The Plot to Kill Google
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-02/ff_killgoogle

DOJ story on Google's failed attempt to do advertising with Yahoo.. and lawyer-ly intrique and microsoft scare tactics

An article on everyone's favorite search engine by the awesome folks over at Wired.com.

Google may not be evil, but it sure does have enemies.

Learn to use this package and its open-source cousi

Recursos de java en un mundo lleno de mierda

public / private data with logging on

Overview of the security principles identity, authentication and authorization.

Security

Ver clear description of the problem. Identity - "who are you?" - public assertion - locally unique. Authentication - "how can you prove it?" - secret response - non-unique. So biometrics are identity, not authentication.

css for layout

Why CSS should not be used for layout

The singular thing that distinguishes Twitter from blogs, RSS, IM, email, etc. is synergy

So you’re a skilled developer or design freelancer who has established a handful of customers who pay your bills and provide you with an income. That’s great. You may wish to keep things just the way they are or you might want to build on this and build up your own small business. If you’re opting for the later then here are a few tips to help you ride the bumpy road from freelancer to fully-fledged small business.

Don't constrain your self by making too much part of your identity (reminds me of much of Tom Robbins's writing)

Paul Graham

Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.

Yes! I think a free interaction gives the user experience that special edge.

"One free interaction" is a prospective design pattern that gives software and hardware a more humane feel. It exists outside of task flows and the concept of users as task-doers. Instead it sits in the "in between" spaces, suiting users as fidgeters, communicators, and people who play with things.

Very nice post from Chris Noessel of Cooper Design on the more subtle but no less brilliant elements of iPhone design, as well as other simple, pleasing software highlights

I flip page control on the home screen back and forth, for no apparent reason.

"Since we want our designs to be humane and, presuming they fulfill their utilitarian purposes well, emotionally satisfying, I suggest that designers begin to include one free interaction in their designs to enable the channeling of energy and simple expression."

Emily Chang is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a web design consultancy in San Francisco focused on designing and developing next generation web products for companies, organizations, schools, businesses and individuals.

Everything about twitter

this article is not only disturbing because he looks 8 and she looks 25, but because apparently all poor british slobs fuck like rabbits. the boy's dad has nine kids. the girl's dad (unemployed) has at least six.

What a shame. She at least might have had a better understanding of what the implications were, but he clearly wouldn't have had a clue at 12...

LOL

his name is alfie haha

EXPO WEB 2.0

The Death Of “Web 2.0″

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, the graphic arts industry was populated by full-time illustrators, production assistants and compositors. With only composing sticks for laying out type, straight edges for defining grids, a human proofer to catch spelling mistakes and an arsenal of X-acto blades for making edits, these guys lived and breathed detail. Mistakes were costly. It was a trade position that required lengthy apprenticeship; job security depended on getting all of the little things right.

good article on the business qualities that make a great & successful web designer/developer

Good article on being a good designer

Great summary of a Web designer's job...

freelance writing ideas

twitter history

Sitting in the Flickr archives is a nearly 10-year-old document uploaded a couple of years ago by its author, Jack Dorsey (@jack), who started Twitter in 2006 along with co-founders Evan Williams (@ev) and Biz Stone (@biz).

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site's founding document. Part I

The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

The hottest microblogging service, Twitter, is changing the way TV, literature and media operate.

"In the mid-'80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly... until one of them devastated the global economy."

Ars takes a close look at the technology underlying Google's Linux-based Android platform. From the platform fundamentals to the development experience, details inside.

A great overview and introduction into Android developments and the various pros/cons and gotchas.

Some good info on megapixels from Gizmodo

Why More Megapixels Isn't Always More Better

Explanation of why a digital camera with more megapixels isn't necessarily better.

Between all the new digital cameras pooped out b4 the upcoming PMA show & the crazy cameras buried inside cellphones @ MWC, it's a good time to see why more megapixels isn't necessarily better. So, the nutshell explanation of how a digital camera works is that light lands on a sensor, which converts the light into electrical charges. Depending on the camera, how the light reaches the sensor may seem different; digital SLRs house a complicated pentaprism & mirror system that swings out of the way, while the inside of a compact point & shoot is mechanically far simpler. The sensor fundamentals stay the same = where most of the MP machismo comes from. When U squeeze the shutter button, the sensor is exposed to light for however long you have the exposure time set for. Common metaphor » sensor works » like an array of buckets ( pixels) that collect light, & the amount collected is turned in2 an electrical charge, which is converted in2 data. 2 two major types of sensors, CCD & APS (CMOS).

l dominance ov

Last fall, Facebook launched a major site redesign that primarily impacted the profile page, home page, and application developers. With the redesign, the Facebook profile page changed from a “box-oriented” design to a “Wall and tabs” design to make sharing more prominent and viral. Now, Facebook is preparing advertisers and brand managers for a similar redesign to its Pages product for businesses that could launch as soon as sometime in the next few weeks.

