http://stevesanderson.com Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:16:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en With the economic downturn, financial pressures increases on technologuy budgets (whether commercial, large / small enterprise, startup or non-profit).Increased productivity + open source + prevalence in the 'cloud' (regardless of your definition of 'cloud') bodes well for the Rails + Ruby eco-system.I'm biased, as are the rest of us at FiveRuns - but we're ... http://stevesanderson.com/2008/10/08/rails-ruby-and-other-open-source-components-better-during-the-downturn/ Hot off the press - an iPhone app to accelerate the Obama '08 campaign! Thanks to my friend (and open source guru) Raven Zachary, I had the privilege of beta testing the new Obama '08 for iPhone application. The idea, the potential and the implementation is tremendous - create grassroots ... http://stevesanderson.com/2008/10/02/obama-08-for-iphone/ Finding Paths Through the Worlds Photos (via webware.com) is a stunning example of stitching together collections of 2d photos and navigating them in 3d.I can't help but be reminded of the scene from Blade Runner where the main character takes what appears to be a 2d photo, enhances and looks around a ... http://stevesanderson.com/2008/08/14/finding-paths-through-the-worlds-photos-blade-runner-pseudo-ghosts/ I haven’t even noted anything different here - but on Oct 1st ‘07, I joined FiveRuns as their VP of Development and Technology. A lot is brewing there, and the fruits of of our work will be visible soon. Recently, I’ve begun to blog there as well. On occasion, I’ll ... http://stevesanderson.com/2008/03/01/fiveruns/ I had an interesting discussion with Kelly Looney today regarding positioning. Based on his experience, (as I interpret it )positioning starts with identifying and sharing a world-view and then describing what you do (of benefit), in the context of that world-view. For me, it seems an interesting pattern to use to ... http://stevesanderson.com/2007/08/08/an-interesting-pattern-to-make-a-brief-pitch/ I think that my recent purchase of the iPhone has tipped the balance in quandry I've had. It goes something like this: I've wanted a better tool to manage my professional relationships (something I've been thinking of as a personal CRM). As a result, I've been looking for what Mac apps ... http://stevesanderson.com/2007/08/01/down-or-up-into-the-clouds/ So if vertical social networks become popular, then the horizontal problem becomes intestering, e.g. how to manage one identity across multiple services. OpenID provides authentication, but nothing beyond that. What about profile data ala Google's form-fill? How? Consider this - if an OpenID enabled set of tools existed to extend OpenId ... http://stevesanderson.com/2007/08/01/my-profiles-managed-by-me/ So I've made the plunge and bought an iPhone. Half the joy is in using such a beautifully designed product - every aspect of the experience shows so much thought. I can only add my kudos, and continue to be frustrated at how low the standards are for so ... http://stevesanderson.com/2007/07/28/iphone/ So in the physical world, there's tremendous constraints placed on a system by existing infrastructure. It defines and limits what can be done without significant extra resources expended - which means cost, complexity, risk, etc. In a recent issue of Wired, there's an article about how a new city in ... http://stevesanderson.com/2007/06/26/infrastructure/ Thanks to Julie, we had a great Excite.com reunion party last night at her house. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate an old Excite comrade (Kuntay) coming to Austin to work (at least for a little while) - and it was a great reason for many of us to get ... http://stevesanderson.com/2007/06/24/excite-reunion/