Philipp Heintze

jason@kottke.org via kottke.org shared by 7 people

In October 2007, the International Documentary Association made a list of the 25 best documentaries.

1. Hoop Dreams (1994), Steve James
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris
3. Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore
4. Spellbound (2002), Jeffrey Blitz
5. Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple
6. An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim
7. Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff
8. Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
9. The Fog of War (2003), Errol Morris
10. Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore
11. Super Size Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock
12. Don't Look Back (1967) D.A. Pennebaker
13. Salesman (1968), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
14. Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), Godfrey Reggio
15. Sherman's March (1986), Ross McElwee
16. Grey Gardens (1976), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer
17. Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Andrew Jarecki
18. Born into Brothels, (2004), Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
19. Titicut Follies (1967), Frederick Wiseman
20. Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Wim Wenders
21. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Michael Moore
22. Winged Migration (2002), Jacques Perrin
23. Grizzly Man (2005), Werner Herzog
24. Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais
25. Woodstock (1970), Michael Wadleigh

(link)

Shared by Robert Scoble
Interesting to see the tools a dev uses and how that differs from the tools I use.

I'm about to configure a new development machine this week. It's going to be my 3rd install from scratch in the last 12 months, which I know is not all that much, but certainly more than I wish I had to.

Besides the common software development tools, like Visual Studio, SQL Server, Ruby, Office, Firefox, SVN, etc, over the years I've collected a number of small tools that I make sure are installed before I start doing anything else.

The list is volatile but some utilities have been there for years. Here's my current list in no particular order:

• Taskbar Shuffle - I'm sort of a neat freak and this little wonder does only one thing. It lets you rearrange the application buttons in the taskbar. I don't understand how this is still not enabled in Windows out of the box.
• Slickrun - I need a command/app launcher and I've settled on Slickrun for some time now. I don't need much from it but I definitely need it. On my mac, as you can imagine, I use Quicksilver.
• EditPlus - Every serious developer has his favorite text editor. Mine is EditPlus, at least on Windows. It's simple, extensible, has most of the features you'd expect from a text artisan's toolbox. Again, on the mac I'm more obvious and use TextMate, which is quickly becoming my new favorite if I can work on the mac.
• Truecrypt - In case you aren't familiar with it, Truecrypt is a data encryption software that creates encrypted file systems that that you can mount in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Truecrypt makes encryption a piece of cake and I have been using it since when it's non-Windows support was laughable.
• Timesnapper - This tool has a very simple premise, it takes screenshots of your desktop on a regular interval. You can later relive your day just like a movie. This application is like my backup memory when I'm preparing my timesheets. It works great with Truecrypt in case you are concerned with having your whereabouts "caught on camera."
• Lutz Reflector - There's no .NET development without Reflector, I should not even need to mention that I use it. Let's start a campaign to have Reflector bundled with Visual Studio.
• Daemon Tools - Mount ISO images as CD/DVD ROM drives.
• Hamachi - VPN made easy as pie. 'Nuff said.
• Foxit Reader - I can't stand Adobe Acrobloat. Foxit isn't the greatest thing on earth but is good enough and very lightweight.
• Filezilla - Sooner or later I'll need a FTP client. Filezilla has been good to me.
• Firebug for Firefox - If there's no .NET development without Reflector, then Firebug is like Reflector for Web development. But I'm sure you already know that.
• YSlow for Firebug - This nice add-on helps me by suggesting possible ways to improve page loading performance.
• 7-zip - Because we all need a shell-integrated compression tool.
• Tabbed Console - I'm not exactly a command line ninja, but I find myself at the black screen very often. Often enough that it's not rare that I have more than one of those open. The tabbed Console utility allows me to have all my command prompt sessions in the same window. And more than that, I can have flavored command windows tabs, like one for the regular cmd.exe, one for IRb (the Ruby console), one for PowerShell, one for Cygwin, VS Command Prompt, and on, and on.
• Sysinternals stuff - Sometimes you need to bring the big guns.

What about you? Do you have tools that you feel naked without?