Redesigned Pages for Businesses

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes virus virusvirus

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead (Part One):

The Godfather Wars In many ways, the men who made The Godfather—director Francis Ford Coppola, producer Al Ruddy, Paramount executives Robert Evans and Peter Bart, and Gulf & Western boss Charles Bluhdorn—were as ruthless as the gangsters in Mario Puzo’s blockbuster. After violent disputes over the casting of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, they tangled with the real-life Mob, which didn’t want the movie made at all. The author recalls how the clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped a Hollywood masterpiece. Plus: Video, more photos, and the late-breaking story of how a Jersey family mentored the cast.

The author recalls how the clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped a Hollywood masterpiece.

As if I needed another reason to get 14 hours of sleep every night.

In the sleep-deprived, gruesome images produced 60 per cent more activity in the amygdala - a primitive, emotionally reactive part of the brain - than in well-rested people. // Evidence is growing that sleep - and dreaming, REM sleep, in particular - helps the brain to process memories. Disrupt this mechanism, and you could end up with psychological problems such as PTSD.

Ever feel like some days you can crank out amazing looking designs with little effort? Then on other days it feels like nothing is working, you’ve lost all your talent and you’ll never make another good design for the rest of your miserable life? Don’t panic – this is natural...

"We moved from thinking of ourselves as designers to thinking of ourselves as design thinkers. We have a methodology that enables us to come up with a solution that nobody has before." -- David Kelley

bio of IDEO's David Kelley. IDEO is a creative design and technology firm, an inspiration.

Ideo CEO David Kelley talks about evolving Ideo from a design firm to a "design thinking" firm.

Good introduction to X-phi, as rediculous as it sounds.

Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don’t like it.

a new philosophy field? holy moly. really good read.

Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don’t like it

What's the bigger idea: social media as marketing stimulus or social media as a way to innovate business processes? It's both.

One is that the financial press isn’t in the business of supplying useful information; it’s in the business of feeding people’s lust for predictions. “You keep buying the magazine regardless of how the forecasts turn out,” Wellington says, “and they’ll keep supplying the forecasts.”

Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.

As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more

Like a lot of people who end up on Wall Street, Blaine Lourd just sort of stumbled in. He'd grown up happy in New Iberia, Louisiana. His father had made a pile of money in the oil patch, and Blaine assumed that he too would one day eat four-hour lunches at the Petroleum Club, hunt ducks on the weekends, and get rich. His older brother, Bryan, had left Louisiana to make what seemed like a quixotic bid to become a Hollywood agent, but Bryan was gay, even if he pretended not to be. (He's now a partner at Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency.) Blaine was distinctly not gay and felt right at home in Louisiana—right up to the moment when, during his third year at Louisiana State University, the price of oil collapsed and took the family business with it. That was when he realized he had no idea what he would do with his life.

The markets are roiling, money managers & banks are posting disappointing returns, and people are beginning to wonder if they chose the wrong guy in Greenwich to take 2% of their assets and 20% of profits. But what if the problem isn’t the guy but the idea that makes him possible: the belief that the best way to invest capital is to hand it to an expert? As a group, professional money managers control more than 90% of the US stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole less the fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more. "If you put a thousand people in barrels and push them over Niagara Falls, some of them will survive. If you take those guys and push them over again, some of them will survive. And they’ll write books about how to survive being pushed over Niagara Falls in a barrel."

FTA: 'Blaine Lourd got rich picking stocks. But then he realized that everything he thought he knew about the markets was wrong. And he's not alone.' (note: Dec. 2007 issue!)

8 Racist Words You Use Every Day. Happy MLK day! You're a racist!

Have you ever worried that, no matter how hard you try, you'll just never be racist enough? Well, you're in luck. As it turns out, you've been unconsciously using racial slurs your entire life! Slurs like...

"Of 13 million tracks available, 52,000 - just 0.4 per cent - accounted for 80 per cent of downloads."

awesome read on the sociology of shopping

The long tail

do I agree? does this matter?

nt us towards more mainstream

An interactive inquiry about why America hasn't been attacked again. By Timothy NoahUpdated Friday, Feb. 27, 2009, at 8:59 AM ET

This is the first in a series of eight essays exploring why the United States suffered no follow-up terror attacks after 9/11.

