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If I ever say anything like this, smack me.

Quite simply, Greenplum is using an open source database optimized with supercomputing architecture to bring terabyte scale datawarehousing to enterprises.

— Ed Sim, BeyondVC Blog

I mean it. It should hurt.

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This wonderful site has streaming video and audio of lots of talks at MIT! How did I not find this earlier?

It just needs podcasts.

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Emacs comes with a handy mode for writing and editing structured text. You type things like this:

* Big Idea 1
Maybe we should sell fish over the internet, because who wouldn't want to cut out the middleman when ordering Chilean Seabass?
* Big Idea 2
Let's hire hundreds of people to go around town writing about things that happen, then put their writings into a two-pound stack of papers we can sell for $1.
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure
It is a lot of work to produce hundreds of articles a day, print them in the early morning, and deliver them to thousands of readers.
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?
Would we be wasting a lot of people's time?

Outline-mode interprets the asterisks as heading indicators, and automatically colorizes them. And then you just hit C-c C-t and get a headings-only view:

* Big Idea 1…
* Big Idea 2…
** Pros
*** Sounds kinda useful
*** Can advertise for things like clothing and soda
** Cons
*** High capital expenditure…
*** How would writing for an average/objective/idealized "citizen" make sense?…

Of course, there are also shortcuts for jumping between headings, expanding and collapsing individual subtrees, and more. Best of all, outline-mode is packaged with GNU Emacs and works as a minor mode with other modes, so you can use it to navigate HTML documents or source code too.

More resources:

• GNU Emacs Manual, Outline Mode
• One enthusiastic outline-mode user's .emacs file
• Emacs Wiki: outline-mode
• Outline-magic extension mode (Emacs Lisp)
• Emacs Wiki: Allout (another Emacs outline module)

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Usability attention for Free/Libre/Open Source software projects. Very valuable, and these folks have a good format. See also: Open Source Usability: The birth of a movement.

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Jessie Stricchiola, a click fraud expert who frequently represents advertisers seeking refunds from Google and Yahoo, estimates that click fraud accounts for as much as 20 percent of the clicks in some industry sectors. The president of AlchemistMedia.com, Stricchiola said tens of thousands of advertisers, who pay Google and Yahoo by credit card, are being overcharged daily, adding that neither search engine has a large enough staff devoted to monitoring the problem or fielding complaints.

Hyperbole from selfish lawyers aside, click fraud is an interesting problem. It may never be fully solved, but can advertisers tolerate it like retailers tolerate (some) theft? I think it will eventually be accepted as a cost of doing business, with enforcers at ad syndicates in a contant arms race against this next wave of organized crime.

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For those following the Summer Founders Program at YCombinator, a new venture company backed by Paul Graham and friends, Aaron Swartz has a detailed review of his visit. Aaron will start something blog-related, code name Infogami. Let the speculation begin.

According to the SFP Announcements page, YCombinator will be funding 9 startups (out of 227 applications). As Aaron reveals, they didn't accept anyone outright—all applications were either rejected or called to Cambridge for interviews.

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Pete finally realizes that blogs can form a basis for personalized web search. In other news from Pete, Gmail is adding an aggregator, Feedmesh still seems like a good idea that is only alive thanks to Bob Wyman, and AllConsuming is tagging for books.

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Frassle is noted (and even pictured!) in this excellent survey of social bookmarking applications.

The Mozilla Update site has lots and lots of extensions for Mozilla browsers. Here are my picks:

• Autocopy - automatically copy any selected text to clipboard
• Tabbrowser Preferences - tweak tab settings (includes putting an X on each tab label, not just on the right)
• AdBlock
• ForecastFox - weather forecasts in your toolbar
• DictionarySearch - get definitions via context menu
• Web Developer Toolbar - highly recommended if you develop websites
• ConQuery - query web services from the context menu; good for fiddling around with server-side scripts
• GooglePreview - adds thumbnails of result webpages to Google and Yahoo search results
• Javascript Debugger - aka Venkman
• Nuke Anything - probably superceded by AdBlock, but more straightforward. And perhaps you like advertisements…
• EditCSS - modify stylesheets, live
• AutoForm - automatically fills data into forms, such as your name and email address.

Potentially interesting:

• ieview - preview a page or link in MSIE
• SmoothWheel - smooth scrolling when using mouse wheel
• QuickNote - make annotations on web pages

I've tried a bunch of these and they work as advertised. It's great that Mozilla's extension system makes it possible for so many people to improve the product.

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Awesome web-based shell for trying out/debugging javascript. Even has tab completion.