jpreardon.com

Eater breaks the news that Fatburger is opening a store in Manhattan. Yes, you read that correctly, Fatburger! As far as I knew, this was a tiny chain that stayed close to home in the Los Angeles area. Man, was I wrong, Fatburger has over 80 locations worldwide. Nevertheless, Fatburger is a good addition to the ever growing number burger joints in New York. Now, if we could just get an In-N-Out.

<plug>Now that you’re thinking about burgers, head over to Burger and Bordeaux to check out some of the finer burgers around town.</plug>

Now that Leopard has been released, I’m going to order a new Macbook. Sorry PowerBook G4, you’ve served me well for many years, but its time for an upgrade.

As part of the upgrade, I took a quick inventory of the applications I use. In addition to the built-in apps such as Address Book, iCal, Mail and iTunes, there are several applications that have become necessities for me. When the new Mac shows up, I’ll be busy downloading and installing these popular applications:

• Adium
• CocoaMySQL
• Colloquy
• Firefox
• Growl and GrowlTunes
• NetNewsWire currently using an old version (2.0.1), will try the lite (free) version
• Quicksilver
• TextExpander
• TextMate and the Vibrant Ink Theme

Ruby on Rails is bundled with 10.5, so I don’t think there is much to do there–other than move my Rails projects. iTerm is nice when working on Rails, but it no longer seems necessary since Terminal is tabbed now.

I’ve been using Microsoft Office X since I’ve had the PowerBook and have very few complaints about it. So, I’ll probably stick with MS Office rather than spend the extra $79 on Apple’s iWork. I’m less positive about the other Microsoft product I use regularly, Virtual PC. There are one or two applications I need to run that have no Mac equivalent. Using Virtual PC has always been painfully slow for me. While Virtual PC will run better on a faster machine with more memory, Microsoft is no longer upgrading the product, so I think it is time to try something else. I’ll probably purchase Parallels or VMware Fusion as a replacement.

This list of applications was longer than expected and I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. I’ll update this post when I find out what those missing applications are. This will undoubtedly happen while I am franticly trying to complete a task on the new computer without the proper tool installed.

Joel Spolsky explains Evidence Based Scheduling (EBS), in detail, at Joel on Software. EBS, which is included in the latest version of Fogbugz, predicts ship dates based on individual developers’ historical accuracy in making estimates. Nice.

So it’s Leopard Day. The official release is at 18:00 EDT, but mail order copies of Leopard have started arriving on desks around the world. There will be a sharp drop in productivity today as Mac fans upgrade their operating systems. If you are ready to upgrade, you might think about going for a clean install, it will be almost like getting a new Mac.

If you’re not quite ready to upgrade, check out, The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s 24 hours of Leopard, TUAW’s favorite new Leopard features–in 24 parts. If those shiny, new features don’t encourage you to loiter at the Apple Store tonight, I don’t know what will.

Photo by Obi Juan Kenobi

The view of Manhattan in UpNext looks much like an impressively large collection of Puzz-3D models. Nevertheless, it’s pretty damn cool. If you check it out for yourself, prepare to spend some of your productive time flying (virtually) through the streets of your favorite, or most disliked, neighborhoods.

The idea here is to combine local information with a slick 3D map:

UpNext is the new and exciting way to explore and discover your city.

Rather than sifting through pages and links of data, UpNext enables you glide around your city, virtually. Exploring has never been easier.

While this is really excellent, there is a better way to explore and discover the city: The old way. You know, version 1.0 of urban exploration which involves wandering the streets, getting lost, meeting people, and stumbling your way towards neighborhood guru status. Sure, this requires leaving your apartment, but how can you really explore New York City without being able to smell it?*

* As far as I know, UpNext does not have an olfactory plug-in.

If you like GMail, but want to use a different mail client from time to time, you’ll be happy to know that GMail has added IMAP support. To get started, just enable IMAP in your GMail settings and follow the configuration instructions for your mail client.

The best part of this is that any labels used in GMail carry over to the mail client as folders. Folder actions such as copy and move also translate to label actions. For example, if one copies a message from their inbox to a folder, the label that corresponds to the folder name will be applied in GMail. If one moves a message from their inbox to a folder, the label will be applied and the message will be archived.

This is a nice feature for both mobile and desktop users of GMail. If you are currently using POP with GMail, you will probably be better served with IMAP.

Update: Lifehacker suggests a few improvements to GMail’s IMAP setup.

via engadget mobile :: engadget

I just finished reading Three Cups of Tea. It is the story of Greg Mortenson’s transformation from a part-time mountaineer to a full-time doer of good. Mortenson’s humanitarian efforts began by building a school for a remote mountain village in Pakistan. Since then, he has gone on to co-found the Central Asia Institute and build more than 50 additional schools throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This story is an inspiring adventure that shows just what can be achieved when someone puts their mind to it.

The previously mentioned Five Guys Burger chain continues their friendly invasion of New York City. Come this Thursday, they will have landed in the belly of the beast–if you consider that belly to be somewhere near West 55th. Midtown Lunch has the lowdown.

A List Apart has released the results of their web design survey:

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.

A List Apart also provides the anonymized, raw data from the survey. If you’re up for it, you could make your own fun charts to justify a raise to your boss.

via Vitamin News

As part of their 10th anniversary, Slashdot is refreshing their FAQ to reflect their current hardware and software setup. If you are interested in what it takes to run a high volume web site, you might want to check out this two part series:

1. Slashdot’s Setup, Part 1- Hardware
2. Slashdot’s Setup, Part 2- Software