Dave Naffziger’s Blog

I’ve been using a few services recently that I’m pretty excited about and wanted to share. I wanted to give a bit stronger of a testimonial than I could in a tweet so I’ve been collecting them into a blog post:

Interesting

• The biggest cloud provider is a botnet. Google manages ~1M CPUs, while the Connficker worm controls ~18M CPUs. Holy crap - this gives me an entirely new perspective on botnets.
• Snake Oil Scale. A great graphical look at various supplements and the extent to which science backs up their efficacy.

Cool

• TechStars Seattle Launches! It is great to see the Seattle entrepreneurial community come together to launch TechStars. The team behind this is fantastic. It will become a great launchpad for Seattle startups. Also, applications are now open.
• Seattle 2.0 New Management. Marcelo has done a fantastic job building Seattle 2.0 into the nexus of all things startup in Seattle, and I’m excited to see what the future holds for the brand!

Useful

• Rapportive: The best gmail firefox extension ever. Pulls your social media info for your email contacts into the sidebar (replaces the ads). It keeps creating serendipitous information discovery.
• HgInit: Stunningly written documentation on Mercurial by Joel Spolsky. I found the transition from svn to mercurial similarly difficult to Joel’s. This guide helped immensely. Many open source software suffers from terrible documentation. I wonder what other open source movements could achieve with similar efforts.
• Athlinks: Automatically gathers all of your race results (ok, most of them). On sign up, you are presented with a series of events and you check the ones that are yours. I’ve actively wanted this built for a long time. Not perfect yet, but I love the vision. A great showcase for what ‘intelligent agents’ (and likely a little bit of manual config) can do.