You can read 2 great articles about the company and their technology here:

Clojure and Rails – the Secret Sauce Behind FlightCaster

Building FlightCaster’s Frontends for the Web and Smartphones

Their application is available as an iPhone or Blackberry app. Since I was to be traveling to Denver shortly after originally reading about this company, I decided to make my first app purchase for the iPhone (9 months of iPhone ownership and I still had only used free apps) for a whopping $4.99 (the price is now down to $1.99).

The app itself was simple and visually very appealing. As I went to enter my flights, I discovered that you can’t enter your flights until around 24 hours prior to takeoff. This is probably a limitation on the airline data available to FlightCaster so this was not much of a bother. On my flights out to Denver the weather was great and there was no prediction of delay. Sure enough none of my flight had issues.

Unfortunately on the way back home the application wasn’t able to find either of my 2 flights. They were small regional flights, but it was still a bit disappointing to not be able to use the app on the trip back home. That aside, I would still recommend this app to any traveler.

I’m definitely not a road-warrior so this was the only time so far I have tried out the application. Since my flights had no problems I can’t really say whether the app works as they say, but given the comments and reviews it sounds like it does (it did predict my experience on the way out correctly). If you travel much you really should check out this app. Especially with the lower $1.99 price, this should be a no-brainer for frequent travelers. And if you are a technology person, you should really read about how the company approaches and solves the problems of predicting the unpredictable. It is very interesting stuff.

http://news.ycombinator.org: This site posts various articles and commentary and has an extremely technical slant with a focus on the startup community. YCombinator is a startup incubator that was started by Paul Graham (whose articles are also an incredibly good read) of Viaweb fame. This site is what Slashdot was 10 years ago and what Reddit (which is a YCombinator alumni) was 3 years ago.

For actual print books I tend these days to read them online using the wonderful Safari Books Online from O’Reilly. I actually read them through my ACM membership account. The ACM offers a great selection of books online for members.

Coding Horror is a great site written by Jeff Atwood. I was a longtime reader of his site and actually got to hang out with him when my friend Brian worked for Vertigo Software out in San Francisco. He is a very sharp fellow that does some great writing. He is no longer with Vertigo and his moved on to create another site that I am a huge fan of.

StackOverflow.com – This site created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky is what a Q&A site should be. I hate Experts Exchange with a such a passion that I actually update my hosts file to resolve their site to 127.0.0.1 so it fails quickly when I click on one of their links from Google. StackOverflow is an incredible resource for reading and learning and also for giving back to the community and answering questions. Answering questions is an incredible way to push your knowledge forward. Normally you will know an answer but still have to do some more research to fully prove and justify your response. I highly recommend getting involved with this community that Atwood and Spolsky have put together.

Joel on Software – Joel Spolsky tends to be a bit of a lightning rod in the tech world. Some people love his viewpoint and ideas while others can’t stand him. I am in the first camp and really enjoy his writing and thoughts on the industry and creating and running a company of technical resources. Even if you disagree with him, you can still learn much from him and the successful company, Fog Creek, he has built.

Then there are the sites that I don’t read everything, but just skim and find a few worthwhile nuggets to read like Planet Apache, the ThoughtWorks Blogs, Planet Eclipse, AskTom.Oracle.com (a great Oracle Resource).

Just by spending as little as 10-20 minutes per day reading some of these resources you can help keep yourself up to date with what is going on in the tech industry. Unless you want to find some legacy technology and become a greybeard you will need to make the effort to keep your skills relevant. The sites I have listed always have interesting content and great communities of people around them. Dive in and enjoy.

Adblock Plus
http://adblockplus.org/en/
This plugin strips out ads from web pages. It is the only way to browse the web these days with the ad-overload present on most sites. You will wonder how you every browsed without it.

Firebug
http://getfirebug.com/
If you are a Web Developer you must try out FireBug. It allows you to view and modify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of pages you load in your browser. An indispensable tool for anyone that writes web pages.

IE Tab
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
Even though I love FireFox, there are many web pages that still require Internet Explorer only. Instead of having to actually open IE, this plugin allows you to re-render the web page using the IE engine from within FireFox.

Links & Forms
http://mozilla.queze.net/
This one probably only applies to web developers, but it adds back functionality that was removed in FireFox version 2 that let you view Links and Forms info when looking at a page’s info via the Page Info menu item.

RefControl
http://www.stardrifter.org/refcontrol/
When browsing to web pages, one of the values that a site can log is the web page that you came from to get to that page. This means that a site can record whether you came to their site from a Google search or any other page that led you there.

Of course the downside is that if you were sitting on your bank’s web page and then typed in the name of a new web page, that new site could log the URL of your bank in their web logs. The RefControl plugin solves this problem by allowing you to prevent the referring URL from being logged by those sites. It allows you to block the referring URL entirely, set it to something you want to display (like www.noneOfYourBusiness.com), or have it return the name of the site you are heading to. A good addition to FireFox to help protect your privacy.

*Note though that some sites use the Referring URL as part of their login validation so sometimes you may have to disable it to make some sites work.

Tab Clicking Options
http://twanno.mozdev.org/
The tabbed browsing available in FireFox is a great improvement over the old one window per browsing session that used to be the norm. This plugin allows you to close tabs by double-clicking on the tab. This is something I find easier than trying to click the X on the edge of each open tab in FireFox.

Web Developer Plugin
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/
Another must have plugin for Web Developers. This plugin adds a toolbar of amazing features targeted at those that write web pages.

PDF Download
http://www.pdfdownload.org/
I love the PDF format, but I hate Adobe Acrobat’s PDF Reader. I use the FoxIt PDF Reader instead of Adobe’s when I view PDF’s on my computer. I never like when PDF’s open inside my browser window either. This plugin gives you a pop-up when clicking on a PDF that gives you the option to open it in an external program (like FoxIt).

If there are any must have plugins that you use within FireFox that I haven’t listed, please let me know about them in the comments. I’m always on the lookout for new plugins to make FireFox more useful to me.

They provide based software appliances that are pre-configured and installed with various software packages. The appliances are created with a small footprint and are packages as Live CD’s (bootable ISO’s) that can be run via CD-Rom or loaded into any of the virtual machine environments.

Google App Engine
Tomcat
phpBB
WordPress
LAMP
Ruby on Rails
MediaWiki
Django
and many more

At work we wanted to set up a Wiki to track our development documentation. Using the MediaWiki appliance we had a complete running VM of MediaWiki within 6 minutes of downloading it. If you are interested in experimenting with any of these software packages, you must check TurnKey Linux out.

VMWare offers for free their VMWare player product which allows you to run existing VM’s. This product, though, does not allow you to create new VM’s, just run existing ones. Enter a great site called EasyVMX.com. This site allows you to create a blank shell VM into which you can load OS’s or software.

In its most basic form, a VM is just a .VMX text file that contains a description of the system specs of the VM. Using EasyVMX you can define the system specs you want to use (typically linking the CD-Rom drive to an ISO file to use for installation), download the .VMX file and start it up using the VMWare Player.

A great site when working with VM’s that I will write about more next week is www.turnkeylinux.org/. They have preinstalled ISO’s of many application platforms.

After looking for various third party applications which all seemed a bit too heavy and intrusive, I finally ran across this post talking about an application named PushPin. It is a small 22kb freeware application that when launched runs in your system tray and adds an “Always On Top” option when right-clicking the title bar of any window. Once you are done with the application, you just remove it from the system tray by right clicking on it. It is light, unobtrusive, and fits the bill perfectly.

Unfortunately the author Chris Rosa’s site is no longer up but you can download the app from here: PushPin Download