MindComet

Podcast 04: Back in the saddle again

Join the MC Oops crew in our latest podcast talking about the design pattern for MVC (Model View Controller).

In this episode we talk about:

CodeIgniter - http://codeigniter.com/
Kohana - http://kohanaphp.com/
Ruby on Rails - http://rubyonrails.org/
YII (This is the one we can’t pronounce)- http://www.yiiframework.com/
Presidential Stuff - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tippecanoe_and_Tyler_too

Podcast 04

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Posted by Andrew Riley on Sep. 18, 2009

Sub-Genere: Geek Novelty Songs

While skimming my twitter feed I happen to run across a post on Topless Robot (great name but they fail to deliver on pictures of their namesake) that covered “The 8 Nerd Novelty Songs You Must Hear… So You Can Avoid Them“.  While I won’t bore you with the list of what they linked I was happy to find they included not one but two Leonard Nimoy songs.  I was saddened to find out they didn’t include “The Picard Song Dance“ so I’m including the video in this post for your listening and viewing pleasure.

While this video may make no sense, here’s some background: It started on a gaming website called Shacknews where a user had heard the song and put up a bounty for someone to shoot a video involving colanders and tin foil… the rest was up to the people in the video.  True story, I can’t make this stuff up, this is how geek memes get started.

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Posted by Andrew Riley on Aug. 27, 2009

Estimation

XKCD is a webcomic with a very broad geek leaning for comedy. Today’s struck home as I’ve frequently wondered how Windows’ estimation process can be so far off. I still hold that the file copy estimation issues are the main reason to use Apple computers.

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Posted by Patrick Jarrett on Jul. 20, 2009

Podcast: The games we play

Have you ever wanted to know what games the geeks of MindComet play (or have played for that matter)?  Well, here’s your chance.  Listen in and be prepared to be amazed (or scared).

oops_ep0003_20090716.mp3

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Posted by Andrew Riley on Jul. 17, 2009

Bit.ly and the Plan

It drew a lot of raised eyebrows when the link shortening website http://bit.ly raised over a million dollars in funding. Link shorteners are a dime a dozen and on top of that they’re taking a lot of heat for destroying the integrity of the Internet by creating failure points for these links. So why would someone invest in them?

Bit.ly started out as a link shortener with a handful of analytics. Up until then the analytics were extremely sparse and hard to come by. But Bit.ly dove in and provided minute by minute analytics for clicks, sources, twitter conversations and more. They innovated a field that had been blindly simplistic. But their plan doesn’t stop there. The capital they raised is going to help them build a news site. Just like the sites which share the trending topics on Twitter, Bit.ly is going to share the most popular links on their service.

Currently they do this through a twitter bot that sends the top link every hour, but what they’re talking about is akin to a Digg competitor, a destination site that provides this information.

Now, this could be a fool’s bet. Digg is still trying to come out on top financially, and it’s a competitive market with the YCombinator graduate Reddit, the also fast innovating StumbleUpon (and their beta link shortener Su.pr) and a whole host of others. Entering a crowded market requires one thing: innovation. What is Bit.ly going to offer that these others don’t? It will more deeply integrate Twitter and other social networking services.

It could also be that Bit.ly is cruising to be acquired. Twitter has already switched and blessed them as Twitter’s link shortener of choice (sorry TinyURL, you didn’t innovate) and the rumors abound that Twitter would be well off to internalize the link shortening, as they did for Twitter search. And since Twitter has a nice war chest (though no solid income to continue building it) they can afford to make Bit.ly a good offer.

In the end I think Twitter will wait to see what Bit.ly does with their platform, and if they like what they see then we’ll see a merger or acquisition, assuming it isn’t too late and Bit.ly’s innovations don’t take them past Twitter into the next phase of this ‘microblogging.‘

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Posted by Patrick Jarrett on Jul. 07, 2009

Podcast 02: A List Apart Survey

Join us for our second podcast where we go over the “A List Apart” survey results!

oops_ep0002_20090618.mp3

Additional show notes after the jump.

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Posted by Andrew Riley on Jun. 26, 2009

Podcast 01: Blogs we read that you should read too

Join us for our first podcast here at Oops, My Geek is Showing. In this episode, we suggest and discuss various blogs we use on a daily bases. We also discuss our various methods of retrieving updates from these blogs as well as how influential blogs are in our daily development careers.

oops_ep001_20090519.mp3

Additional show notes after the jump.

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Posted by Chris Mitchell on Jun. 18, 2009