Gadgetopia

Extreme Gravity Racing Series: Did you like soapbox racing when you were a kid? Wish you could do it again? Well, you can, although now it has the ominous sounding name of "Extreme Gravity Racing" and some high-powered competitors, like this entry from Porsche. (As much as I like Porsche, ...

Five Lessons Open Source Developers Should Learn from Extreme Programming: A good article, summarized below. Test, Test, Test Practice Simplicity Refactor, Don't Rewrite (this bit reminded me of Joel Spolsky's comments) Release Frequently Be the Customer, When Appropriate

Amazon Light: This guy has taken the Amazon API and made and entire Web site out of it. Via Metafilter.

The New X-Men: I read a book on Extreme Programming once, but I never quite got it, and at the time I was working in a company that wasn't ready to embrace it. After reading this article, however, I can't help but think that I'd write better code as part ...

Unsanity.org: Piracy Protection?!: Don't ever try to pirate this application. Additionally, don't mis-key the serial number. Fat fingers will cost you dearly. [...] it has come to my attention that some developer I will not name here has moved further on the road of fighting the piracy. Here's what the ...

PHP Collaboration Project: Zend has announced that they're developing a new framework and "environment" for PHP. [...] the initial focus is on two areas: the creation of an open source Zend PHP Framework and engagement with the Eclipse Foundation around PHP. Having a PHP IDE and framework will empower PHP ...

Exploding Overclocking Extreme AMD Duron Vaporizing: Take an AMD Duron, overclock it to over 4 GHz, then remove the heatsink. Hillarity shall ensue.

Build It: Extreme TiVO PC: A good article on how to build your own Tivo. Very cool, but not for the faint of heart. This is the only conceivable application where I'd have to get my wife to approve the PC case style.

Boing Boing gets a semi-extreme makeover: Boing Boing made some changes this morning. [ ] the blog has reinstated comments along with a redesign that went into effect on Tuesday morning. Additionally, there s a new Boing Boing Gadgets vertical helmed by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. But I m still beating both ...

So, you're telling me I just put this CD into the computer, reboot it, and I'm booted into an environment that's got all sorts of games pre-installed and instantly ready to play? I am so there. A distribution of Knoppix loaded with games has a bootable CD with 700 MB ...

Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.: This is apparently the first wiki ever produced the wiki seed from which all others grew, if you will. It's also known as the Portland Pattern Repository. It's kind of the oracle of all things wiki. There are pages on wiki and Extreme Programming philosophy, ...

Project Blackbox: This is the coolest thing in the history of the world. Ever. Expect to see one of these in my yard soon. After today, you'll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualized datacenter--built ...

Apple Computer has a limited-time deal going on; order a new Mac mini from the Apple Store online before Halloween and you can try it out for 30 days. If you don't like it, call them up & ship it back on Apple's dime for a full refund. ...

Cruciforum: crucially simple: Apparently the most simple discussion forum in the world. There s exactly one file. Cruciforum is a very simple web forum, designed to make it really easy to add a discussion forum to a website. If you want to start off some conversation around a bit of code ...

LitePC: IEradicator - the Internet Explorer Hitman!: This is perhaps a little extreme. And given the dynamic loading that Windows apps generally do, I wonder if you're going to wipe out some DLL that something else needs at some point? IEradicator is a tiny, script that uses the Windows setup ...

The Mechanical Battery: This is a really great article on flywheels, which are the sleeping giant of energy storage. I ve heard bits and pieces about them for years now, and it s fascinating to think that a disc could spin at 100,000 rpm for years just waiting to be asked to ...

TYPO3.org: Kasper's Korner: Here's an interesting license for Typo3, a content management system. [...] I will express my wish here that Typo3 is not used to spread material that is against the word of the Bible and the human rights. For instance don't use TYPO3 for NewAge publications, anti-christian messages, ...

Here's a slick ride; the Acabion GTBO. It looks like it'd be more at home on the deck of an aircraft carrier or falling from the bomb bay of B-1, but it's actually designed to transport two people at extreme speeds top speed is limited to 279mph, but ungoverned ...

Apple Computer introduced today a G5 tower with a single 1.8GHz processor in it, which adds a new lower rung on the G5 lineup. Priced at $1,500, it's aimed directly at those who need a bit more power and more expansion possibilities than the G5 eMac or G5 iMac, but ...

spl's soapbox apple powermac G5: Apparently Apple cooked the G5 test results. Bummer. More from Extreme Tech. "...it appears that Apple actually modified the CPU registers to enable an optimized special-case scenario, and one that is not indicative of real-world performance. Lionbridge's notes regarding the malloc library also indicate ...