Gödel mistrusted our ability to communicate. Natural language, he thought, was imprecise, and we usually don't understand each other. Gödel wanted to prove a mathematical theorem that would have all the precision of mathematics—the only language with any claims to precision—but with the sweep of philosophy. He wanted a mathematical theorem that would speak to the issues of meta-mathematics. And two extraordinary things happened. One is that he actually did produce such a theorem. The other is that it was interpreted by the jazzier parts of the intellectual culture as saying, philosophically exactly the opposite of what he had been intending to say with it.

goel and the nature of mathematical truth

{no comment}

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7907888.stm slowdeathofhandwriting handwritinghandwriting

the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

Superb article on Space

article from New Scientist about the world being a hologram

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. (..) If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

A noise floor found in very small measurements means that our entire universe could be holographic. If true, this could have wide-ranging applications in space exploration, physics, computer science, philosophy, and other fields.

"The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level."

save

Good piece on network effects and history of social network sites by Danah Boyd.

Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media - MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc.

Feb. 28, 2009 paper on Social Media to Microsoft.

Great overview (sampling plate) about 'social media'

The indispensable Michael Lewis reports from Reykjavík on the de facto bankruptcy of Iceland. An amazing story: the country's currency is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance. This was the result of a collective madness stunning even by US standards of financial insanity. Lewis asks how a 300,000 person fishing nation with one of the highest living standards in the world managed to turn itself into a national hedge fund? Lewis reports on an inbred country where, among other things, the men are largely nuts and the women seem to have completely given up on them, The result is the first lesbian head of state, an all-female political party, and the nation's only profitable bank run entirely by women. Like most of what Lewis writes about the intersection of people and large sums of money, this is another "drop whatever else you are doing and read this" article.

on the financial meltdown ef Iceland

Iceland's collapse. "One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it."

"Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown. "

Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

Simple but useful checklist for websites. Certainly not a comprehensive list, but a good starting point.

And 20 examples of nicely designed charity websites

So how does a charity get the most out of its website? It needs to let users find out information about the charity, but the main objective of the site is to get people involved with the charity, usually resulting in the user donating money. In this article, we look at 8 principles that you should follow when creating a charity website.

ere’s an Elephant in the Ro

I spent more time working on SSDs that weren’t the X25-M than the Intel drive itself. The Intel drive just worked as it should, the rest of them didn’t.

Fascinating article on SSDs. Until now, I have been aware of SSDs but largely ignored them due to cost-per-gigabyte for this heavy-duty data user. They're starting to get interesting. I doubt my _next_ drive will be an SSD, but the one after that probably will be. Given these sequential read/write numbers, I do look forward to putting my Aperture library on an SSD.

Best article about SSD technology ever written.

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done. The loot was never found, but based on circumstantial evidence, Notarbartolo was sentenced to 10 years. He has always denied having anything to do with the crime and has refused to discuss his case with journalists, preferring to remain silent for the past six years. Until now.

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable... and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.

Compelling yarn, optioned for screen adaptation for obvious reasons.

Useful article explaining the inner workings of objects, classes, metaclasses, etc.

You've now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter...

6 Reasons Why Twitter is the Future of Search

by Mihaela Lica "Please note that the “Googlers are delighted” when sites are optimized for search. The moral: know your SEO!"

Optimize Your Site

Does Google care for SEO? Yes, it does: from Google’s SEO Starter Guide (pdf) to help provided in the Google Webmaster Help Forum, the search engine is pretty transparent when it comes to how it prefers you to optimize your site for inclusion. We’ll be discussing URL structure, TrustRank and duplicate content issues.

SitePoint.com - » How Google Really Wants You to Optimize Your Site

glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal al

Amazing bio piece on David Foster Wallace; actually chokes me up while reading; totally essential - must blog about this

David Foster Wallace

Object-oriented programming was supposed to unify the perspectives of the programmer and the end user in computer code: a boon both to usability and program comprehension. While objects capture structure well, they fail to capture system action. DCI is a vision to capture the end user cognitive model of roles and interactions between them.

Jinming

devthought

Which one are you? I'm probably a 3

Data Visualization

Today's consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for information, but until recently making sense of all of that raw data was too daunting for most. Enter the new "visual scientists" who are turning bits and bytes of data -- once purely the domain of mathematicians and coders -- into stories for our digital age.

