And that last post prompted this....

for those w/ no patience, skip to the 40 second mark.

Your Arturo clip du jour

Lame story of the day: I was on the search for a song from a cd of mine that I lost oh-so-long ago. I knew a Brecker brother and Arturo Sandoval played together in it, and simply couldn't find it... that's the lame part. The cool part is that I found a Bobby-McFerrinesque clip of Arturo singing. Here ya go:

CARB: It was almost a year ago now, but...

Last year I read a blog post from the (former?) CEO of Tesla Motors. Definitely worth the read if the relationship between state governments and the auto industry interests you.

If you're too lazy to read the page-worth, his short testimony pretty much says, "As long as CARB and the auto manufacturers here seem to keep pushing for a technology that is 10 years away (and has been '10 years away' for over 15 years), I'm simply here to say thank you and keep doing what you're doing because we're making a killing... oh, and it would be nice to have some competition if anyone is interested."

The Reubenstein is the coolest Ruby developer I know

I'm not kissing your ass Ben, but it's pretty cool that your mod_rails setup post made this week's Rails Envy Podcast. Go team!

Flash exploit explained... really well written.

Even if you have only a slight working knowledge of how a compiled app talks to and works with your computer's memory, this is a totally awesome article that quickly summarizes a report by Mark Dowd at IBM Security Systems (the 25 page report shows how some malicious AS code might use ActionScript's VM to allow access to any of the billions of OS-independent computers that have Flash installed). Yes, a bit geeky, but at least he talks about cyberdine, skynet, the koopa family, and has some nice pitfall animations.

Music music music

I'm a music geek and I thought this was worth a share: Today TED posted Machover's TED talk:

Island of Garbage

So there's been a lot of chatter about the island of garbage the size of Texas floating inches below the surface of the Pacific. A small group of people took it upon themselves to sail 2000 miles out and check it out for themselves. Trash Island.

Shostakovich's Symphony no. 5 - 4th mvt

One of my favorite orchestral pieces. I had never heard Shostakovich's 5th under Bernstein. I get a little bit of an un-easy feeling at around the three-minute mark. I think this is because I'd like a bit more tempo contrast -- but this is an awesome 'version.' Fantastic conducting decisions all around:

google appengine vs aws (or just ec2 and simpledb)

Check back soon for the SmashedApples.com Public EC2 AMI. Also, we hope to quickly incorporate google appengine into the framework to allow usage for either aws or appengine behind your smashedapples flex front-end.

What is Flex?

Today, someone asked me what Flex is. This person has a pretty decent understanding of web technologies though had never used or even heard of Flex. My response, via email, was this simple video (along with a brief explanation):

Click here to watch the video.

April Fools day is interrupting my blind-belief!

April Fools day has officially been an interruption. I have maybe 500 articles that I sift through daily in my Google Reader. Today has provided a great deal more interesting headlines that I've clicked through. Many more than usual at least.

It's April Fools day, so now I'm stuck trying to decipher whether or not members of the AWS team truly developed a Dog Computer Interface. Why can't I just go about my day blindly believing everything I read as I usually do? Damn you April Fools day!!