The Fjordruta is a great multi-day hike in the west of Norway. It has a little bit of everything: fjords, forests, mountains. The whole trail can take about two weeks but you can do as little as a couple of days.

The best time is summer. I did 3 days in late September: the conditions weren’t perfect but not too bad either. I had two overcast days with some rain and one sunny day. The ground is very wet so waterproof hiking boots will really be worthwhile.

…

A little less than three months ago I started working on my new project, Cohaico, and today I’m launching the public beta of the website. From the announcement post on the Cohaico blog:

Let us fix that for you.

Guess what - your friends are already sharing everything they know about stuff. They do it on social networks like Twitter.

But if you get on Twitter - you’ll just see what was said in the last few hours or so. It’s hard to see what all your friends said about a particular thing.

…

People are zombies

Everybody’s on their iPhone, all the time. I find it kind of troubling. We’re soooo headed at The Matrix. And when it happens, 5-10 years from now, it won’t be all violent skynet-style-war-with-the-machines-kind-of-thing. When Steve Jobs comes up with the iThing that plugs via USB directly into your brain - people will just line up to get that $499 piece of crap.

Bubble

This place is a bubble. And I don’t mean “startups are being funded too easily” bubble. Which is also true. I mean that people are just so into everything internet, that any kind of stupid idea flies. Which is pretty dangerous because the rest of the world just don’ work dat way ™.

…

Over on the Cohaico blog, I wrote about some things I learned during the first months of working on a new startup:

Products that succeed? They are the ones that got the crazy distribution by getting people to use their service, other companies to partner with them etc. On the outside, this often looks like “destiny” or “force majore”. You built such a kick-ass product that people are just magically drawn to it. Bullshit. Nothing happened by itself. Every successful product came to be because somebody, deliberately, carefully and thoughtfully kicked ass doing sales and did it better than the competition.

…

Google Chrome (and now also Firefox 4) have the useless little feature of allowing the user to resize any on a page.
I’ve found the perfect use case for it:

1. Go to a page in your website that contains a , like my Delver profile page:

2. Drag the corner of the until reaching a particularly obnoxious appearance:

…

.code {background-color: rgb(205, 205, 205); font-family: lucida console;} Here’s a c# example of consuming the Twitter Streaming API.
Suppose you want to take all Tweets mentioning a country and save it to a database.
I will be using the Twitterizer c# library. Let’s first look at the complete code and then walk through it:

private static bool streamEnded = false;
public static void HandleStream()
{
  DateTime end = DateTime.Now + TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60);

  OAuthTokens tokens = new OAuthTokens { ConsumerKey = “YOUR_KEY”, ConsumerSecret = “YOUR_SECRET”, AccessToken = “ACCESS_TOKEN”, AccessTokenSecret = “ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET” };
  TwitterStream s = new TwitterStream(tokens);
  s.OnStatusReceived += new TwitterStatusReceivedHandler(s_OnStatusReceived);
  s.OnStreamEnded += new TwitterStreamEnded(s_OnStreamEnded);
  FilterStreamOptions ops = new FilterStreamOptions { Track = new List { “italy”, “germany”, “spain”, “france”, “england” } };
  s.StartFilterStream(ops);

…

Here are some tips for creating more useful software specs that I gathered from my experience working on Delver.
Note: these are mostly relevant for specs that deal with user-facing features, but some apply in general.

Tell a story

Try to structure your document as a story that describes what the user does in the same sequence users are going to do it in the eventual system.
This conveys the experience better than just describing different pages and functions as standalone objects.

…

Out of the few Twitter API libraries for .net out there, the ones that seem most complete are: Twitterizer and TweetSharp.
I’ve been developing with both in the past couple of weeks and both are generally stable, complete and provide a clean one-per-one wrapper for the Twitter API methods. Which is great news (tm).
TweetSharp currently does not support the Streaming API, which is a major drawback and the reason why I am sticking with Twitterizer for now.

…

I hate saying “I told you so”… ;)

5 months ago I tweeted:

And yesterday it was announced that Google is buying fflick.

…

Well, this is just too lame. This little window was just hanging around my desktop:

“Peculiar” I thought. But you can’t fool me. I dragged the edge of the window to *resize* the window (yes, just like they taught us):

An “Invisible Window”?! Oh, the lords of secrecy and the gods of international espionage: this is the shit!
Whoever coded this crap: you should poke your eyes out and hang yourself I hope there is a really good reason for this!

…