A nice round up of teh ideas and some great examples

Advertising Age - DigitalNext

<blockquote>...the true accidental brilliance of Java is that it has created a very smooth path for its own replacements, even if Java itself has reached the point where it can no longer evolve.</blockquote>

In a recent discussion, there were assertions that C++ was a poorly-designed language. I was on the C++ Standards Committee for 8 years, and saw the decisions take place. I think it's helpful to understand the language choices for both C++ and Java in order to see the bigger perspective.

good list of design blogs

Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text.

Un nuovo alertbox con i consigli del guru dell'usabilità

Even if you've been casually Torrenting for years, BitTorrent tools keep getting better. Here's our guide for getting the most out of what is, slowly but surely, changing forever how people acquire and consume entertainments

Even if you've been casually Torrenting for years, BitTorrent tools keep getting better. Here's our guide for getting the most out of what is, slowly but surely, changing forever how people acquire and consume entertainments.

The genius behind Google's web browser

Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that’s an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission’s antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors a chance Legislation and market share aside, the technical challenge has been laid down. “Microsoft will have to build something better than V8,” Bak says. Most tech watchers doubt that they will manage to any time soon: in tests, V8 processes JavaScript 56 times faster than the most used version of Internet Explorer.

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow that seeks to improve the performance of the Python programming language. One of the project's goals is to replace the Python virtual machine with an LLVM-based JIT.

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow, which aims to bring a major performance boost to the Python programming language by making runtime speed five times faster. The project is being implemented as a branch of the conventional CPython runtime and will be fully source-compatible with regular Python applications and native extensions. This will make it possible to eventually merge the improvements into Python trunk. The goal of the Unladen Swallow project is to use LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure, to build a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that can replace Python's own specialized virtual machine. This approach offers a number of significant advantages. As the developers describe in the project plan, the project will make it possible to transition Python to a register-based virtual machine and will pave the way for future optimizations. Adopting LLVM could also potentially open the door for more seamlessly integr

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow, which aims to bring a major performance boost to the Python programming language by making runtime speed five times faster.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into Section 508 or the Rehabilitation Act or any of the rest of that stuff. It’s all about politics and has nothing to do with what I’m going to talk about.”

The issues of accessibility are a daily reality for my family. For us, it’s not a political issue at all. Our oldest daughter, Ramona, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get around.

in which accessibility is about people, not checklists.

Accessibility is NOT a checklist. Accessibility is about usability.

how the beauty ideal been retouched?

sad but true

Why magazines should let readers know if images have been retouched.

vid on photoshopping

Twitter power users have many thousands of people following their tweets. Here are their tips and insight to gaining so many followers.

5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head. Who can you trust?!

Useful article highlighting Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0

The technology landscape of the enterprise environment fits SharePoint well; the business requirements to a lesser extent.

These concerns about SharePoint’s ability to be an effective Enterprise 2.0 platform is one I hear echoed a lot with practitioners I talk to. In spite of this, I correspondingly hear that SharePoint is in fact what most organizations are planning on using when it comes to 2.0-style collaboration and knowledge management.

If it's too good to be true...

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Excellent Article on Dubai: "Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history."

Write your Google App Engine applications in Groovy

Google just announced that their Google App Engine cloud hosting platform now supports other languages than Python: namely Java and Groovy!

i find it so amazing that people can design fonts. my brain just doesn't work to that level of precision.

I remember clearly the day I was waiting for the 6 train at 33rd Street and Park Avenue in New York. I had taken pictures of type on the street for some time, but there was something here that caught my eye. There was a plastic sign on a door with letters and numbers routed out of plastic, and I noticed a couple of characters in particular: the way the 8 curved back into itself, the charming tail of the a. And then I realized that the lowercase e’s were all different. This had been done by hand and therefore wasn’t an existing typeface. I knew then that I could actually make this into a font.

Here's a captivating, personal article on I Love Typography about the design process of Jeremy Mickel's first commercially available typeface.

great typography article, about making your first font.

Look at the bottom for a list of USEFUl links. Too lazy to bookmark them all so just bookmarking this one post ...yeah, I know

The Art of CSS Positioning Warm welcomes to our very first guest poster Rob MacKay! CSS Positioning is one thing I used to struggle with, hopefully I can help you understand how positioning works and what it’s affected by, and iron out some of those kinks.

etween browsers where elements vanish, don’t show or are a few pixels out of alignment, it’s normally because you are guilty of using margin and padding for positioning

CSS Positioning is one thing I used to struggle with, hopefully I can help you understand how positioning works and what it’s affected by, and iron out some of those kinks.

