Problem: I was exporting and manipulating the data in a MySQL database using the ruby mysql gem. Unfortunately, the people writing the data in the database were using curly quotes and other typographic marks that were causing trouble.

Solution:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘mysql’

@dbh = Mysql.init
@dbh.options(Mysql::SET_CHARSET_NAME, ‘utf8′)
@dbh.real_connect(“localhost”,@dbuser,@dbpass,@dbname)

The key is to add a line in the options call to set the character set to UTF-8. This seems to solve the problem.

Hope this helps!

There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants.

Serendeputy is definitely organic. I want this to exist, and I use it every day. I hope you like it, too!

Serendeputy hits a few Tokyo Cabinets when it assembles a page. I was having trouble with these sometimes getting hung up, especially when looking up some of the ancillary information. I keep all the tag metadata in the main librarian cabinet. The site looks up this data pretty often. This would manifest itself on the site with a 500 error, and the Passenger Rails process would hang. The site would return 500s until I restarted the process. Ugh.

So, I did a couple of things (which I’ll likely talk about later.) The easiest one was probably the simplest.

I ended up adjusting the librarian build to not only populate the appropriate cabinet, but to also generate a ruby source code file in which I declared a constant with the tag metadata hash defined. I then restart Passenger to pick up the new constant.

Now, Rails only loads this once, and it’s in memory for the rest of the time. This not only saves me the network latency, it makes the individual responses much faster.

It’s always fun to solve complex problems with simple brute-force actions.

The algorithm never lies. The saddest thing is that New England Patriots has dropped off my top topics list. It’s been a slow, steady slide since they lost to the Ravens. I probably shouldn’t take as much joy in the Colts loss as I did. HA HA

Sadly, my life is not that exciting. I’m taking down Serendeputy’s main set of data stores (a series of Tokyo Cabinets) and re-sharding them to make them more memory-efficient and a bit faster. Customer growth is getting a little ahead of the architecture, so I’m doing some tweaking. (A nice problem to have, but still a bit of a problem.)

Things might get a little wonky this weekend as I’m making this transition, but I’ll try to keep the outage short.

Thank goodness Ruby and Tokyo Cabinet are so flexible. If I’d been doing this using the tools of five years ago, I would not have been able to pivot this smoothly.

Look for a couple of fun announcements in the next [real soon now] weeks.

(And yes, Tokyo Cabinet is probably one of the geekiest topics I have up on the site, right up there with Machine Learning.)

I’m pretty excited. I’ve been heads-down the past few weeks working towards the official 1.0 release of the Serendeputy application. Probably a few more weeks to go.

Serendeputy is really four applications. Each of them are in pretty good shape.

The librarian understands the world. Its role is to read all the news sites, parse them and figure out what they’re talking about and what’s relevant right now. This has been running stably for eighteen months now, but I’m most excited about something I put in a couple of months ago — the sidecar.

The sidecar allows me to attach snippets (or pages) of code to any element in the librarian system, be it a source, an author, a feed, a tree or a topic. This lets me do little things like fixing the author tags on the New York Times articles, and bigger things like programmatically disambiguating the different meanings of “windows.” This sidecar functionality is really letting me fine-tune the librarian, which makes the overall results appear much more on-target for all the users. The machine learning pieces of the librarian are tremendously helpful, but nothing’s better than being able to hand-tune when I need to perfect one particular thing.

Hooray for Ruby Metaprogramming.

The deputy understands you. The deputy is the real personalization engine that takes all the gestures you give the system and builds them into a profile. It then reads all the librarian’s indexes to find just the right articles for you. The core deputy technology has been in place for more than a year, so I’ve mostly been fine-tuning it.

I’ve been mostly focusing on timeliness boosts and sinks. If you read something on Bill Belichick, the deputy will interpret that as an interest for you and build it into your master profile. The key knob I’m twiddling now is how much should I boost it based on the fact that you’re reading it now? How long should this boost last? Should this end up swamping some of your longer-term but not recent interests? I’m having a fun time modeling all the different ways of doing this, but I’m still working on finding a reasonably optimal configuration.

The web application (at Serendeputy.com) is getting tweaked substantially over the next few weeks. I have a few interface things I’ve wanted to get at, and I’m bundling them into a big release. (Firefox + jQuery + way too many DOM nodes = sluggishness). I’m also building out the site-wide meta lists (most popular for everyone, etc.) and building out the interface for the tree navigation of the sources and topics. Ideally, these improvements will make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.

