Hype

It’s what Apple is famous for. They have such a great air about them that makes them a very good candidate for hype. But, there are some things to consider.

I think that hype can be a very dangerous thing for a company if it is not handled properly. Hype can be a great thing if you can control it. There can be too little hype and too much. And the last thing you want is too much. I think that Apple is one of the few companies that really understands this and knows the expectations people have to them as a company.

This makes me wonder. Is there any such thing as a Reality Distortion Field (often called the Jobs RDF)? Can people be blinded by the hype? Is it like the Placebo effect, where a patient thinks that they are getting medication that will help them but in reality they are given a sugar pill, but the brain thinks it’s getting medication and thus medicates it self.

Are Apple products merely sugar pills?

Digg for sale?

According to TechCrunch both Google and Microsoft are possibly preparing to bid on Digg. As a long time Digg user these are some very interesting news to me. I’m not sure if I think that Kevin (and the rest of the crew) should sell Digg at all, but… if they are going to I have some advice (i.e. plea):

Sell to Google!

I think that the culture at Google is very similar to the culture at Digg and thus it would make a much better relationship. I would expect that, in case of a sale to Google, Kevin would still be running the show and Google would just step aside, offering only help with development if it would be needed. At least that’s what I think they should do.

Even if we were to look past the different company cultures between Microsoft and Digg, I’m pretty sure that the community on the site would not be happy with a Microsoft run Digg. The anti-Microsoft’ism is very strong on Digg and in some cases rightly so. 

File this under "IE quirks"

If you are trying to make Internet Explorer open a PHP file as an Excel document I have a tip for you…

Include the following at the top of your PHP script:

header("Cache-Control: max-age=60");

For some reason IE deletes the temporary *.xls file that you created before it has a chance of letting Excel open it.

Thank you IE for keeping me busy!

Hope someone can use this information.

Old code

No matter how great you think your code is, no matter how much work you put into it, no matter how long you tweak it, some time later you will go “What was I thinking??”.

It’s inevitable. Old code sucks. It always does and always will. And it will suck more and more the older it gets.

I’m all for refactoring and reusing code as much as possible but when you’ve been using the same piece of code for a few years you should definitely go through it again and see if you can’t freshen it up.