Tax Filing

Just a quick recommendation — if you need to file 1099s for your contractors, I recommend eFileForBusiness.com. It ain’t web 2.0, but it’s a piece of cake to use, and it’s reasonably priced.

Best Work Environment, Ever.

You know you’re with a good company when your boss sends an e-mail like this.

Capazon

Jesse Newland took Amazon EC2 and Capistrano out for a hot date, and ended up with Capazon — a brilliant set of tasks for managing EC2 instances.

Go forth and play with it, ye adventurous developers.

Concentro

Looks like Sun’s Project Blackbox project has a little competition — Rackable Systems has introduced (and is shipping) the Concentro. It’s a data center in a 40 foot shipping container. It’s tailored to Rackable’s server products, with half depth racks and a custom DC power system, but it’s intriguing none the less. With all the hype around “containerized” data centers, I’m pretty sure we’ll see a few others join the fray.

Whatever happened to Google’s rumored container project? Was that the genesis of Project Blackbox, or were all of these companies secretly building these things at the same time?

Beer Survey

So, here’s a little fun with Jyte. I’ve set up a brief survey for friends, family, and strangers — it’s a beer survey.

Briefly stated:

• Do I owe you a beer?
• Do you owe me a beer?
• Have I bought you a beer?
• Have you bought me a beer?

… and for bonus points, are these questions making you thirsty, for a beer?

Simple!

Inquiring minds want to know.

Spotted – $100 Laptop

Check it out — it’s real, and it works, and it’s very, very cool. This is one of the working prototypes from the One Laptop Per Child project.

Seen at the BarCamp Portland Meetup.

BarCamp Portland Meetup

The BarCamp Portland meetup is tonight, from 5:30PM – 8:00PM at Jive Software.

Be sure to RSVP on this page if you plan on attending. I’ve never been, so I’m not sure what to expect, but rumor has it’s a pretty good time.

Jyte

So, I’m watching Myth Busters and noodling around on the Internet while waiting for my laundry .. and I find Jyte.com. It’s based on an idea that’s about as simple as simple gets: you make a claim (“Myth Busters is awesome.”) and people vote yes or no.

What makes it compelling is that it’s easy find and socialize with people who share your opinions. Throw in OpenID for buzzword compliance, and a light weight reputation system, and it’s a pretty cool little application.

Lily

“Lily is a graphical data-flow programming environment that runs in a web browser. It’s currently in beta testing.”

Oh man, this is a total deep geek thing — but check out this video of creating a Flickr image browser and viewer, and keep in mind this is all done using javascript within a web browser.

http://www.lilyapp.org.nyud.net:8080/flickr-yui-lightbox.mov

Great stuff.

Grrr!

I like the “Grrr!”

It’s the little things that make applications like GMail such a pleasure to use. There are very few excuses for authoritarian messages and obscure error codes in software.

Internet does not enjoy being anthropomorphised — but people sure do like the human touch.