The API application is almost done. This is the functionality that helps publishers take advantage of Serendeputy’s personalization engine on their own site. I’m working with several alpha/beta customers right now to get the right balance of functionality. It’s a lot of fun talking to folks back in the industry, and I’m glad that I have a decent amount of cred from my time at the Boston Globe, Abuzz and Amazon.

This will be one of the core revenue drivers of the site, so I’m excited to see it coming together. Revenue is helpful.

So, lots to do, but I think I’m making good (and fast) progress. Never underestimate the ability to understand the entire system. And make decisions quickly. Not a lot of bureaucracy here at Serendeputy world headquarters.

Mostly, I’m very excited that this thing I’ve built is started to really resemble what I had in my head.

If you have any comments or suggestions, please drop me a line!

I’ll have a state of the union post up this week, and I have a couple of longer think pieces in the queue. We’ll see if I can get them up by the end of the month.

I’m better at building than writing, but I’ll try to be better at both.

I used to call my version of this the “slamming the fist on the table” method of hiring. If there wasn’t someone in the group slamming their fist and demanding this person be hired immediately, then it was a “no hire.” It worked pretty well at Abuzz.

SEOMoz’s SEO factors review
Every site owner should read this. Serendeputy isn’t an SEO play, but it’s still good to know that I’m doing the basics pretty well.

Publishers are killing themselves with misguided ad pricing
I’ve been railing against selling inventory to the remnant markets for years. Forbes’ Jim Spanfeller agrees, and lays out his rationale.

The art of business development
Joel Spolsky at Inc. talks about how some of the deals are made. Here’s my favorite quote: “Are you proposing a relationship in which you write checks to us or one in which we write checks to you? Because, you know, we took home $812 last month, so we won’t be writing any big checks.”

I’m in the middle of the Serendeputy Publisher Services sales cycle with a number of clients right now. Doing deals takes a while, but I think that it will make everyone more money in the long run.

Why Waltham doesn’t matter
Scott Kirsner writes that Waltham (with its Mount Money plateau) is less vital to the local start-up ecosystem than it used to be.

Can anyone tap the $100B potential of hyperlocal

Success remains perpetually around the corner, constantly predicted yet never fulfilled.

I’ve seen this movie before, but I still believe in it. Especially interesting nugget about the Times looking to sell its platform to people who want to do this. I think there’s a good market there; and sometimes it’s better to be the one selling the picks and shovels.

MSNBC buys Everyblock
Congratulations to the Everyblock team. The product still needs some work in Boston, but I hope that they’ll now have the investment to do this really well, all over the country. The more data that’s out there, the better it is for everyone.

The Nichepaper Manifesto
Umair Haque’s take on the newspaper of the future. Pretty close to what I’ve been thinking in a lot of ways.

Microsoft’s long, slow decline
“Car enthusiasts lost interest in GM’s cars long before regular people did; the same is happening with Windows.”

Stuck in Legal
I’m in the early stages of writing all the Serendeputy contracts. I’m dreading working with my clients’ legal departments.

This Business of SEO
Good article by Todd Freisen about how it’s hard to sell expertise when customers cannot recognize expertise:

I’m the guy who will be offended when you try and tell me that you think my SEO isn’t worth the price I charge – and you trot out your neighbor’s daughter’s former roommate’s ex-dog walker’s 15-year-old son that has offered to do your SEO for almost free and tell me that’s the competition. After I politely decline to pursue the relationship further and wish you the best of luck with your decision, I’ll hang up the phone and look around my office for something I can afford to lose and throw it against the wall.

When you do a search, I first look to see if I have a match among the pre-compiled topics. If you do, I bring you directly there. If you don’t have a direct match, I do a call to Yahoo BOSS’s news search and show you those results.

But now, Microsoft is handling all the search for Yahoo. What does this mean for the future of BOSS? I hope they keep it up and running. Here is the current news.

UPDATE: It looks like Yahoo’s developers don’t know what’s happening with it either.

What specifically does it mean for BOSS? Honestly the team is still absorbing the implications and we just don’t know. We can tell you that BOSS will remain live for the time being. There are many aspects still to be considered. Over the next several days we’ll be working hard to get clarity and will update the community as soon as we can.

