For the first time in a long time, I've had a quick squiz of my amazon referrals. And I was met with just a few little surprises.

Someone, somehow, bought a 'thing' called Playboy - Women of Starbucks [NSFW] after reading the 'geek.

Now if I can believe amazon then this is a piece of film media which features barrista-ladies in mininal, or, more frequently, entirely absent, clothing, who are linked by a common place of employment: the afore-mentioned bucker of stars.

Now I am certain that i didn't recommend this particular work of cinema. If you know me at all then you know of my disdain for bad coffee. (apart from the beloved Nescafe Granulated FoodService Blend of course).

I've also been perusing the refunds that have happened at Amazon via the old secret geekiness.

Someone, somehow, thanks to this very site, bought a paperback called Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later returned it. Sorry dude, but we could've guessed from the name that it weren't worth the shippin'.

But the real shock belongs to the only other return:

Someone *returned* a copy of Joel on Software!

What a fool! I'd expect people to donate extra money just to indicate that this book was worth triple the postage and quadruple the cover price. And then some.

That's a pretty strong protest from me. You know that i hand-write all my html. And you'll notice that i surrounded the word 'returned' (above) with not only asterisks, but an <em> and a <strong> tag as well. Thus you can tell that this is true, Raw emotion speaking to you. The sort that hemingway and shakespeare only shared on a particularly warm day.

JOS is a brilliant book -- i constantly find my self spouting opinions as if they are my own; only to find they either come from JOS or from The Best Software Writing I. The guy in the next cubicle said, just today, "Do you mind if i take this home?" meaning, Joel on Software, "it's good isn't it?"

In other news: leaked information about yet another new thing from Google: it appears that they too will be leaping into the adult content market.

I suppose that with their unfathomable statistics about what people are really surfing for, they have a better idea about where the next internet boom is going to be than any number of etech conferences.

Expect to hear more about this in the next week or two. Very hush, hush for now.

• Remote control coffee machine
• RSS feed for my fridge
• Barcode scanner next to the kitchen-bin, so that as i go to throw out an empty food container i can scan the label and automatically create a PRO (Pantry Replenishment Order)
• Self-emptying dishwasher. Empties itself into adjacent cupboard. Not as hard as it sounds.

Come on lifehackers, get building.

in other news: 25 years since John Lennon died. r.i.p. old buddy.

Here's a more recent question on a similar topic. Where were you when you first heard Bob Dylan died? For me it's a moment I'll never forget.

Okay lazyweb --- try and implement the code that goes behind these two message boxes... and i don't want to hear anyone say "oh just wait till you get visual studio team system.".

I want real solutions, that work today. ;-)

I think a Visual Studio Macro could be enough to do it -- or a full blown Visual Studio Add In.

Please Lazy Web -- Save Me From Premature Shutdown or Check in!

Get another language under your belt, fatty

Why The Lucky Stiff's Online Ruby Tutorial

If you've got two minutes spare, then go to this website and get your hands dirty learning ruby. I'm not one of those crazed ruby fanatics, but this tutorial is just perfect. Well worth your time.

Also, javascript enthusiasts, check out NET WAR: Justin Walduck's AJAX strategy game.

Admin Foo!

I tend to pick on sysAdmins. It happened to me slowly over a long period of time.

They gripe me about little things. They reset the name of my computer without asking me. They run around unplugging things without telling anyone why. They complain when you take over a server and use it for your own purposes.

But adminfoo.net has set me right. This is a brilliant site helping admins do good.

GlyFx

Australian design company that makes great icons. They have some free icons here. (Recording this for my own reference as much as yours. Found via Larkware).

And in other net news...

This article on ajax is getting a lot of attention -- very few people realise it's a spoof.

Based on the work of Sean McManus. How to play and summary of the rules at the bottom of the page.

delay:400

Either of these shapes are good ones to start with:

Now a note about Sean McManus -- whose javascript i have modified for this page...

Sean wrote for various Amstrad magazines in the distant past. I recognise some of the screenshots at his website as games that I played back in the day.

Really good work. He says he was only a kid back then.

Instructions | Sean's Science & Technology resources
More games by Sean | www.sean.co.uk comments

TimeSnapper is largely written by Atli Björgvin Oddsson, who lives in Iceland.

