Items of Interest: 2006.05.02

Things that I found interesting on May 2, 2006:

Spotback – New personalized news site. See my review. Found via TechCrunch.
Google/Microsoft: Be Careful What You Whine For – Review of hypocrisy, startegy and misconceptions in Googles attack against Microsoft for their search box in IE7 from Henry Blodget.
Preparing Yourself for Entrepreneurship While Working Full Time – Advice from Anita Campbell
Programming Fonts – list of good monospaced, easy to use fonts for programmers from Keith Devens
The Hardest Lesson for Startups to Learn – From Paul Graham.
Spanky Corners 1.0 – Rounded corners using CSS, no Javascript. From Sitepoint (see announcement by Alex Walker)
Startup Hiring: Why you should date before getting married – From Dharmesh Shah

Items of Interest: 2006.05.01

Things that I found interesting on May 1, 2006:

Firefox Embedded Video Downloader – Firefox extension that lets you download embedded videos as you watch them (from sites like YouTube and Google Video)
XHTML/CSS Template Phase of my New Blog, Part 2 – Veerle explains how she does she handles the button overlays using CSS only
Keeping Up and “Just In Time” Learning – If you are not able to keep up with everything going on in the programming and tech worlds, don’ feel bad. Nobody else can either. From Jeff Atwood.
Reboot on JeffCroft.com – New design here, featuring Django as the engine and a very innovative way of displaying live search results. (Via Mike Davidson).
Google Dumped by Amazon’s Alexa for MSN Live – via Memorandum. So Alexa is no longer using Google. Anyone else? How about A9 – now using MSN as well (via Scoble). I wonder how much this cost the guys from MS. Though if the performance and results don’t come through, it wont make any difference.
BusyBoxDotNet – Very cool ASP.net control (1.1 and 2.0) that will display a customizable overlay when the client is waiting for more tasks to execute (check out the demo if to see what I mean). From Simon Busoli, via James Avery
CSS Reboot Spring 2006 – Today is the day!

Things that I found interesting on April 30, 2006:

Google News-Suggest – Google News with Suggest enabled. Announcement from Google Blog.
PHP vs. ASP.net – Karl Seguin critiques the #1 search result on Google for this search
Are Your Code Reviews Effective? – Lidor Wyssocky asks the question and gives some advice on how to make them better
Google Calendar Tips – From Douglas Bowman
Snook Reboots – I normally wouldn’t post something like this. This is an exception: he has some really cool features integrated intot he design, including dockable comments, contrast changing, dynamic layout (along with a great design).

Things that I found interesting on April 28. 2006:

A Blog Without Comments Is Not a Blog – Thoughts from Jeff Atwood. I think that sometimes the opposite becomes true (especially for some of the more popular sites with multiple contributors): A blog with comments is a forum, not a blog.
Keeping Secrets in ASP.net 2.0 – Encrypting connection strings & more in this MSDN article from Rob Howard (via Christopher Steen)
Ballmer: You have to get better at firing people! – (via Mini Microsoft)
Create image reflections using Script.aculo.us – Cool scripting technique from Derek Punsalan
Top Ten Lies of Engineers – From Guy Kawasaki. I don’t agree with all of these – some of them are only lies when told by extremely incompetant engineers (of course, these may be the types of people that Guy si used to working with, if so so sorry). In the real world, there are actually software engineers who write scalable code to industry standards and have a decent bug tracking system to back them up, who get things right from time to time. They do exist. Really.
Search Engine Indexing Limits: Where Do Bots Stop? – Serge Bondar from SitePoint ran an interesting experiment to see how much content on large webpages is indexed by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).

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Things that I found interesting on April 27, 2006:

Why Clicking a Hyperlink can Result in Multiple Requests to Web Server(s) – David Wang explains how this can happen
Notifying Webmasters of Penalties – Matt Cutts gives details on how the Google Search team will offer more disclosure to certain sites regarding reasons why they have been removed from the index, as well as offering guidance to them to get reinclusion. Very positive step.
How to Set up a .Net Development Tree – More than a year old, still very pertinent guidelines from Mike Roberts
Get a Great Headshot – Owen tells how to take a quality headshot all by yourself
China Blocks Technorati – News from Tom Rafferty (via TechCrunch)

Things I found interesting on April 26, 2006:

Great Blog Traits: Consistency – Scrivs tries to pin down the first thing he looks for on a new site to include in his network
Signal Vs. Noise Jobs Board – $250 to post a job on this new site by 37Signals (whatever they touch turns to gold, remember?)
MonthlyDollar – Once again: whoever thinks up the idea first will make some money (via eHub)
How to Get up Right Away when your Alarm goes Off – Something I definitely need to figure out (I am avergaing about 2.3 snoozes per day right now), from Steve Pavlina
Switch from Windows XP to Mac OSX with Ease – Julia Geng gives some advice for those who would like to make the switch and need someone to hold their hand through the process
Understanding and Using Exceptions – Karl Seguin gives a very thorough (and long) review of the proper way to catch and handle exceptions in .net/C#
450+ Free & Useful Open Source Applications – From eConsultant
NUnit Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2005 – Handy reference from Scott Bellware (if you are into that whole unit testing thing, that is)
Paging Done RIGHT (in SQL Server 2000 & 2005) – Scott Guthrie readdresses the subject of the most efficient way to handle large-scale paging with Stored Procedures in SQL Server