Apple recently announced that there are more than 15,000 apps (applications) in the app store. My iTunes shows I have downloaded and tried 189 of them, but even going through those, there are only a handful that I would actually buy if I had tried them out first.
Based on that, here are 22 apps that I actually recommend to other iPhone users, as well as the reasons why I recommend them.
Eric Clapton is all thumbs after all:
Stevie Ray Vaughan, not as good as you thought:
This video is from our ExoSocial event at Nanshan Ski Village just outside Beijing today. It shows what the few people that went to the top were up to (most people stayed on the green slopes). Fun to see programmers, PMs, and sysadms basking in the snow.
(APOLOGIES: I’ve decided against making the video public, so the video below will not work unless I share the video with you; just tell me your youtube account and I’ll share it with you.)
This was my first edit using the new iMovie. It’s a very rough cut 
I’ve been having so much fun listening to songs and watching music videos by Jonathan Coluton, an ex-software developer gone Internet music artist, or “Internet star”. He originally made headlines with his “Thing a Week” project in which he would make and publish a song every week. Merlin Mann has a good interview with Jonathan where he discusses what the process was like.
Want to hear and see his stuff? (more…)
Warning: This is a rant.
With wifi came the promise of being online (almost) anywhere, but due to incompetent or misdirected implementation and management, it’s pretty much a patchwork of extremely unreliable networks. My experience is that there’s a 30-40% chance of actually being able to get online at an access point.
Martijn Faassen (whom apparently started EuroPython years back) did the funniest lightning talk at this year’s EuroPython, promoting his new web framework Grok, built on Zope:
Talking to him, he seemed very passionate to reinvigorate Zope through Grok. I must say I think both Zope 3 and Grok are quantum leaps forward compared to Zope 2.x, and I’m sure they’ll pick up more developers over time. It’s going to take some time for me, though, who got pretty burnt by the Zope/ZODB combination, to give it another try again. And I don’t think I’ll ever trust a database that doesn’t explicitly enforce a schema; it’s just a recipe for maintenance hell.
In early May 2007 something amazing happened. Hollywood’s most guarded secret, the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, was found and released on the Internet, via the site digg.com. At first Kevin Rose, the Digg founder, felt pressured by Hollywood lawyers to take down the key, but this made Digg users go completely ballistic, and in the end Kevin posted the code himself saying something to the sort of “this may be the end for us, but at least we went down fighting” (see original post). The key in hex, in case you wonder, is:
09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
Even the iphone didn’t generate this much attention, the blogsphere was flooded with reactions from the two factions: “digg surrenders to mob” and “the truth will not be silenced”. I’m afraid I, with most techies and new media people, belong with the last group that thinks DRM is the Next Big Evil.
People went out of their way to spread the code, to the point of creating songs. The first song wasn’t really that good, but then Geoff Smith created a song called “Digg the Code” that Cali Lewis of the GeekBrief.tv podcast put video on…. What can I say, it’s awesome:
There are currently more occurences of this “secret code” on the net than there are HD-DVD players in the world.
This is just awesomely creative:
Everyone in Exoweb has seen this already, but for all you others out there, I thought I’d share This was the (or one of the) April Fool’s joke at Exoweb:
Subject: Our colorful future To: all at exoweb
Hi all,
We had a final office renovation meeting Saturday where we went through the final list of changes that has to be made before people move in. It was mostly minor stuff, except one:
We didn’t feel the colors in the office were exciting enough, and we all felt we should go for one strong color across all rooms. A long discussion ensued where the options were hot pink, pitch black, and flurescent green. Kelly, speaking on behalf of the ladies, was pushing for hot pink, whereas Holden thought the green would counteract the greyness of Beijing, and Darren and I thought black would contrast nicely with our computers, which we’ve decide will be all white in the future.
In the end Kelly won out (maybe because she also promised she’d get all the ladies to wear pink boots from now on), so we’ll do everything in hot pink.
Kelly is talking to the furniture company to see if we can get pink desks, chairs, and partitions, and Holden will see how much Wuye will ask for to have us paint the outside walls on the 5th floor pink too. We also decided to make our exoweb logo pink, so we’ll have to find a way to make the pink logo stand out on the otherwise pink walls. Attached are 3d renderings by Holden showing the office in it’s pinkness from different angles. The last image shows the pink logo wall with the pink logo on it.
This is going to add significantly to the costs, and will take another 3 weeks to complete.
Sorry for the delays, but hope you can understand it’s so that we can all have a nice place to work.
I believe Vivi and Rena are going to HK, and are taking orders for those of you that want to accessorize with matching “Hello Kitty” products; see http://www.sanrio.com/ and ask them nicely to bring back some.
Mrrrreow!
Bjorn
You are currently browsing the archives for the Fun category.
