this is sippey.com

File under “the genius of editorial calendaring,” but the timing of reading Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker profile of Justice Scalia on the train ride in this morning, and learning of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Title IX retaliation ruling this afternoon couldn’t have been any sweeter.

Ruby on Rails 0.11 is out, and it includes helper tags for doing Ajax-style development.  (Plus, bulit in pagination support, inbound email handling, and very importantly, “Rails applications no longer require their own virtual host to be easy to set up.”)  They’re starting to make building CRUD-heavy web apps ridiculously easy.

This is probably obvious to most, but it just hit me in the face this morning:  desktop search is best executed both as an app (“I’m going here to find something”) and as a component of the OS (“I need to attach a file to this message, now where is that again?”).  Something as simple as baking search (and ideally fast preview) functionality into the File Open dialog would go a long way towards enabling “search rather than browse” behavior.

Powertools.  Get your Powertools here.  We’ve got Powertools.

(I’m obviously very ready for opening day.)

I didn’t realize it until very recently, but my iPod had been stressing me out.  Every time I stuck the phones in my ears, powered up the device and scrolled through my tracks I had a decision to make.  What genre?  What artist?  What album?  Or should I pick a playlist?  Or just shuffle everything?  Or shuffle a genre?  Or an artist?  Should I shuffle my albums?  By the time I had made up my mind, I’d be half way through my commute, and then spend the other half wondering if I had made the right choice.

My iPod was giving me option anxiety.  (Woe is me.)

I didn’t realize this until I picked up a Shuffle on Monday.  It hasn’t left my shirt pocket since.  Not only is it ridiculously light, but the Shuffle’s insanely simple product design has turned the “what to listen to?” decision into a simple yes/no: to listen or not to listen.  If yes, then jam the headphones into ears and push Play.  That’s it.

Well, that’s not only it, of course.  The iTunes Autofill feature gives the user control over what music ends up in their pocket (pick from this genre, from this playlist, etc.) while staying true to the gestalt of the device.  It’s this combination of streamlined industrial design and sophisticated software design that makes the Shuffle such a fantastic product.  Apple made the most important use case (“listen to music”) a complete no-brainer, and then backed it up with elegant way for the user to shape their day-to-day experience of that use case.

This post -- this one post – was worth the entire cost of my Kottke.org micropatronage.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answerrrr ddddooooooooo….. Iiiiimmmm hhhhhaaaaallffffff craaaaaaa….

We now return you to your regularly scheduled dose of Kelly Clarkson.

It’s about time:  Microsoft’s buying Groove.  I was a heavy Groove user in a past life, and always found the disconnect between the Groove client and my desktop; their core technology (for transparently creating secure, peer-to-peer virtual workgroups) belongs in the operating system.  It will be interesting to see if Groove tech ends up there, or simply becomes a bolt-on to Sharepoint…

File under Now That’s a Market:  Zopa.

Zopa is a place where creditworthy people who want to borrow money can get together with people who are happy to lend it to them. And because there’s no middleman - the borrower just pays a 1% exchange fee to Zopa up front - both get a great deal.

When you join Zopa, we’ll tell you what your Equifax credit rating  is. If you want to be a borrower, we’ll then use it to rate the likelihood of you being a good one. If you look like you’ll be a low risk borrower, we’ll let you borrow from a low risk market. If your credit rating is only quite good, we’ll let you borrow from a medium risk one, and so on.

Lenders pick a market to offer their money in depending on the level of risk they are happy to take. They choose the length of time they want to lend their money for and set the interest rate they are happy to accept.

Here’s the really clever bit. An individual lender doesn’t lend to an individual borrower because that’s too risky. Instead a lender lends their money across at least fifty Zopa borrowers, and similarly a borrower borrows from a group of Zopa lenders. So the risk is well and truly spread.

Started by folks from Egg; available to UK residents only.  It has an outstanding loan limit of  £25,000, which, if I’m understanding this correctly, pits them against unsecured debt tools like credit cards for the borrower, and CDs for the lender.  Question: would this even be legal in the US?