Long Time

CTO Can
I watched a client fire their CTO. The guy made some decisions I wouldn’t have made, but was basically a good guy. Much better than me on the ‘presence’ and executive-swagger thing. Now they seem to have kinda given up on having one at all, and elevated one of the programmers to a similar effective spot. I’m curious to see what happens.

Blackberry? Treo? what?
I am thinking about getting a Blackberry. Or a Treo. Or something. I just really would like a mobile ssh and mail terminal, and even some web browsing could be nice. I may see a client today who has them, so maybe we’ll see. Strangely enough, for the amount of phone I use (very little) and the amount of Internet I would use (nearly unlimited), Sprint is actually the best carrier for me. But they don’t subsidize their handsets much, and, well, that’s where I’d need some help… I made a little spreadsheet with the total cost over two years of all of the different options – a t-mobile BB is cheapest, and a somewhat-distant second is the Treo 700p on Sprint. I love the Palm Calendar, and can’t live without it. I didn’t really like the Blackberry one (I used a friend’s one yesterday.)

AppsLink NetServOS Whatever
I wrote a letter to the BizDev dude over at 37signals, the guys who wrote Ruby on Rails and Basecamp and stuff. I thought I would ask about the integration idea thing I mentioned like a gajillion blog postings ago, and see if they would be interested in developing to an API. The guy actually ended up responding – and relatively quickly:

Hi Brad-

close enough

Thanks for emailing us.

We’re entirely consumed by our own work on our own products.
Basecamp and Backpack have APIs and you are free to use
them to integrate with whatever you’d like, but that’s the
extent of what we can do with you right now, sorry.

-Jason

Which is interesting, and I think kinda telling. I imagine the answer for lots of different services like these would be the same. So perhaps the federated authentication model isn’t something I need to worry about – for now, at least.

I’m thinking about writing up some documentation on protocols – and some basic explanation of how everything works and why – and maybe we’ll see where that goes. I’ve sketeched out some interesting things, thus far.