Last week Apple posted an interesting interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson: the minds behind 37 Signals. This is one of the companies that’s leading the charge towards distributed online applications, so it’s nice to get a feel for their philosophy and ethics.

Granted you’ll have to get through quite a bit of heavy handed Apple propaganda, but there are some good quotes in there, like “it’s not the low end of the market, it’s the smart end of the market“. Along with Google, 37 Signals is showing the world that the best solution for productivity isn’t necessarily the next iteration of Microsoft office: it’s often a lightweight webapp that fills one roll, and fills it well.

Thanks Kotaku!

Sun is onto something really cool with their new Project Blackbox portable datacenters. The plan is to convert ordinary shipping containers into mobile datacenters that can be dropped into any location for customers that need to expand their capacity and data processing capabilities fast. These boxes are complete IT solutions that, fully maxed out, would place them within the list of the world’s top 200 supercomputers.

They offer:

• 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores
• 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage
• 7 terabytes of memory
• Suport for up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users
• Power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment

Check out the movie over at the Project Blackbox site. It’s so impressive that I decided to max out all the credit cards and put one on order for the Crashpod offices. Even if we don’t need it for Crashpod version 5, I bet it would make a sweet gaming rig!

While logging into the iTunes store today I was greeted with a great surprise! One of my favorite NPR radio shows, This American Life has finally added their program to iTunes’ lineup of podcasts! Formerly, the only way to listen to TAL episodes was by streaming them from the website or purchasing them from the archives at $0.95/pop. I always hoped to eventually see the show migrate to a podcast format but didn’t see it happening if they were using episode sales as a revenue stream. The way they are making it work is each show will be available as a free podcast for one week after the original airs. After that it moves into the archives where you can either stream it for free or purchase it for the same price as before. Fans of TAL rejoice! And when you are finished rejoicing, go subscribe today so you can take advantage of this free service!