on languages and platforms.
10. Given a long weekend and some caffeine, you could do #8 with a popular language/platform that is not of your choosing.
11. You’ve developed something non-trivial before that nobody you know could recreate in a weekend (and you know more than two people that you’d consider great developers).
12. You’re going to start your own company someday. So, you’re interested in sales, marketing, operations and things other than figuring out how to make Ruby on Rails scale to large numbers of users when there are complicated database queries involved.
13. You read a lot, including things like Hacker News.
14. You’re not just an internet developer, you’re an internet participant. You actually use the stuff other people have built.
There doesn’t seem to be a mention of what happens when the person answers yes to lots of the questions - but is only a legend in their own mind.
I’ll probably end up giving this to the people who ask me advice on hiring programmers for their startup (since the people asking are generally not programmers and need all the help they can get) The real message seems to be - look for someone who is seriously technical with broader interests.
assert_efficient_sql - O’Reilly Ruby
Now you can write tests that dig into the SQL that is being generated underneath the Rails app you are righting. I can think of a couple of places this would have been useful in my last app. But I can see people going way overboard as well - don’t say I didn’t warn you.