Mathew via mathewingram.com/work shared by 7 people

When I saw the news about the launch of Delicious 2.0, I can’t say I felt a huge wave of joy, despite the fact that I am what most people would probably consider a hard-core Delicious user, with about 10,000 webpages saved since I started using it. But not only didn’t I feel any joy at the news, I didn’t really feel anything at all. In part, that could be because the new Delicious interface has been rumoured to be coming any day now for about a year (or perhaps even more, I’ve lost track). Now that it has arrived, it’s definitely anti-climactic at best. It also seems a lot slower than the old one, even though it is supposed to be faster. Maybe 10,000 bookmarks is just too many for it to handle.

But that’s not the only reason I’m ambivalent about the launch. Adam Ostrow put his finger on it in a Twitter message, in which he said that he never bookmarks things any more — he either remembers something, or searches for it, or asks someone else if he can’t remember the details. It has occurred to me over the past year or so that while I religiously bookmark things, often dozens of them in a single day, I rarely go back and look them up. If I’m writing about something and I remember some details, I type them into Google and eventually track the page down.

I’ve been experimenting with using Google Reader’s shared items as a kind of Delicious bookmark substitute, in part because that is hooked into social networks I use like FriendFeed.com and Feedly and Readburner and so on (although Delicious can be plugged into FriendFeed as well). But I have the same ambivalence about sharing items through Google Reader as well — I mean, I do it, but I hardly ever go back and look at them. Sometimes I do when I’m stuck for something to blog about, but that rarely happens. It’s occurred to me, however, that the simple act of bookmarking them makes it easier for me to remember them, the same way that setting my alarm ensures that I wake up before the alarm goes off, but if I don’t set it then I sleep in.

Perhaps the Delicious redesign will appeal to enough people who aren’t like me — to new adopters who are still using their Netscape or IE bookmarks, or to people using Diigo or Clipmarks or one of the dozens of other bookmarking tools (all of which I have also tried). But I think I’m even less likely to use Delicious than I was before.

YAY! The long awaited, much promised, never delivered Delicious 2.0 will launch in the next few minutes, just like they promised again last week.

The new Delicious is just like the old Delicious, except for the way it looks. They’re also promising that it will be “faster, easier to learn,” and “hopefully more desirable.”

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.

Users will need to log into their accounts and get a new browser cookie. Honestly, I rarely visit Delicious any more, the Firefox plugin is so good that actually visiting the site isn’t necessary. So all I’m really hoping for here is a stable service. If there are glitches, I hope they fix them quickly.

As I said in our previous posts, it’s too bad Delicious 2.0 couldn’t launch before founder Joshua Schachter left the company in frustration. I called Schachter to ask him what he has to say about the new launch. His response - “Good luck. I hope it goes well.”

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Peter Ha via TechCrunch shared by 7 people

I think it’s safe to say that iPhone OS 2.0 is far from perfect and anyone saying otherwise must be on Apple’s payroll. Other than the horrendous battery life (on the iP3G), what else do we all hate about the OS? The inability to run background apps! Sure, Apple’s argument against a Windows Mobile-like task manager makes perfect sense, but the ability to run background apps is something we’ve all grown accustomed to and it would be the ‘killer app’ as they say around these parts, right?
Read More

Oh, and is anyone’s white iP3G starting to crack?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Late last night Facebook updated user newsfeeds under the new profile design. The move was expected as Mark Zuckerberg gave a first preview during the f8 keynote last week. The new feature enables users to filter through “Top Stories”, “Status Updates”, “Photos” and “Posted Items”. This means that users are now going to have access to many more news stories beyond the pre-filtered ones that Facbeook chose to display. There are two significant changes to this update.

FriendFeed-Like Commenting Added

One of the most significant changes is that there is now commenting on certain news feed items directly from within the feed. This is one of my initial complaints when Facebook launched commenting for the mini-feed. My guess is that we will start seeing a lot more commenting taking place as the new site design is rolled out to more users. One downside of this new feature is that not all stories can receive comments. It appears that you can add comments to all posted items, none of the photos, some of the status updates and certain stories within the “Top Stories”.

While it is not a total addition of comments, this is yet one more step that Facebook has made to totally duplication all of FriendFeed’s functionality. As Facebook adds the ability to import from more sources, they will eventually replace FriendFeed for mainstream users.

The Return of Story Preferences

Facebook removed the first iteration of preferences on news feed stories which simply displayed at thumbs up and a thumbs down. This time around Facebook has gotten a little more specific. You can now choose whether or not you want more or less stories about a specific user and more or fewer instances of a specific type of story (e.g. Posted Items, Events, Photos, and Videos). One thing that users can’t choose to reduce the frequency of is Fan Page additions. My guess is that this is due to Fan Page news feed stories are related to Social Ads.