Over this past year, I have come to appreciate why you invest in missionary CEO’s.  Despite one of the most challenging economic times in a century, all of my CEO’s exhibited incredible leadership, drive, and passion through thick and thin.  In the darkest moments of this past year, they all demonstrated unwavering commitment and enthusiasm that carried their companies through.  While I don’t know what the future holds for these companies or for the economy, I do know that I am very proud to be associated with each and every one of my CEOs.  They are all great leaders and even better people – worthy of being called missionary CEO’s.

I hope that I can qualify as a visionary CEO. I know what I want Serendeputy to be, and I’m keeping as close to that vision as possible. About 75 people are using it right now, and I hope it’s delighting them.

The Push-Button Web
Anil Dash does a great job outlining the next set of optimizations around notifications. My entire feed-fetching infrastructure may be obsolete by this time next year. And that would be a good thing.

Ask and it shall be given
Steve Blank on the need to ask when an entrepreneur.

Also, great comment that crystalizes something I’ve thought for a long time:

in a technology company it’s usually better to train a domain expert to become a marketer than to train an MBA to become a domain expert.

Does Silicon Valley noise detract from long-term value creation?
Andrew Chen writes about the differences between Seattle and Silicon Valley.

As an entrepreneur, I can’t help but look at the short-term choices that get made in an environment like this without some degree of disappointment. There are many brilliant people who could be trying to make the world for the better and really create long-term value, but instead they are engaged in a zero-sum game to extract as much value as possible from the world.

I’m desperately trying to stay focused on the long-term. The bank likes the short-term, though. We’ll see how it all turns out.

Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule
This is the latest from Paul Graham, talking about how managers’ lives are ruled by the schedule and makers need unbroken blocks of time to accomplish anything.

This rings very true for me. When I was at Boston.com, I would often spend all day back to back to back in meetings. I used to come in at 7am in order to get a little work done before the day started. Now that I’m on my own, I’m able to block out two three-hour blocks a day for sitting and concentrating and building. It’s a luxury.

More: Antonio responds and the comments on Hacker News are worth reading.

Averse to change
Why do some people just never accept change?

Is it possible to live any sort of a life in these times without being in a near-contant state of flux? I don’t think I’ve had a good solid run of stability since the fall of 2002.

I could use a good rut.

But, one is unlikely to appear any time soon, so I might as well design my live to react well to unexpected change.

Malleability is a good strategy. Janet explains why.

As 20th century models falter and lose relevance, a question to ponder – one that may be more profound that how to save a failing bank or newspaper –  is what will happen as the gap widens between those who can change their minds and those who can’t?

Six months from idea to prototype. Six months from prototype to product. Now, hopefully six months from product to business. Or else, six months from product to get a damn job, already. I can’t wait to see how it all works out.

Now, it’s on to making it better every single day. I have a whiteboard full of things to improve and build. I can’t wait to get to them.

Quote of the day:

“If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” – Reid Hoffman

Serendeputy should be pretty solid, but please make sure to give me your feedback. I need to make it much, much better than it is now.

One of the perils of cloud computing: if something goes wrong on the underlying hardware, you’re several layers of abstraction from being able to fix it. Ugh.

Anyway, one of the machines at Slicehost went down, which happened to be holding my web1 server. When the server went down ungracefully, it corrupted some of the files. So, I waited for Slicehost to rebuild the underlying machine, then I rebuilt my server. It wasn’t too bad: a little fsck goes a long way.

Thanks for your patience.

The users couldn’t access the items the hover class exposed. As soon as they went to click on them, the items disappeared. It is not nice to cruelly taunt your users.

Anyway, Google let me down, and I couldn’t find any good workarounds. So, this is what I did.

I ended up using a different class for IE, despite the icky duplication it caused in the stylesheet. This is what the original beautifully-simple jQuery code looked like:


$("div.story").mouseover(function(e) {
  $(this).addClass("hover");
});

$("div.story").mouseout(function(e) {
  $(this).removeClass("hover");
});


This code worked in every browser but IE7. Here’s what I did for IE7:


$("div.iestory").mouseover(function(e) {
  $(".iestory").removeClass("hover");
  $(this).addClass("hover");
});


So, this removes the class from all possible divs as you enter a new one. It then lights up the hover for the current div. This is hitting a fly with a sledgehammer, but it was the simplest thing I could think of that would possibly work. You don’t really notice the speed hit unless you have tons of these possible divs on the page.

