Mike-O-Matic

As a consistent reader of the business section in the newspaper, I have always been mystified by how reactionary the stock market coverage is. For example, check out this article on Bloomberg.
The stock market consists of millions of investors: individuals, institutions, companies, clubs, funds, etc. These people choose to buy and sell stocks […]

Being a web programmer is hard work. To be successful at it, one needs an intimate knowledge of many different languages and technologies: SQL for talking to databases, JSP/PHP/Coldfusion/ASP/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc to handle the dynamic functionality, and HTML/Javascript/CSS for the front end. In addition, they need to know the optimal way to fit each of […]

Good news out of the USPTO recently: They are finally opening up the patent review process so that external parties can aid in the search for prior art. As detailed on Cairns (link here) the new medium for this collaboration will not be a wiki in the traditional sense, but a new platform that respects […]

I still remember how I discovered open source. It was 1999. Dot coms were abuzz with activity, shifting paradigms and discovering synergies. A young starlet by the name of Britney Spears was teaching us about domestic violence. Reality TV and million-dollar gameshows were still but an elusive fantasy.
I was a […]

Yariv Sadan’s weblog had an interesting post the other day. In it he discusses Paul Graham’s seminal article, Beating the Averages, in which Mr. Graham talked about the competitive advantages ViaWeb had by coding their application in Lisp rather than the regular CGI languages prevalent at the time. Yariv goes on to discuss […]

I’ve been chugging along slowly on StevesLeads.com for the past week.  The initial design is more or less there, and I’ve been looking for the perfect stock photography for the splash screens to somewhat limited success.   If anyone has a good (cheap!) stock photo website they use, please feel free to comment or email me […]

I was attending a business analysis training session the other day, learning to flowchart my way to self-actualization and inner peace, when the trainer brought up that little gem. I am not usually one to fall prey to generic business analogies, but this one jumped out at me. He explained it like this:
When […]

This past weekend I had a chance to hang out with still another friend named Jason, a newly minted lawyer from Marietta, GA who joined me in undergad at the University of Maryland.
Jason is funny as hell.  He drove his black Mustang up here to attend a friend’s bachelor party in the middle of nowhere […]

Last week the founders of Kiko.com placed the site up for sale on EBay, complete with all source code, traffic, and domain rights. Lots of people have been speculating what this means for web startups, including the esteemed writer/Lisper/entrepreneur Paul Graham whose Y Combinator put some funds behind the venture. He says that […]

There was an interesting article in BusinessWeek Online (linked by Slashdot yesterday) about Google. The basic premise was that Google has done a poor job of expanding its reach beyond the dominating position in search. Take the following quote:
But if you cut through the hype, Google’s intimidation factor quickly fizzles. An analysis of […]