Getting SimTower set up on a modern machine.

Getting SimTower set up on a modern machine.

MCMap Live is a Minecraft mapper, like Cartograph for Mac OS X. It is a wrapper for mcmap, Zahl's fantastic and fast isometric Minecraft map renderer. What makes MCMap Live special is that it renders maps in pieces and lets you view them right away in an intuitive, minimalist interface. You can scroll and zoom all around your world and as quick as mcmap can render the chunks, you will see them.

Note-taking, av recording, and annotation tool for the Mac.

Narcoleptic – a sleep library for Arduino. It provides a new delay() function that drastically reduces power consumption from 15mA down to practically zero (around 1µA). If your code spends 99% of the time executing the Narcoleptic delay() function, you could reduce your current consumption by 99% too.

The Scaling Startups panel I was on last week at Supernova generated a little coverage, but I wanted to go into a lot more detail than what I saw there.

From unrivaled vision science expertise, 2d3 delivers imaging technology to extract, manipulate, combine, create and enhance. We bridge the space between 2D and 3D, between the virtual and the real.

Mapping with R and other free and open-source programs feels clunky and hacked-together at times. Tomislav Hengl provides a free e-book, A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping, that can hopefully help you with such tools.

Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications.

MapBox is a suite of open source tools for creating custom maps in Amazon's cloud infrastructure.

Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

portfolio software

While checking the bus schedule for Greyhound, I recently discovered that travel from New York City to Boston is a multi-day affair, involving stops in Rochester, Toronto (yes, Canada), Fort Erie, Syracuse, and even Schenectady and Worcester (presumably because they’re both fun to say).

1 day, 5 hours, and 35 minutes. That’s the last time I complain about how bad the Amtrak site is.

Before I fell into the world of shareware, I worked in the bowels of corporate America developing client-server applications.  And I hated it.

Perhaps the thing I hated the most was that I rarely talked with the people who ended up using my software.  I was given a list of requirements, told what was expected, and that was it.  I never found out whether my work met the needs of those using it, never got to ask them how I could improve it, never knew if my software was a blessing or a burden to them.

Apparently that was smart business, because the companies I worked for charged their clients an obscene amount for my work.  But it was a lousy way to write software.  The whole point of writing software is to create something useful – to create something that, even if in a small way, makes someone’s life better.  And how can you know whether you’re doing that if you don’t talk with the people who use your applications?

I broke out of corporate development by getting lucky with HomeSite, which I never expected to become as successful as it was.  Looking back, it’s clear that its success wasn’t because it was a "killer application," but because I opened the floodgates and directly communicated with my customers.  By talking with customers I helped ensure that it met their needs, which is the best any developer can hope for.

It seems so obvious: if you want to develop software that’s useful to people, you’ve got to talk with them.  But too many developers take the anti-social approach and consider customer support to be beneath their status.  Besides, talking with customers would distract them from important code-slinging.

Look, I can understand that viewpoint, especially if you’re working on something that’s very popular.  You can’t create anything if you spend all your time doing support.  But avoiding support completely is a big mistake. 

If you've never supported your own software, spending just one day doing tech support will be an eye-opening – not to mention humbling - experience.  You'll have to keep your ego in check, because most people who contact tech support do so because they're having problems with your software, some of whom will use colorful language to describe the annoyances they're running into.

But that's the stuff you need to hear.  You need to hear it because you're the one who can solve those annoyances.  You're the one who can get rid of all the things that prevent your software from being that kick-ass program that people recommend to their friends and co-workers.

You also need to hear an unfiltered view of what people want your software to do for them.  If you rely solely on your tech support team to tell you the features that customers want, chances are you'll develop those features without really knowing why people want them.

And that's not meant as a criticism of your tech support team.  When NewsGator was still doing tech support for FeedDemon, they did an excellent job of answering people's questions and forwarding feature requests to me.  But I would still follow-up with customers to figure out exactly why a feature was necessary, and quite often it turned out I didn't really need to add a new feature, but instead needed to change how an existing one worked.  A lot of feature requests were the result of people being annoyed with how an existing feature worked, and they wanted some way to get around it.

If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology.  Don't worry if your resume isn't filled with the latest buzzwords.  Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don't care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.

A common stumbling block for Rails developers is learning the basics required to write plugins. Luckily, if you can write Rails applications you can write plugins by simply drawing on a handful of basic patterns.

A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their

The trick I used to get my Lenovo T60 with Intel video working with a dual display.

SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools based on Semantic Web technologies that improve access, management and reuse among digital assets.

A series of excellent presentations held by Douglas Crockford from Yahoo!

This wiki is about the editor Vim. It aims at providing a platform to exchange tips and tricks of vim users.

A Small Matter of Programming asks why it has been so difficult for end users to command programming power and explores the problems of end user-driven application development that must be solved to afford end users greater computational power.

VIM shortcuts and tips

A free, GPL, non-interactive software package for producing plots, charts, and graphics from data.

A Java-based toolkit for building interactive information visualization applications.

Several of you have asked us about the graphing and visualization package we use to generate graphs at Swivel. Here's a bit of history about how we chose our graphing package.

SVG:::Graph is a pure Ruby library for generating charts, which are a type of graph where the values of one axis are not scalar.

All about AppleScript, from Apple.

WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment.

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.

Rapair Windows without formating

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events.

“VirtueDesktops” is a virtual desktop manager for Mac OS. It offers features, eye candy and configurable options that no other desktop manager on the mac has added yet, and is under active development.

Linux users can take advantage of a number of documentation tools, including both free or open source software (FOSS) and proprietary software. All of them give technical writers the ability to author and publish professional documentation.

Mac OS X-like dock for KDE

Today we'll learn how to download a film, transcode it ready for DVD, create the file structure of a DVD, make a DVD ISO and burn the damn thing.

A slick script/GUI for installing many of the most neeeded software on Ubuntu. Amazing.

A simple script to install the lastest version of Firefox in Ubuntu

Quick `n Easy FTP Server Lite is a standalone, multi threaded FTP server which supports all basic FTP commands as well as virtual directories, IP blocking, server statistics and remote administration

An automated way to remove pre-installed Dell software

Collection of Linux applications

What exactly is software development, and why is it so hard? This is a question that continues to engage our thoughts. Is software development an engineering discipline? Is it art? Is it more like a craft?

A slide show of the install process

I have compiled a list of the ten guides I find most useful as a new Ubuntu user

FlickrUploadr is a Linux tool to upload your pictures to Flickr.

Comprehensive methods and command-line expressions for install any kind of software

My LHMC would have to interface with my existing home configuration via a wireless network with WPA security enabled and output to my television's S-Video or composite inputs, and it would have to connect to my media server via NFS.

gui frontend for SSH in linux