I highly recommend this series of screencasts on erlang basics in the Pragmatic library.  Kevin Smith does the screencasts and also writes on his excellent erlang-centric blog – hypothetical labs.

All the tech blogs are aflame with news of Cuil’s launch (pronounced cool), so I thought I would give the new search engine a try.  Cuil’s brick wall immediately becomes apparent before I ever even hit the site.  Instinctively, I tabbed over to my google search bar embedded in FireFox and typed in ‘cuil.’

That’s right – I’m a url searcher (someone who knows the url for a given site but still types it into a google search bar), and by all accounts I’m not alone.  So, I’m an engaged user actively looking to try out a new search engine and I am typing that search engine’s name into google?  I don’t envy the position Cuil is in.

On a more optimistic note, I really like Cuil’s interface.  It’s refreshing and new, which seems to stimulate the brain, and their categorization of searches really helps.  I’ll definitely use it more if I think about it, but again I search instinctively and right now that means I use the google search box in firefox.

Have to share this.  Life changing.

I’m really into XMPP right now, and this awesome presentation says why a lot better than I ever could. Be sure to view it on SlideShare and make it fullscreen.

This is a test of the new wordpress iPhone application.

High Scalability.com is an interesting read if you’re interested at all in cloud-based technology and news.  Author Todd Hoff puts an appropriately nerdy twist on talking about all things cloud related.  Heck, his blog avatar is Gandalf.  Nerd +1.

Stumbled accross this very entertaining video from about a year ago. Linus Torvalds gives a good talk about his git SCM. I’m itching to try it out but unfortunately MacPorts install of git-core fails for me… grrr.

Pandora takes the cake for the best iPhone app so far.  If you’re unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s a site where you enter in artists you like and it autmatically creates a ‘radio station’ for you of similar artists.  Their iphone app is basically the same functionality.

I’ve always hated creating playlists and managing my library… I want a smart as computer to just tell me what to listen to at all times.  Pandora is the solution on my iPhone.

Raph Koster, of EQ fame, posted his thoughts on Lively.  Worth a read and I ditto his thoughts on the lack of features and how maybe this isn’t a play against Second Life-esque games.