Soldier Ant 

Okay, maybe it's not been dead but the product has changed hands at least twice since I stopped caring. The SuperCard 4 beta is out and it's OS X native! I spent way too many hours thumbing through a set of thick SuperTalk manuals in grad school. It almost makes me want to download the beta and see if I can get some of my old projects running... Almost.

Want to determine your standings in the Google-verse? The Handy Dandy Google PageRank Figurin' Guide breaks it down. (And explains why Google reserves top ranking for itself. Ah, what the hell - they've earned it.)

Link courtesy Robot Wisdom.

I hope that this doesn't come to pass.

Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! is a quick read. It provides the rationale for Yahoo!'s move to more open-source technologies. There are some nice PHP-vs-Y!-Proprietary performance comparison graphs. And I was touched to see training overhead for designers listed as one of the Costs of Proprietary Languages - it looks like the engineering/design relationship at Yahoo! might be a healthy one. (Link courtesy XBlog.)

Don't get me wrong. I recently got to keep an XBox for a couple of weeks, and it's a beautiful piece of technology. But it's also losing boatloads of money for Microsoft, perhaps as much as $100 for each box sold. Microsoft plans to make up for these losses by selling in volume. (Joke.)

Here's a lovely, very matter-of-fact breakdown on Retrieving Conversation text from Instant Messengers. This one is focused on MSN, but I can't imagine that the same principles couldn't be applied to AIM.

"This gives us the opportunity to make some fantastic SPYING applications that can e-mail MSN conversations of someone to you or whatever you can think of!"

Whee!

So during a casual conversation with my wife this afternoon, I realized that grok may be the quintessential 'nerd tell' of all time: anyone who uses it probably works in the technology industry, and I've never heard it used casually in the culture at large. (Unlike, say, 'parse' which I've heard creep into the common lingo here and there.) Grok is like our nerdy Masonic handshake.

Fantastic, deep-reaching essay by Paul Graham on Hackers, the last American heroes:

When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."

Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors.

Joel Spolsky describes the dream internship opportunity:

Instead of wasting their talents giving them the usual dull and unimportant tasks of a typical summer internship, we decided to let the interns create a complete new software product, from beginning to end, over the course of one summer. With experienced software developers as mentors, the team will design, program, test, and roll out a complete software product over the course of one hectic summer, going from concept to paying customers in about ten weeks.