If EMail is EFail, What's EFTW?

Image by Nils Geylen via Flickr"The underlying problem is that individual human beings don't scale." - Jeff Atwood

Not only is email inefficient, it leads to lost information. If I send you something by email, but Bob needs that info, how is he supposed to get it? In this day in age, if you can't get it through a Google search bar, it doesn't exist.

Now, I don't want to dump all of my company's information into the big G's index, and their appliances are a little pricey. So what do we do about internal data? Here are a couple of ideas I've come up with recently.

• Set up Wordpress and post time sensitive notices there.


• Set up a Mediawiki and use it to document EVERYTHING.


• When someone asks you a question, reply with the link, not the info.


• When you get information by email, put it in the wiki and reply with the new link


• When the volume of information starts to grow, set up Nutch, the open source search engine, or invest in a Google Mini.

This doesn't solve every problem. For instance, you still don't get a private Twitter or FriendFeed, but with a little creativity, I'm sure you can hack something together.

Final thought: Email is an expensive way to transfer information, and your time is to valuable.

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• Google updates search box

Follow my Tumblelog

I've started posting some of the random stuff I find online to a Tumlelog. You can find it at http://pfeff.tumblr.com.

The stuff I post there comes mostly from my collection of RSS feeds. Using the bookmarklet, its really to just post an interesting article with a quick thought. I have trouble keeping up with blogging, but RSS + Tumblr makes it really easy to post throughout the day.

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Code Formatting for Blogger

The code in my last post was formatted using Format My Source Code for Blogging.

Accessing the FriendFeed API from Rails

I was hacking around with the FriendFeed API last night, and after quite a bit of frustration I got ActiveResource to download the public and user feeds. The main problem I ran into was that ActiveResource assumes a very specific URL format, and I've never actually encountered an API that actually conforms to it.

This tutorial about ActiveResource and the YouTube API tells you how to manipulate the URL format. I didn't go nearly as far as they did though. To get ActiveResource to do what I needed it to do, I only needed to override one method:

class FriendFeed::User < FriendFeed::FriendFeedApi
  
  class << self
    def element_path(id, prefix_options = {}, query_options = nil)
      prefix_option, query_options = split_options(prefix_options) if query_options.nil?
      "/api/feed/user/#{id}"
    end
  end
  
end

This class wraps the user feed api. It makes a request to http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/user/{id} and converts the response to a ruby object when you make a call to FriendFeed::User.find(id).

The parent class, FriendFeed::FriendFeedApi, inherits from ActiveResource::Base and takes care of setting some defaults used across each of the API categories. For example, it sets the site variable on ActiveResource::Base to "http://friendfeed.com" and the format variable to :json.

What Do Search Engines Know that is NOT on the Internet?

When a company is as secretive as Apple, everyone loves to speculate about what they're going to do next. The latest rumor is that apple is about to jump into low-cost, ultra portable PCs (aka Netbooks). While this may or may not be true, something in one speculative article caught my eye.

That would seem to confirm findings that a search engine company shared with me on condition that I not reveal its name: The company spotted Web visits from an unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook. Is it the iPhone 3.0 or the NetMac 1.0?

Forget the stuff about the NetMac and the iPhone. What's interesting is the source: a "search engine company". They may be in the business of organizing the information ON the internet, but because of their position, they actually have MORE information than is on the internet. Given their vast search logs, what else do they know that none of us COULD know?

You Need to Know Marketing, Start with Seth Godin

I've been following Seth Godin for a while now. His book, Purple Cow, is a great read, and I just discovered that one of his earlier books, Unleashing the Ideavirus, is available online as a free eBook. You can download it here.

We geeks tend not to care much for marketing. I know I've my share of unpleasant run-ins, but instead of avoiding the business end, I've decided to learn more about it. Seth's books and his blog have turned out to be great resources.

VCBUILD : error Message: '9.00' violates enumeration constraint of '7.00 7,00 7.10 7,10 8.00 8,00'

I upgraded a Visual C++ project from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 today, and my MSBuild script stopped working. It spat out the error message below and Google was no help.

VCBUILD : error Message:
'9.00' violates enumeration constraint of '7.00 7,00 7.10 7,10 8.00 8,00'

I made two changes that seemed to fix the problem:

1. Use the MSBuild.exe in \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\ instead of \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.xx.

2. Pass MSBuild the "/toolsversion:3.5" flag.

I hope someone out there finds this useful.