lawn improvement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqHcm66s-kc

...since August 4th, decided to step it up. Watering, raking (a lot of dead grass), overseeding... took a picture every day. Hopefully in a month it will be all filled in. Plan to continue to log it with pictures every day or two, grow the slide show.

Better improvement in ~4-5 days than expected, it's filling in nicely. The 16 point sprinkler ($14.95) in the last two!

microformats ftw

Maybe not "cool" to say so, but MySpace++. Love the initiative to push forward with Microformats. µFormats ftw

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_to_bet_its_future_on_open_standards.php

Here's how MySpace's plan is unlike what Facebook is doing. The updates will be marked up for the types of activities they represent with standardized microformat code, beginning with the events format hCal and soon to include the book, movie or other review format hReview. Those little bits of code that will be added could have big consequences.

Keller says the company acknowledges that this won't be a small task for third-party developers, so in the meantime she is working on automated methods of pulling user data in from other sites' Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and marking them up automatically, with the microformat code communicating what kind of updates they are (events, reviews, etc.)

programmable sprinkler

This is non-software related, but brilliant:
http://www99.epinions.com/review/Pulsating_Pattern_Master_Sprinkler/content_137910324868

Was hoping someone already invented something like this, as I have a non-circular lawn ;) Bought it. Very reasonable price, I hope it works well.

grok-ing POSH

..class names in XHTML are for semantics, not presentation. Yes, provide presentation with CSS calling out the class name, but the main purpose is for semantics.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/goodclassnames

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/contentPresentation-26.html

Google acquires On2 (video compression)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/innovation-in-video-on-web.html

...high quality, searchable video programming on the web one day = inevitable. Surely Google wants to be at the epicenter.

App Store censors a dictionary?

This is pretty lame:

http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords

In other words, not only must the dictionary be censored — a dictionary — but even after being purged of “objectionable” words it would only be considered with a 17+ rating. Even after agreeing to these terms, it took another two weeks for Ninjawords to appear in the App Store. According to Crosby, “We gave in and said fine, hoping that we could get on the App Store immediately since the solution to their rejection was a simple metadata change. However, the App Store reviewer would have none of that. We would have to resubmit an entirely new binary and get to the back of the queue before they would look at it again.”

Ajax API team leaves Google for VMWare

Exciting times.

VMWare is everywhere, so is cloud computing. For now I'll settle for being able to consistently build and deploy web apps on an elastic cloud (Heroku) in my spare time, but things are moving fast, which is fun to observe.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/google-loses-engineering-director-who-once-caused-steve-ballmer-to-melt-down/