It will be interesting to see if this new version of the news feed preferences will succeed.

Conclusion

It’s clear that the Facebook News Feed has received a total makeover. There is now the addition of comments to stories and the return of preferences. Facebook moves closer to full FriendFeed functionality with each new feature. Given the site’s reach, this could soon totally eliminate the need for using the FriendFeed site by mainstream users. It will be interesting to see how the FriendFeed - Facebook battle plays out. If FriendFeed plays their cards right they could end up getting acquired by a competitor of Facebook.

If they don’t play their cards right, I honestly think they could be rendered useless for most users.

Those that know me are aware of my addiction to World of Warcraft. There have been talks at Blizzard about creating a mobile version of the game, likely as some sort of add-on rather than a full-fledged version. Naturally, the iPhone would be the perfect platform for such a title, however, with a recent merger, it's possible that this project may never see the light of day.

Recently Activision and Blizzard merged to form Blizzard Activision, which is now one of the largest gaming companies in the world. Unfortunately in the process, one of the smaller companies was virtually eliminated. Vivendi (the smaller company) happens to have their own mobile gaming division, which was most likely to be the one working on the mobile WoW title.

While Blizzard never confirmed that they were indeed going to make a mobile version of WoW, it seems that this recent merger may very well destroy any chance that it had. I still have my hopes up for an application that will allow me to buy and sell my goods on the auction house, and perhaps even chat with my guild mates via the iPhone. Perhaps we'll hear something at Blizzcon later this year.

[via WoWinsider]

One of the big news stories this morning is that the Argarwalla brothers who founded Scrabulous have launched a similar application called “Wordscraper”. The application, which is similar in style to Scrabulous, has attracted over 8,000 people so far. It also appears that the brother no longer have an announcement message on Scrabulous and have instead completely pulled down the application. When you try to view Scrabulous a message appears which says “Application ‘Scrabulous’ has been restricted. We’re sorry but you’re unable to access this application due to restrictions put in place by either the developer of the application or by Facebook.”

How the brothers are driving traffic to the application is unknown at this point but my guess is that they are investing in application installs rather than cross promoting. Otherwise Hasbro could theoretically argue that the brothers leveraged Scrabulous, an illegitimate application, to cross promote their new application. While this is not a blatant violation of the terms, it could theoretically be argued that the brothers leveraged Hasbro’s brand to promote their new application.

As such it appears that the brothers will stick to traditional tactics and try to spend money on promotions. With all the buzz generated today, perhaps the brothers will get a nice free boost. While this new incarnation will most likely protect the brothers from future legal matters, obtaining over half a million daily active users again will definitely prove challenging. It’s unfortunate that the brothers had to completely remove the application rather than change the existing one.

It will be interesting to see if the team can generate as much buzz as before. This time around their going to try to do it legally!

Truphone hatten wir zwar schon mal in den News. Damals aber noch als Demo-Video. Jetzt steht die kostenlose Voice-over-IP Applikation im AppStore zum Download (AppStore-Link) bereit und kommt nicht nur kostenlos, sondern bringt auch ein $4 Test-Guthaben mit. Truphone erlaubt das Führen kostengünstiger Telefonate ($0,06 weltweit ins Festnetz, $0.30 aufs Handy) über W-Lan und bietet euch so auch im Urlaub die Möglichkeit, mal etwas länger nach Hause zu telefonieren. Einmal installiert, nimmt das Aufsetzten des eigenen Truphone-Kontos knappe vier Minuten in Anspruch. Danach lässt sich telefonieren. Mit Skype-ähnlicher Qualität und bislang ohne Aussetzer, hat Truphone einen guten ersten Eindruck bei uns hinterlassen. Mit Dank an Piwo.

Apps, AppStore, Geld, VoIP, Wireless

Shared by Philipp Heintze
yeah!

Der deutsche Hersteller düwi plant eine Applikation, die es ermöglicht Lichtschalter, Dimmer und sonstige düwi Z-Wave-Produkte vom iPhone oder dem iPod touch aus zu bedienen. Die Fernbedienungsfunktionen sollen dann nicht nur im hauseigenen Wi-Fi-Netzwerk sondern auch ortsunabhängig über das Internet gewährleistet sein.