If there’s a better way to do this, please leave it in the comments. If not, then I hope you find this useful.

Besides offering a full-featured feed reader, the application attempts to create a personalized Techmeme by scanning a user’s feed list for popular (or hot) links. Fever then groups these links into stories and assigns each a “temperature.” This allows a user to quickly keep a pulse on what’s going on in his or her “slice of the web.”

I’m glad to see that other smart people are trying to solve the same problems that I am. Helping people make the most of their limit time and attention is one of the biggest challenges of the next couple of years. Fever is an interesting take on it.

The vocabulary engine lets me fine-tune my classification engine topic-by-topic and source-by-source. This will allow me to do some pretty sophisticated disambiguation, and I hope that it will make document classification all the more effective.

This is still a hand-defined engine, but I also wrote in the hooks for the machine-learning piece. That’s still a ways away, though.

I’ve been an IA geek for a little over fifteen years at this point. Having the system of my dreams is pretty cool. It’s pretty rewarding to have the system you’ve had in your head for a long time actually exist in the real world. I’m not quite a sculptor, but I have to imagine the feeling is the same.

Well, it is what it is. If nothing else, I’ll have a kickass personalized news site for myself.

Part of me wants to hold off on inviting people. Serendeputy’s getting better every day (literally, as I’m spending most of the day in Emacs tweaking things), so the longer people hold off on trying it, the better it will be. But, I need to put it out there at some point. Might as well make it soon.

My favorite quote of the day is from Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, among other companies.

If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.

Reid Hoffman, as quoted in Mark Goldenson’s 10 lessons from a failed startup, a post-mortem of what PlayCafe’s founders did right and wrong.

You can create tables in Emacs Org Mode by just starting a line with a pipe (|). Then, just add in another pipe when you need to add columns. When you add new lines, it automatically resizes all the columns to the length of the data.

This is incredibly handy when you need to keep a running tab of something in the context of your to-do. (Like, say, if your document server is constantly leaking memory…)

Another little delight with working with Emacs — Aquamacs in my case.

• Boston Red Sox
• Personalization
• Parenting
• Gardening
• New England Patriots
• Advertising
• SEO
• Boston Globe
• Newspaper Industry
• Joss Whedon
• Supreme Court
• Terminator
• Revenue
• Lisp
• Lost
• Ruby
• Real Estate
• New York Times
• Weight Loss
• Journalism
• Awesome
• Fashion
• Artificial Intelligence
• Scams
• Bankruptcy

Not sure if there are any patterns there, but it’s reasonably reflective of what interests me at the moment. (Bankruptcy is strictly about the automobile industry; Serendeputy the company is doing just fine.)

• The Economist
• Universal Hub
• Christian Science Monitor
• Work it Mom
• Entertainment Weekly
• The Atlantic
• Pro Football Talk
• Obsidian Wings
• Balloon Juice
• WEEI
• New York Times
• New Yorker
• Soxaholix
• Sports Illustrated
• TV Guide
• CQ Politics
• Salon.com
• Forbes
• Mark Bernstein
• TechCrunch
• Glass Hammer
• Eating Well
• MediaMemo
• Science Blogs
• Search Engine Land

I’m into the double-digits with betatesters right now. I’m looking forward to opening it up further in the next few days. See you then!

StyleFeeder’s Execs on how to do a lot with a little
Interesting set of articles about how StyleFeeder is getting stuff done.

Twitter is being smart about trademark law
Startups are more likely to build on your platform if you don’t try to sue them out of existence.

If file-sharing is piracy, what about aggregators?
I (obviously) think that aggregators create a lot of value for readers and publishers. But, others have different perspectives.

12 excellent examples of lazy registration
I’m building out the registration system for Serendeputy right now. I’m taking these concepts of lazy registration to heart. I want to minimize the barriers to Jen’s engagement with the site.

Cash vanishes from merchants’ accounts
This sucks. Some of the merchant-services companies are aggressively holding back money from entrepreneurs. I’m going to have to review my accounts to make sure this doesn’t happen to me.

Serendeputy is always recalculating, and I needed to make sure that the browsers wouldn’t cache the page when someone clicked off and then hit the back button. This is how I was able to do it.


..in application_controller.rb..
  before_filter :set_cache_buster
  def set_cache_buster
    response.headers["Cache-Control"] = "no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate"
    response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"
    response.headers["Expires"] = "Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT"
  end


I just tested this out, and it works on Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and IE7, Firefox and Chrome on the PC.

