Risk aversion; a barrier to innovation

Death by Risk Aversion [via Scoble]

Scoble posted a quote earlier, relevant to this discussion:

We should not expect good work to be acknowledged; and where it is, we should not expect it to be welcomed. Rather, the strength of a creative impulse is measured by the strength of opposition it meets. – Robert Frip

What Programming Language to use

Steve writes about the motivation in choosing a programming language for a task.

Choosing a programming language tends to involve an interesting intersection of what you need (i.e., requirements), what you know (i.e., past experience), and what you believe (i.e., bias and flexibility).  … Choice of programming language should depend on the project(s) at hand, the team(s) doing the work, and the business interests of those who will own the intellectual property.  There is no "best" programming language; the suitability of a language depends on the problem domain to which is it being applied and the people doing the appying…Too often, however, developers go with what’s cool or what they know. 

I would say that choosing what you know is the number one reason.  And it’s often the single person in an organization with the most clout that decides it for the group.  I think the scenario Steve describes where the choice of language is selected without bias, is rare.

SeaDragon Imaging Technology

This could end the distinction between an icon, a thumbnail, and a document.  Everything could be a document — sometimes it would just be icon-sized, sometimes thumbnail-sized, and sometimes document-sized, and you could smoothly scale between those views [Channel 9 Forums]

Microsoft Acquiring SeaDragon Software
SeaDragon

TeamSpeak communication system

TeamSpeak, for example, promotes focus and enhances awareness by eliminating the need to type. Best form of teamwork requires no communication at all because everyone knows what needs to be done and in what order. But often a team has to improvise. At such times the leader can bark out short abbreviated orders between mob clusters, keeping the team moving fluidly with only occasional rests. That is, if every member of the team is using TeamSpeak or another tool like it. [via Don]

Screen Capture Programs

Cropper – C# code available [via Omar]

Personal Home Pages

NetVibes. Review of NetVibes

Google Home Page

Windows Live Ideas

Ning

Ajax Portals

Here is a better list:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/25/yes-this-weeks-ajax-homepage/

Social Software

Family 2.0 [via Google Blogoscoped]

Mac Software

Now that I own a mac, I’ll have to start tracking interesting Mac software.

Yojimbo – Information Organizer [via Brent]

Performance consequences of polling

Raymond discusses polling as a bad design choice.

Image to HTML

This is an interesting site that will upload any image and output an HTML page displaying the image using only colored 0 and 1 characters.