I had the pleasure to watch hordes of co-workers, past and present, struggling to get through their days without going insane. The lot of them are capable people, but they appear to waste a lot of time (and nerves) by not asking the right questions when it comes to technology. And I am talking here about developers and non-developers. Also, before I go any further, let me clarify one thing: I am writing this not to tell people they suck, but to share some personal findings and experiences about common pitfalls and how to get around them.

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The other day I had to move my desk to another room, and thus was cut off more or less entirely from the rest of the Y! engineering gang. My homies, my posse, noone around! Mein Leben! Anyways, during the day I was chatting with Mike, who didn’t have to move from the other room (because he is cool). “How you holding up?”, he asked. “Okay, but I’m lonely… SEND HELP”, I said.

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Vor ein paar Wochen hat ein “Discount-Bäcker” in Trudering aufgemacht. Ich vermutete, dass es sich um einen “keine Bedienung, niedrige Preise”-Laden handelt, war mir aber nicht sicher. Gestern abend sitz ich im Bus, auf dem Weg heim, und seh' durchs Dunkel das erleuchtete Schaufenster. Letzteres mit einem neuen, handgeschriebenen Vermerk. “Kaffe + Crosso 1.50€”. Was zum Teufel ist ein “Crosso”? Und “Kaffe”? Huh? Verwirrung. Heute morgen hab ich dann mal reingeschaut und mit der Chefin geplaudert.

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Quote of the moment. Simon on SEO, SMO and TLA’s: SMO, or “Social Media Optimisation” — digg spamming now has its own TLA. Real life recursiveness. Best warning sign EVER. A sign warning about itself. Classic “WTF?” moment. This is deep. On Mistakes. Glass Maze: Mistakes were made—an angry, yet polite, essay on political semantics. So if a guy’s ever caught cheating on his wife, say, he could tell her: “Yes, intercourse with someone other than you may have taken place.

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Swinging big. Yahoo! Pipes is live! Go play around with it. It’s really good stuff with almost limitless possibilities. I didn’t work on it personally, and I’m speaking from an end-user perspective. Jeremy Zawodny, Tim O’Reilly and Ed Ho (one of the Pipes developers) described the product in detail earlier today already, so go read. And play. Have fun! Awesome job, esteemed colleagues. And now the weather. Quote of the day [via Beryl]:

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Oiy. Microsoft announces interoperability between CardSpace and OpenID: On the heels of the Windows® CardSpace™ general availability launch in Windows Vista™, Microsoft demonstrated momentum with industry partners that are working to apply this technology to help consumers realize a more confident online experience. This includes the announcement of collaboration on use of Windows CardSpace with the OpenID 2.0 specification. Through the support of the WS-Trust-based Windows CardSpace experience, consumers can take advantage of increased security against phishing attacks without adding complexity to their identity management experience.

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Technorati WTF. Technorati launches their WTFsystem. I see the possibility of serious abuse, but we’ll see whether I am too paranoid. Anyways, the short summary: Know something that’s hot? Explain why! This is your opportunity to write a quick explanation for the buzz around a popular subject. No blog required! getElementsByClassName() in Firefox 3. Native, built-in! Because John said so. Get your URLs straight. A good explanation why everyone should be using disambiguated URLs by (of course) Mr.

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Friday I finally got my new machine delivered to my doorstep: 24’’ iMac, Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7600GT. First impression: it’s huge. Really huge. “A couple of smaller iMacs are orbiting it!”-huge. But very shiny. My 20” Dell flatscreen is still sitting next to it, looking small. The transition from the Mac mini to the new box was uneventful, almost too easy, if there is such a thing. Next I moved a few gigabytes of porn data over from my PC, the 250GB drive took it with a mere shrug, as expected.

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Today is the day Vista is launched by many happy faces at Microsoft. (The World stood still for a very short moment… it blinked, shrugged, and continued to spin, feeling indifferent.) Today is the day I placed an order for a new machine. It will be big, and I will be very happy the day it’ll arrive—this Friday, if all goes well. No real connection between these two fantastic events. By the way, one of them excites me to a degree I can’t really communicate, the other… eh… not so much.

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Vorhin im XXXLutz-”Restaurant”. Kellner: “Was darf ich Ihnen bringen?” Carlo: “Ich möchte das Tagesangebot, die vier Weißwürscht mit ‘nem Weißbier.” K: “Nein.” C: “Was?” K: “Nein, möchten Sie nicht.” C: “Möchte ich nicht?” K: “Nein, die sind grauenvoll. Ganz ehrlich. Wenn ich Sie die bestellen lasse, dann seh ich Sie nie wieder. Bestellen Sie lieber irgendwas anderes, dann kommen Sie wenigstens vielleicht wieder.” C: ”… Okay, ich nehm dann die Berner Würschtl.

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CSS Well Of Knowledge. 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without is a nicely done, dense list of cool techniques (with links). Great quote. By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (via): If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Minty! Mint v2. ‘nuff said. Firebug video. Last week, Joe Hewitt, Firebug developer, visited the Sunnyvale campus to give a tech talk about version 1.

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Yahoo! meets OpenID. Simon Willison just released his new site, idproxy.net. Basically it’s a wrapper to “transform” your Yahoo! ID into an OpenID. (To put it simple.) It’s making use of Yahoo!s BBAuth system, and it quite nice. Not perfect and fully fleshed out yet, but cool already. And hey, it is secured by monsters! Buy MS Vista. Seriously, there are so many versions, there’s something for everyone. Spring? The snow is melting, the sun is out, and we just got back from Lehner’s where we had some excellent Kaiserschmarrn.

