When you ask a colleague for help, particularly in programming, you want him to know less about your project… so he will ask the stupid questions you sub-consciously avoided asking yourself because you thought you knew the answer, when in fact you didn’t.

I’ve thought about this many times while programming, and I’ve never seen it said so well. Sometimes, when some code of mine isn’t working, I’ll take a break and do something else and work on it later. Quite often, taking a new look at the code forces you to (inadvetently) ask yourself those stupid questions. I almost always find that I’ve made an assumption somewhere along the lines, and my thoughts were not consistent with the actual workings.

I just switched web hosts yet again (I’ve been through at least a dozen in the past year), and I think I’ve finally found a good home for Command-Tab. I’m now proudly hosted at CrashProne, run in part by the same folks who brought you CSSEdit. If you find any broken links or errors around the site, please let me know via the email link at right or by commenting on this post. Thanks everyone!

Google’s new instant messaging service, Google Talk, is now live. While a Mac client is not yet available, it is possible to set up an account in iChat using Jabber. If you have a GMail account, you’re already signed up. Just open up iChat, and set up a new Jabber account with your GMail address as your username, your GMail password as your Google Talk password, and talk.google.com as the server address. Feel free to try it out my messaging me at command {dot} tab {at} gmail {dot} com (replace each item in braces with it’s real counterpart — it’s slightly obfuscated to cut down on junk mail to my GMail account). Both text and voice chat work, and video will likely be added in the near future. You can get more information at the Google Talk Help page.

Elsewhere on the web, Skype announced that they will be opening up their service via an API, allowing for better integration with the web, as well as other IM clients. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Maybe Google will buy Skype and combine the two services to create a total IM and VoIP solution — they have the money and the talent, why not do it?

I just ran across this useful post on MacOSXHints. You can Command-click on links in Mail.app to open them in the background in Safari. Handy!