So I think what happened is, this post by Jeremy on how Web 2.0 companies need to scale led to this post by Om on how right-on that is which led to this post by David on how you should just chill out.

Trying to reconcile these viewpoints I’m left with the feeling that there’s an incommensurability problem here. They’re using lots of the same words, like “scalability,” making it sound as if they’re arguing about the same thing – but I’m not so sure they are. I think they may actually agree much more than they appear to.

Interesting – About.com is moving to WordPress. I also learned from Matt’s blog posting, much to my surprise, that they were using Movable Type before. It feels very significant that the New York Times Company is migrating its $410-million-dollar baby over to an open source content-management platform. The usual open source components further down the stack – Apache, Linux, et al. – don’t have the same implications for feel and functionality that the content management layer does, and therefore this feels like more of a significant endorsement of open source.

It’s become a user interface meme: the Big Green Download Button. I like it. (I’m surprised Django doesn’t have one yet!)

Download.com – the original?

CodeZoo

OpenOffice.org

Firefox (not quite compliant – no arrow)

Sourceforge (mentioned earlier)

Netscape (green-ish)

Opera

NewsGator Feedstation

Macintosh software development dustup of the month:

• Haxies Good, Rich Siegel Bothers Me (Drunken Batman, of Chicago)
• Haxies Problematic, Drunken Batman Wrong (Rich Siegel, of Bare Bones Software)
• Haxie Users Like Car Chippers, Drunken Batman Definitely Wrong (Cory Redlien, of redlien.com)

I thought my idea for a figlet-based Captcha system was just my own nerdy, sick secret. Now I discover that someone has actually built one. Wow.

Yesterday was the Snakes and Rubies meetup in Chicago, featuring Adrian Holovaty of the Django Project and David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails. By all reports it was an informative and enjoyable event, with about 100 to 200 people attending. I’m looking forward to hearing the audio when it becomes available.

In the meanwhile, thinkhole.org has a good roundup of notes and blog postings, and of course there’s always Technorati.

Here’s another advice post. Luckily, many of you can test out of it, like a college Gen Ed requirement. Here’s the test:

1. What does the following regular expression do? ^http[s]?://([a-z]+\.)?example\.com/$ (Answer below.)

The target audience for this post is people who have heard of regular expressions, but don’t use them. Or who have used them a little, but have the feeling they really should know them better.

You’re right. You should.