Hope this helps.

I’ve built the servers out, and they’re up and running now, burning in and breaking in fun new ways. I knew nothing about systems administration, so it’s been a bit of a journey from bare Linux installs to fully-functioning (and even reasonably snappy) servers. My librarian application has been running for a couple of months, the deputy and memcached servers for a couple of weeks. I’m working on the rails application now, and futzing around with jquery. I’m on version 0.5 of the application, up to check-in 913 in Subversion, and up to Bug 171 in FogBugz.

I’m going to launch a private-invite beta starting with version 0.7. 0.8 will be the public beta, and I hope to be at 1.0 within a few months. After that, the world.

Thanks for keeping in touch. I’ll write more soon. (Especially about the imploding newspaper industry. I’m not an insider anymore, but I still know how things work. It’s as if the NAA has turned into a giant suicide pact.)

I’ve decided to look at it this way, though: I’m building distance between me and potential competitors. I’ve been deeply involved in this enough to know that it’s something that a YCombinator kid can’t clone in a weekend. (Or, so I hope).

1000.times do
  puts “It’s important to keep going through the dip.”
end

I also need to re-read my review of The Dip.

That said, Aaron Wall’s new SEO toolbar is pretty damn useful. I really like the integrations with all the other services. It seems to do a really good job pulling all this disparate information together.

Plus, it doesn’t phone home. That would have been a deal-breaker.

I’ve learned a ton from the private alpha I’ve been running for the past month or so. Now, it’s time to take those learnings and incorporate them in the product. I also need to go through and make it a bit more robust. There’s a lot of baling wire and duct tape keeping it together right now.

I should be able to get to the public alpha in the next few weeks. Woo Hoo!

Just need to make sure the baby doesn’t get sick any more…

While working on the site, I came across a post from Steve Outing pointing to the winners from a contest on how to reinvent classifieds in the newspaper world. This was my world a couple of years ago, so it’s very interesting reading.

I’m intrigued by the consignment method. It’s a little like running eBay postings in the paper. I wonder if that would be an interesting upsell for eBay…

As I’m going into alpha, I want to make sure everyone can get ahold of me. If it works best to hold conversations in public, I’m more than happy to.

I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the towns. I can’t wait until they get a version of this for Holliston.

I’ve been head’s down on Serendeputy for the past few weeks. I have a couple of major demos in the first week of December, so I’m probably going to be pretty quiet for the next couple of weeks, too. Lots to talk about after that, though…

I’m glad they are being so clueful about this. Opening up API access to your content is the next form of Advanced SEO, and the Times is on top of it. I hope the Globe is able to follow suit.

Hubris alert: I realize I haven’t launched anything yet. Working on it…

Realize you’re one step closer to perfection.


irb >> load 'document.rb'


Make sure to add the file extension. Unlike require, load needs the full filename.

For Serendeputy, I’m building an index of articles relevant to me, and I need to be able to generate a unique id based on the url. I experimented with (what appeared to be) the obvious solution, but it wasn’t working. So, I asked the question: “What’s the best way to hash a url in Ruby?” Within three minutes, I got a useful answer. By morning, I received three answers, with the best answer sorted to the top.

This is incredibly useful. I have a stack of Ruby books at my desk, and I’m often flipping through them trying to find a specific answer. I generally know *what* I’m trying to accomplish; I’m just lost on the syntax and the proper Ruby idiom to use. If my experience is typical, then Stack Overflow is a very useful supplement to these references.

Stack Overflow has a ton of Google juice already. My question is number one for the relevant search query: hash a url ruby. Most of the time when I do a Google search for specific questions, I get links to the Ruby documentation (which I already have) and a decent amount of off-topic spam. If Stack Overflow gets a critical mass of specific questions with canonical answers, then Google will become much more useful for everyone.

I’m very impressed with how they’ve focused on the customer experience. I’m trying to keep the same ideals with my project. Unlike those folks at that annoying site, they have everything open and clean. They have advertising, but it’s inobtrusive. And, the value of the product was so high that I actually made a point of looking at the advertising, seeing that an advertiser who’s associating with this useful an application is probably worth checking out. It’s amazing what optimizing for the customer experience will do for you.

It reminds me of how I felt in 1999 when I switched from Alta Vista to Google.