For fun, I pimped out one of the new "luxury" Dell XPS machines to see how high I could get it. First I had to set some ground rules: No peripherals (tower, mouse, keyboard only), or else it's too easy. No monitor either -- those LCDs get expensive. No software ...

The Great Pyramid of Agile: This is some great commentary in an unlikely place on programming methodologies and why they generally don t work and are just like so many other fads. And therein lies the problem: most developers are not good. By the very definition of the word good, most ...

Gotthard Base Tunnel: I'm watching Extreme Engineering right now. Did you know they're seriously building a tunnel under the Alps? The Gotthard Base Tunnel is a railway tunnel under construction in Switzerland. With a planned length of 57 km and a total of 153.5 km of tunnels, shafts and passages ...

I love these new "timed team event" shows like Monster Garage, Monster House, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In these shows, a team has to build or convert something in a set time limit, usually five days. There's usually a lot of drama, yelling, and screaming, but they invariably end ...

The Dawn of the MicroPubs: Actually, I thought this was an article about small bars, but it turned out to be good nonetheless. It's about the rise of "micro publications" sites, usually blogs, that are narrow to one particular topic. "Micro-pubs have a narrow and extreme focus on one ...

Jon Udell: Visualizing change: I wish I was Jon Udell, as he gets everything he asks for. This time he along with some help from Andy Baio got someone to write a script that animates Wikipedia changes inline. See the picture at the above link, and he apparently ...

It's the newest extreme sport: Expensive Hardware Lobbing. The object: Get your multi-million dollar space probe to explore another planet without crapping out before it can do the job. The players: Earth's space-faring nations, and all other planets in the solar system. The rules: There are only four major ones. ...

Texty: scms: This interesting. It s a CMS where you can create fragments of HTML, and then put them on your Web site using a Javascript include. So you edit the content there, and it gets pulled in to your pages client-side. Never open a HTML page again for a minor ...

I was watching a thing on The History Channel the other night on the Unimog, which is the Swiss Army Knife of trucks. The core Unimog truck can be extended eight million different ways with little snap-on attachments. It can become a snow plow, fire truck, lawnmower, etc. Very cool. ...

I m kind of a building / engineering / architecture groupie, and I m starting to learn how Dubai is Ground Zero these days for magnificent buildings. There s simply nothing they can t or won t build. The picture above is a rendering of the Burj Dubai, which is currently under construction. It s ...

Panamanians Vote Overwhelmingly to Expand Canal: This is going to be interesting to watch. Panama voted yesterday to embark on the biggest project in the history of that country: widening the canal. The overhaul, to begin next year, will double the canal's capacity by adding a third set of locks ...

Extreme Machines: World's Fastest Elevator: I was watching a great History Channel series on skyscrapers which included a sidebar on the elevators at one of the world's tallest buildings: Taipei 101. The 1667-ft., 101-story building has 67 elevator units, including two that service the 89th-floor observation deck and qualify as ...

Here's a question on blogging practice: what do you do for follow-up posts or updates to an existing post? Do you make a new post? Update the original post? Post a comment? I have examples of all three options so far, and I have yet to figure out which one ...

I'm pretty addicted to the TV show "Lost." The first season has wrapped up and left some amazing cliffhangers. I finally got all the episodes watched (thanks BitLord), and I started looking around to see what was on the Web to hold me over until fall. It turns out that ...

I've been completely frustrated with the level of political discourse this year here in the US. With only two months left in the election, neither candidate has come forward and provided a detailed plan for what they'd like to see happen for the future. "I'll put more money in the ...

Is it true that if you shoot a bullet through the skin of an airliner in flight, everyone would get sucked out the little hole? If not, Hollywood has a lot of explaining to do. Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel set out the other night to ...

I ve been reading a great blog called No Impact Man. It s about a guy, his wife, and their toddler daughter who live in downtown New York. They re trying to live for a year without casuing any impact to the environment. This means: no electricity, no garbage, no packaged products, no ...

Back in the 1980s, when I was in high school, the reigning Chevy performance cars were the Camaro and the Corvette. They were almost the same, but worlds apart at the same time. Back then, you could get the Corvette and Camaro with near identical powertrains -- the 350 cid ...

When you get neck deep into a content management implementation, you can lose sight of the actual publishing mechanism-- how the content gets from your system to the end user's browser. No matter how sophisticated your CMS is, at some point, a user enters a URL and some content comes ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...