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1080p!!!1 I don’t know whether technically this qualifies as joke, but I laughed. Re-roll. Kind of sad, but I’m in pretty much the same spot. Sans the couch. Wikipedia. xkcd nails the problem with Wikipedia. Buzz donuts. [via JR] Scientist develops caffeinated doughnuts. Oh yes. Each donuts contains the caffeine of approximately two cups of coffee.

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Chocolate Covered SQL. This particular entry at The Daily WTF is hilarious. Even tho it’s unbelievable wrong, the screenshot of this one Google Accounts captcha page is hilarious. Nerds! You know you’re a nerd when you read a spam email with the subject “Do You SUFFER from CVS?” (in this case the acronym stands for “computer vision syndrome”—whatever that may be), and the first thing that comes to your mind is “Yes, Subversion is so much better”.

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When I read Simon’s proposal about social whitelisting with OpenID this morning, I was immediately intrigued by the idea. Basically, he’s suggesting that by whitelisting trusted OpenIDs, sharing these lists among peers, and using them to decide whether to place a new comment on your own blog in a moderation queue or not, a group of people could build a working, trust-based protection against comment spam(mers). Go read. It’s good stuff.

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BookmarkID? Ka-Ping Yee came up with a funny idea on how to battle phishing using browser bookmarks. Google Earth Space Art. [via Mr. Willison] Space Invaders on Google Maps/Earth. Great. :) Amen. Mr. Alfke, you’re absolutely right: “[A]nyone who’ll voluntarily use ‘vi’ in the 21st century will put up with anything. [..] And that goes for ‘emacs’ too [..] I thought emacs was really cool, in 1986. That’s when it was really cool to have a DEC VT220 terminal in my dorm room with a 9600 baud connection to a VAX running BSD 4.

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Apparently, for whatever reason, people came here and read my mad rant about Jabber, OpenID And “teh shiny”. To be perfectly honest, I was somewhat surprised about that. Anyways, allow me to address some responses. Peter Saint-Andre answered with some interesting numbers. (He is Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation, Director of Standards at Jabber Inc., Chair of the XMPP Council, and managing editor of the standards process followed by the XMPP Standards Foundation.

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Summing up YouTube. xkcd does an excellent job of taking a snapshot of YouTube in one single comic strip. It’s art! jr has an iNsight Apple is not a business. It’s an art co-op. Project Censored: Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007. Interesting list. I “liked” #2, Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran. How old is the Grand Canyon? Park service won’t say: Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.

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I am thinking about my linkblog for a few days now, and whether to continue it or not. On one hand, it is kind of comfortable to just share items in Google Reader or to just store another bookmark using Yahoo! MyWeb. (An hourly cronjob is parsing both RSS feeds and feeding it to my site.) On the other hand, I think the Post Its are the better format. It takes more time (and more work, even) to compile them over the course of a day, but I am more flexible in how to present them.

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Jeremy Zawodny on The Tipping Point for OpenID: I mean that all it takes now is for one “big player” to jump on the OpenID bandwagon. OpenID will then either take off or fall flat on its face. I believe it’ll succeed… in a similiar way Jabber has succeeded. A good, solid, open system with an active developer community, but not shiny enough to appeal to the masses. Personally, I hope that it’ll fare better.

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Windy. Outside a storm is brewing that is assumed to end all life in Germany. Everywhere. We’re all going to die! Is Jesus coming back, bringing his lawyers? No idea. I just hope we’ll still have a roof in the morning. New keyboard. Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, excellent even on a Mac, thanks to the surprisingly flexible IntelliType software. I love Apple hardware, but the glaring lack of an ergonomic keyboard is nothing short of a shame.

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‘Take a leap into hyperspace’ is an interesting article about the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awarding the title “Liquid Propulsion Best Paper” to a team of scientists around Jochem Häuser (Germany) and Walter Dröscher (Austria), who published a paper called “Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory”, which deals with (hold on to your pants) dimension drives. Well, hyper drives. Well, not even that, but apparently the serious possibility of moving shit around really fast by manipulating forces in eight dimensions.

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Wee hands: A baby gorilla grasps the hand of a caregiver at the Lefini Faunal Reserve. The center was set up to rehabilitate “bush-meat orphans,” young gorillas whose mothers are illegally killed by poachers for meat. Gorilla babies rely on the care and emotional support of their mother for as long as eight years.”_ I don’t know whether this is one of the greatest pictures I’ve ever seen or one of the most depressing—assuming the circumstances.

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Seit letzter Woche steht jeden Morgen an der U-Bahn-Station ein entfernt an Gunther von Hagens erinnernder Mann und hebt eine Publikation mit dem etwas aufdringlichen Namen “Erwachet!” in die Luft. Die sich daraus ergebende Ironie, daß er das Blatt noch schlaftrunkenden Menschen auf dem Weg in die Arbeit ins Gesicht hält, scheint ihm nicht aufzufallen.

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The aforementioned tech article is available now on YUIblog.com! It’s explaining a way to use the excellent YUI library in Greasemonkey scripts. I’m sure that this approach is neither the perfect nor the only solution to achieving YUI/Greasemonkey integration, but it works for me and I thought sharing can’t hurt. Well, the article is here, and the example script can be downloaded from this very site here. Many thanks to Eric Miraglia for giving me a soapbox.

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