Amped::TechnologyJohn Sequeira's weblog: enterprise application development, typed weakly.The Paradox of Choice- June 24, 2008 The Paradox of Choice is a book with a thesis that's stuck in my head since I read about it a few years back. Simply put, more choice doesn't necessarily make us happier. The video and book gives some hard-to-dispute examples and data to back this up. The thought that chases me is how much of technological progress is done in pursuit of choiceoptionsetc, without, as the book makes clear, accounting for the aggregate tragedy-of-the-commons cost of these options. The paradox is that someone.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM Roll Your Own Netflix- June 23, 2008 more praise for 'discontinuous fractional ownership' In response to Props to Bookmooch, Replicate Technologies founder Ken Novak writes: Hey John, this sounds good. For dvds, cds and paperbacks, zunafish.com works well (albeit not quite so karmic). For $1 plus $2 postage, the site sets up swaps. I own about 20 dvds, and I gradually swap them after I watch them, so that about 34 are ones I haven't seen. It's like netflix, with a bit less choice online but more DVDs at home and no fixed...http://www.zunafish.com Props to Bookmooch- June 20, 2008 I'm enjoying the bookmooch service quite a bit. It's kind of an honor system based inter-library loan, except you aren't loaning books, you own them free and clear. And it's not between libraries, but individuals. But other than that, it's exactly like inter-library loan. :-) Here's how it works: You put in a list of books gathering dust on your shelf, and a list of books you'd like to read. When there's a match between have's and want's, bookmooch shoots you an email to send or...http://www.bookmooch.com People Powered Transit- June 17, 2008 My friend Andy launched a startup about 6 months ago, and has been getting lots of press in the last week. He's a bike nut, so that's always what we talk about when I see him : the crazy cost of the big dig and the missed opportunity for public transit, the cities without cars exhibit at the MIT Museum, Boston's legendary bike-unfriendliness, wouldn't it be great to work as a bike messenger instead of behind a desk, yada yada. He decided to make a business from his passion for bikes, and...http://www.newamsterdamproject.com 3 Cool things from Microsoft now in my toolbox- June 9, 2008 LINQ - I wrote my first LINQ query last week. My normal web app works with heterogeneous data sources ( xmlobjectsql ), and I know I'm going to love moving up the LINQ learning curve. This is a no-brainer, but it's going to take a long time before clients are ready to move from .NET 2.0, so I'm grateful for any chance I get to obtain LINQ-fu LogParser - a command line tool with knowledge of various log formats, supporting a sql dialect. The size and scope of the tool might tempt you to pass.http://www.asp.net/downloads/sandbox/iis-log-parser/ |