One quibble: Requiring people to get an OpenId is a mistake. Everyone in their target market has a simple throwaway handle/password combination that they use on all these sites. Unless it’s a pragmatic choice — they don’t have to program the authentication module — I think it’s a mistake to go against the grain of what people expect for these sites. Requiring an OpenId dissuaded me from registering; I just posted as a guest.

I hope to be able to have the private alpha done by the end of September, with an incredibly limited wider alpha by October 15th or so. I hope that it doesn’t take me two weeks to get the deployment and hosting issues squared away, but this is the weakest part of my game, so I’m trying to give myself plenty of time to get that part right.

The rails application is largely built, and the catalog application is coming along quickly. The hard part is maintaining the discipline to keep writing the tests and automating the admin pieces of the application. I keep wanting to jump ahead and build out some of the sexier features. It’s sometimes not a lot of fun being a grown up.

If you’re interested in taking an early look at the application, drop me a line, and I’ll make sure I send you the information when it’s somewhere publicly accessible.

The blog will probably be dark for a couple more weeks as I finish this sprint. The world grieves.

I couldn’t find a way to do this using the assert_select syntax, but this workaround seems to work:


  def test_picture_height
    assert_select "div.secondary div.lead_picture img[height]" do |height|
      # pull the tag -- this gives you the whole img tag
      @h = height.to_s
      # extract the height
      @h.gsub!(/.*height="(.*?)".*$/, '\1')
      #run the test
      assert_equal @h, "224"
    end
  end


This can be tightened up, but I left it explicit so that I could understand what I was going. The assert select makes sure that I’m setting the height. The block makes sure that it’s equal to 224.

Are there easier ways to do this?

If you already have them in the system:


cd YOUR_RAILS_APP/log
ls -l # Make sure you're in the right directory
svn --force rm * # Force Subversion to kill those files
cd .. # Move back to the rails root level
svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log


Hope this helps.

Of course, I’m planning on building four or five to throw away. If things go extremely well, I’ll have something release-worthy by prototype six…

Dropping bombs in the newsroom
The newspaper industry really has to reinvent itself. More on this later.

Mom-and-Pop Multinationals
Interesting article from Business Week on how small business owners are taking advantage of global outsourcing. Many good ideas.

I’m thought about using some of these services since reading The Four-Hour Workweek. I’ll see if I can use any of them this fall as I’m going all-out towards launch.

How to analyze and improve the bounce rate for your website
Very good article on a very important topic. I’m trying to build a model for one of my clients on this.

I’ll likely write a longer piece later about how I’m trying to incorporate the best ideas from game design to apply to more conventional websites.

Dissecting today’s Internet traffic spikes
Scaling doesn’t mean the same thing today that it did a few years ago. If I ever get to a point that this is a problem for me, I’ll likely have someone smarter than me thinking about it; still, this is really interesting information to know.

Nine steps to achieving flow
I love working from home now. It’s so much easier to get in the state of flow.

Programmer Competency Matrix
This is a smart grouping of competencies you want your programmers to have. Boy, do I have a long way to go before I’m even vaguely competent at programming.

15 questions to ask during a Ruby inteview
On the other hand, I aced this test, so I’m feeling a little bit better about my meager skills.

I love listening to Leo Laporte‘s TWIT podcast (netcast?) network. I’ve been listening to these podcasts for a couple of years now and they continue to deliver each week.

These are my favorites:

This Week in Tech

This is the flagship podcast, the weekly roundup of tech news and gossip. It’s quality varies widely based on the guests, but it’s still worth a listen every week.

MacBreak Weekly

This is a really fun podcast in which the team, usually including Alex Lindsay, Scott Bourne, Andy Ihnatko and Merlin Mann, talk about the Mac, along with many many many other topics. MacBreak Weekly is like hanging out with some of my geekier friends for a couple of hours. That’s probably the highest compliment I can pay.

The weekly picks are very useful, too. Scrivener, which I’m using to write this post and which will likely be the subject of future fan mail, came to my attention via a recommendation from Andy Ihnatko.

Security Now

This is Steve Gibson‘s podcast, in which they talk quite geekily about security topics. A lot of the topics fly over my head, but I’ve learned a decent amount on web security topics by listening to this one. The bi-weekly listener question shows always contain a tasty nugget or two.

Since I’ve stopped communiting into Boston each day, my podcasting time is way down. I still make sure to listen to these three each week, though.