Whirlycott / Philip Jacob

Saturday, July 5, 2008

That’s a good way to put it

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 7:51 pm

if you feel compelled to comment, please try to think of something interesting to say. youtube needs remarks like “awesome song” and “this video sucks” like it needs another shaky, blurry, garbled & distorted, 27-second camera-phone clip of Feist performing 1234 in [YOUR TOWN HERE]. thank you.


Friday, June 20, 2008

The Ben Adida HMAC Smackdown

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 12:41 pm

Ben Adida is a super nice guy until you start misusing message digests. He once gave me a smackdown (I like to think of it as a learning experience) that was very helpful and now he’s done the same thing in public: don’t Hash Secrets.

Don’t make the cryptographers cry. Especially not Ben.


Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Algorithms, Architecture and Caching

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 10:50 pm

How to scale « François Schiettecatte’s Blog
It not about the language, it is about the architecture.

Nearly: good algorithms and proper caching are also part of the picture.  Sure, caching is part of good architecture, but it makes such a difference that it’s worth calling it out separately.

(This should really be a much longer post…)


Friday, February 8, 2008

So long, YottaMusic

Filed under: Technology — Philip Jacob @ 8:49 pm

I’ve enjoyed using YottaMusic ever since Jake told me about it last year. I signed on and became a paying Rhapsody customer but I used the YottaMusic frontend for streaming my music. I was wondering why YottaMusic shut down over Christmas and now I know.  If anybody knows of another service like it, I’d love to know. The Rhapsody.com website sucks rhino and I’m certainly not going to continue paying for that slow, buggy heap of junk.

Thanks for killing one of the best legit music experiences, Rhapsody. You’re losing at least one customer (me) over this nonsensical decision.


Thursday, January 31, 2008

Never Forget

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 12:47 pm

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Friday, November 30, 2007

The Key to Shopping 2.0 Success: Empowering Customers

Filed under: General, Technology — Philip Jacob @ 6:54 pm

I have an opinion piece in the the E-Commerce Times today about the need for openness as a critical factor in the way that retailers market their products. Rather, the way that retailers provide tools and content to their customers to help them market their products.

In unrelated news, we had some fun at the StyleFeeder office today:

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Photo courtesy of Eric Savage. Eric, I “remixed” your photo!  I just love remixed User-Generated Content (rUGC).


Sunday, October 14, 2007

Radiohead’s Warm Glow - New York Times

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 5:59 pm
Radiohead’s Warm Glow - New York Times
Today, music lovers are left but two options: pay list price for an album, or perform what a fan might call a free download and a record company would call theft. Radiohead’s experiment suggests a third way out: let fans pay what they want and give them lots of touchy-feely reasons to want to give as much money as they can.

There’s nothing touchy-feely about it. Enough people are both willing to pay for the music (because they like it) and quite happy to contribute to an effort that is part of a wave of reform crashing down on the music business.


Guest blogging in dot NL

Filed under: General — Philip Jacob @ 3:46 pm

This week, I am guest blogging on the popular Dutch blog IN10.nl and I just put up my first post where I attempt a silly experiment to get in touch with the band Soko.   I guess I am living in Holland this week, mentally, anyway.