But I wanted the chance to dabble in the code too -- so he set up a vault code repository. Vault has performed exceptionally over the long distances involved (see image).

You really can't get two people working further apart, unless you're willing to offshore your development to the moon. (Somewhere, i know, a web 2.0 company is planning on selling that very idea to some dull witted VCs)

(dragon inspired by trogdor the burninator, found via Harmony Steel.)

(Map of the world thanks to brave explorers who ventured out in bygone times and circumnavigated the globe, taking measurements along the way)

And as a longtime victim of microsoft sourcesafe, there was no effort involved in learning to use Vault. The more I look into it, the more I find interesting features I'm keen to play with. (For example, integration with Dragnet, the bug tracking system also from Sourcegear)(And I wonder what's in the email tab? (see image...)

By the way... Eric Sink DID NOT pay me to write this entry. Not that I'd object if he did.

I am damn excited about this! You're gonna like this too. I can tell, just from looking at you.

My colleague, Atli Oddsson and I have built a website at TimeSnapper.com, where you can download the updated and improved version of our winning entry from the Larkware developers competition.

(this new version is for the 1.1 framework, it has more options, and better help.)

In case you've arrived late in the game: TimeSnapper is a re-branded name for our tool called "Snapper" which is an "Automatic Screenshot Journal"

It sits in the background of your machine quietly taking small screenshots of everything you do.

Download it and run it -- all day every day. Put it in your startup, so you'll never forget to run it.

When it's time to fill out a time sheet, or review where all your time went, or work out why your machine crashed, -- TimeSnapper is the way to go.

When you're wondering when and why you started procrastinating this morning: TimeSnapper will show you where. It's scary the truths that TimeSnapper will reveal.

I seriously think that you, you, you and every other person in the world working at a computer should use TimeSnapper to keep track of what's really going on.

If you've got any ideas for what features to put into future versions, or if you have any problems (with TimeSnapper) -- contact us, or leave a comment below and tell me what's going on.

Lots of people ask the same questions about it -- so we've put up a list of FAQ.

It's been very fun and exciting putting together each of the things involved in this project. Quite different to real work. If you have ideas you're thinking of getting out into the real world I can only urge you to do it. One of my goals each year is to try and release something (anything) into the wild. This is the first time I think I've achieved it.

Best of luck. I hope you find it useful. (Or if not -- tell me why).

One thing every ajax developer needs: a 'waiting' icon to show that something is in progress...

Here's some examples, collected from around the web 2.0...

•  ...from BackPack
•  ...from Gollum
•  ...from Google Base
•  ...from TimeTracker
•  ...from I forget. Big though!

Articles that deal with the agony of a software lifestyle.

There seems to be a common thread amongst these articles... maybe I'm imagining things... they're all pretty damn interesting and well written pieces.

1. NADD - Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder

   "I need rapid fire content delivery in short, clever, punch phrases"

2. Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb

   "A lazy programmer will avoid writing ... repetitive code. ... It's best for the programmer to give up early and admit that it's always him and never the compiler who's at fault."

3. Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana - study

   "Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users"

4. Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

   "People lie... People are lazy... People are stupid."

5. The Cognitive Style of Power Point

   "PowerPoint slides don't have much information in them, and you're limited to a sequential presentation order." (summary via tim kraft's amazon review)

6. PowerPoint Remix

   "PowerPoint is standard... ...but bad. "

7. Why Specs Matter

   "Most developers are morons and the rest are assholes"

8. Worse is better

   "The programmer is conditioned to sacrifice some safety, convenience and hassle to get good performance and modest resource use"

9. Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

   "To get IntelliSense to work right ... you must write your code linearly from beginning to end � just as if you were using that old DOS line editor, EDLIN"

I just emailed a project manager at a company I know, and the email bounced back -- telling me her mailbox no longer existed.

I was surprised -- and assumed it meant that the manager in question had left the company (they do have quite a high turnover at the moment)

Turns out, she'd exceeded her company's ONE GIGABYTE LIMIT on mailbox size, and emails were being rejected in the meantime.

Welcome to 2001 guys! Pity you got here four years too late, and Moore's Law has moved on since.

Here's the equation as far as I can tell:

1 GIG of hard drive space:
      $1.

Three hours of the manager's time cleaning up their hard drive space:
     $500.

Making it appear to customers as if your key staff have quit:

   priceless