What is Twitter?

Nat from O’Reilly Radar: It reminded me of the time in my mis-spent youth when I got lost in IRC, spending evenings heckling the TV with my IRC friends. This is the geek equivalent of being stoner, by the way, with roughly the same effect on cognition . . . It’s a very loosely-coupled conversation. Spot on. An interesting (but probably useless) hack would be to take an opensource IRC client and wrap it around Twitter’s API.

foo9 URL Shortener

I was out of town for a couple days last week and had a lot of time to kill at my hotel. Needing something to do I decided to write my own URL shortening service. This is hardly an original idea – TinyURL.com has been around for a long time. Newcomer url(x) is great, too. However, there are changes I’d like to see made to both sites so I decided to roll my own. Plus, it turned out to be a fun computer science-y puzzle (more on that later). I’ve called my shortening service foo9.net. First off, I wanted the …

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iPhone Versus Dog

A lesson for all you iPhone owners out there: don’t leave your phone on a table that your dog can reach. I got out of the shower this morning to find my dog, Gracie, gnawing away on my phone in the middle of the living room. I was a little upset, but life goes on. How’d the iPhone fare against the jaws of a 25-pound canine beast? See for yourself . . . The bottom backside has a bunch of teeth marks in it. I can tell she was really biting into it hard. The ringer/speaker is still alive – …

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Lessons From a First Time Mac Developer

I’m a web developer by trade. I’ve been programming for the web for over ten years – prior to that I was (god forgive me) a VisualBasic and then .NET developer. Ever since switching to Mac I’ve been interested in building software for OS X. Over the last few years I read up on Cocoa and wrote a few practice apps. I followed most of the Cocoa blogs and even read Aaron Hillegass’ book. However, the lack of a good idea and all of my other web commitments kept me from digging in and writing my first real Mac app. …

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