Easy way how to transfer really big files

What does really big mean ? In my case few hundred megabytes, up to 1 GB. Clearly, too much for email attachments - most providers caps them at around 5-15 MB. Since we started doing screencasts, I need quite often to transfer work in progress - screen recordings, rendered MOV files between me and my co-host of the screencasts. I tried to upload the file to the company servers using VPN, but the speed of the secure uploads is nowhere close to being practical.

Quick online diagramming tool

I am using OmniGraffle for most of my diagrams. OmniGraffle is an OS-X platform replacement for Visio - only easier to use and better looking (in my opinion). On rare occasions I do not work on my notebook, it is quite useful to have free alternative that allows to create a diagram that does not look too awful, without going through the hoops of downloading and installing software. The bubl.us is exactly that tool.

A false "hang" of Finder

Yesterday, I have noticed interesting thing related to Finder and "beach ball of the death". Suddenly, for no obvious reason, the top menu became unavailable and cursor changed to beachball every time I moved it there. The Bluetooth mouse stopped responding. Finder stopped responding. All symptoms as if Finder would hanging ... The cause of the issue was crash of unrelated application (iShowU, if you are curious), which brought up the crash report window.

Agile development team member mantra

Introducing code review and pair programming has often an impact on relationships in the team - especially when a critique needs to be delivered. It takes great degree of experience on both sides to communicate defects in the code for both the reviewer as well as for the code author to get something useful out of it. I found this at http://www.finetix.com/blogs/finetixblogs.html which can be helpful (page is 404-ing now, but I luckily saved it in Google Docs way back) :

Weird kind of spam that passes through Akismet

Spam has always been a big problem for all blogs. Fortunately, worpress.com provides wonderfull Akismet spam filter which is works amazingly well. I do have switched on moderation for all comments, to make sure no spam gets through, but without Akismet it would be impossible to manage it because of the spam volume. Since I started this blog (August 2006), it caught over 17'000 (yes, seventeen thousands) spam posts. In other words, about 30 spam comments a day or almost 60 spam comments per published post.