A big gaping hole in a lot of mainstream travel sites like Expedia, Hotwired, etc. is that they are long on supplying infrastructure for me to book flights and hotels for my next trip, but very short on ideas for trips and reasons why I’d like to visit a particular destination. Kukunu is a new site that lets you plan trips, and also get recommendations as well as collaborate with any travel partners you have. These kind of one-stop shopping sites are nothing new (look at Amazon for general retail) but it’s surprising that in the area of travel I still have to bounce from site to site as I look for travel ideas, find good deals and email or IM friends with plans or asking for suggestions. The idea is great, and Kukunu’s execution looks pretty good.

Now this is very cool. You’ve decided that you need a vacation so badly that you’re going to crack open your piggy bank. By the time you count all the nickles and pennies you have $137.31. How far can you go on that? Before you head over to the nearest freeway onramp and stick out your thumb, take a look at the Explore portion of the Kayak travel site. The easy interface lets you type in your starting point then it gives you (presumably) the best prices for various destinations from your starting point. And you have to admit, it’s a lot more elegant than hitching a ride to San Diego…

There is hope for mankind. Our imagination will save us. Or something.
What do you do if your wife cries uncontrollably at the end of every single movie you watch? Clearly you buy the domain cryingwife.com and post videos of her weepy film reviews. As a bonus there is her hysterical railing against the injustice of it all, such as at the end of 2012 (not referring to the waste of money). Subtitled for your convenience. Hilarious, somebody hire these two for something.

Here’s a story about just how easy it is to make a cool piece of tech whose usefulness outpaces anything you might have imagined when you created it. Twitter engineer Alex Payne describes the way that the minimalist masterpiece downforeveryoneorjustme.com came into being, and why he sold it.
Very refreshing to read a success story motivated by a love for tinkering rather than a dollar. I respect the effort even more when he says he was making ~$300/mo using Google Adwords (in this context, I’m pretty sure he meant Adsense).
Cultivate and trust those little moments of inspiration. More than that though, doesn’t this remind us that some of the best stuff in tech comes from a wacky idea upon which we execute?

Chiphacker bills itself as user-edited Q & A site for Electronics & Robotics Hardware Hacking. Not the first of its kind, but simple and well executed, and I’ll point to it just because most geeks I know have parallel interest in physical computing. I love the smell of solder in the AM, how about you?

Feel like a little user interface inspiration on a Friday? Take a look at this representation of relative sizes of a coffee bean down to a carbon atom, controlled by the user with a slider. Talk about form and function working together.

Call them programming challenges for grownups, or skill sharpeners or what ever you want, but Programming Praxis has great exercises for programmers to keep the brain in shape if the challenges at work are getting too easy for you! Nice site.
via O’Reilly

OK, maybe a better title for this post is: insider trading tip-offs. What does it have to do with programming and web development? A Canadian law student and programmer has created a website that will tell you, supposedly within two minutes of the SEC making the information public, when an insider has made a trade in any company you’d care to follow. Simply enter the ticker symbol and leave your email, and you’ll receive ‘instantaneous’ alerts. Yahoo! HackU was the original inspiration for this idea, and I guess it’s too useful not to continue. There is another proprietary system that gives insider trading info, but it’s neither free nor real-time. Talk about one programmer taking the bull (as it were) by the horns and doing something really subversive. He even makes the source code and YQL tables available, allowing anyone access to real-time SEC data:

“The main RSS scraper for this application is a YQL statement that trims down the SEC’s feed and spits it out in JSON.”

Bingo. The site is a triumph of simplicity.

A little background: insider trading is by no means necessarily illegal. ‘Insiders’, often officers of a given company, are certainly allowed to buy and sell stock issued by the company for which they are officers, but they must do so within strict guidelines established by the SEC. Sophisticated traders/investors often use insider trading stats as one of dozens of indicators that might help them accurately forecast stock prices.

At a time when it’s seen as critical to keep your site design and marketing efforts optimized and right on the bleeding edge, how can it be that one of the most visited sites on the internet shuns these ideas and a whole lot more conventional wisdom, yet continues to grow? With just 30 employees.

I guess the short answers are ‘free’ and customer loyalty…. still, what an enigma…

A small detour from all things Ruby on Rails, PHP and Twitter today.

Recently I’ve formed an opinion about who has the Best Online Chess site. For years I endured the rudeness, the primitive interface, and the time spent wasted just trying to find a game with the Yahoo chess experience. No more. Chesscube made online chess fun again for me.

Not that I’ve played them all, but I’ve played a few other chess sites and there were either too few players, or it cost something to play, or something… Not only is Chesscube is free and very active: the interface is absolutely stunning, like a step forward in time vs. yahoo, which seems to be stuck in 1996. This is what online chess should look like, and play like!

I don’t spend a lot of time studying the free videos, because I don’t think I’m smart enough to get much better, but it’s cool that it’s all there for the ambitious among us. Chess news, records of your games and comprehensive stats, there are all kinds of extras. Moderators attend to the chat stream but it seems like there’s a friendly community feel to Chesscube anyway. It appears to be growing quickly– head over and check it out!