The Art of CSS Positioning

Here are a few of their best stories—for the record:

A friend of mine who happens to be a famous designer (this person shall remain nameless) said something not long ago about one of my projects that really pissed me off. At the time, I objected to this person’s tone and delivery, thinking it inappropriate. After all, we’re friends! But given some distance from the event, I realize now that, the formal qualities of the remarks aside, this person had a point. They weren’t necessarily right, mind you, but there was a legitimate criticism at the core, to which I should have paid attention. In retrospect I realize that getting hot and bothered about this person’s tone said something much less flattering about me than about the person.

The notion of speaking openly, honestly and objectively about work is inherent to learning how to be a better X...."This is why art, film and architecture have achieved such great heights in our society: those art forms are economically robust enough to support a vibrant critical class."

"To put a finer point on it: are we being honest with one another?" - also designer zu designern

The importance of honest criticism (in every profession).

Surprise: there's never been a better moment to bootstrap your own Internet business. All you need is a laptop, a broadband connection and a great idea. Inside the new start-up boom

Why is programming fun? An extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) book, The Mythical Man-Month. Fred Brooks coined the term "no silver bullet" that is famous in the field of computers.

via kottke.org

from New Scientist

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he's an inmate and wears the requisite white prisoner jacket, Notarbartolo radiates a sunny Italian charm. A silver Rolex peeks out from under his cuff, and a vertical strip of white soul patch drops down from his lower lip like an exclamation mark.

Pretty amazing account of a diamond heist in Antwerp. I imagine that various Hollywood types are scrabbling for the rights to produce "Notarbartolo's Five" even as I type this...

Leuk verhaal over grote 3Oceans 11" achtige kluisbraak in Antwerp Diamond Centre

Twitter RT explanation

Great article about how good design really works

We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.

What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space.

Midnight, 19 May 1961. A crisp frost had descended on Turin’s city centre which was deserted and deathly silent. Well, almost. Two brothers, aged 20 and 23, raced through the grid-like streets (that would later be made famous by the film The Italian Job) in a tiny Fiat 600, which screamed in protest as they bounced across one cobbled piazza after another at top speed. The Fiat was loaded with dozens of iron pipes and aluminium sheets which poked out of windows and were strapped to the roof. The car screeched to a halt outside the city’s tallest block of flats. Grabbing their assorted pipes, along with a large toolbox, the two brothers ran up the stairs to the rooftop. Moments later, the city’s silence was rudely broken once more as they set to work: a concerto of hammering, clattering, sawing and shouting. Suddenly, an angry voice rang out; the man who lived on the floor below leant out of the window and screamed: “Will you stop that racket, I’m trying to sleep!” One of the young me

What really happened to Russia's missing cosmonauts? An incredible tale of space hacking, espionage and death in the lonely reaches of space. FT233 Midnight, 19 May 1961.

Sehr interessanter Artikel bei Smashing Magazin.

250!

Wordpress Tutorials

Skype does not get the respect it deserves, because eBay not only publicly admitted to overpaying for it but is making a mess of its core business. Another reason may be that Skype flies in the face of conventional Valley wisdom that says it has to be all about social media. Or maybe the fact that Skype came from Europe, and we all know that Europeans are just lunch-eating dilettantes. Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion (yes, "t" for trillion) market, should get more respect.

10 Resons why Skype is here to stay.

Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion, should get more respect.

It's a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired.

So, you’ve been on Twitter for awhile and realize it has some value beyond updating others on your every move. You may have followers and conversations, but most of your tweeps are on the surface. So, how do you build stronger connections? Here are 6 ways to take your connections deeper: 1. Add Value One big theme here is giving value on Twitter. People do not want to be sold, spammed or overwhelmed with tweets of little value. Think before you tweet. Ask, will this add value? Will this help someone? 2. Listen. Really? I thought Twitter is where I get to talk and tell people stuff. - Use the Favorites to save things you are listening to and might want to talk about later. - Try to read your tweet-stream in batches rather than watching your Tweetdeck all day. 3. Get engaged. Start conversations. - If someone in your stream asks a question? Reply. Share your knowledge. - If someone is looking for help? Offer your help or make an introduction to someone who can. - Like what s

RT @tweetmeme 6 Tips For Building Deeper Connections With Twitter http://bit.ly/ZxhBn [from http://twitter.com/Doug_Caldwell/statuses/1409223825]

guter artikel

RT @dustyedwards: 6 Tips For Building Deeper Connections With Twitter ... http://bit.ly/yIjV2 [from http://twitter.com/Bleau/statuses/1611408833]

Google検索の「&amp;as_qdr=y15」オプションが便利だぞ * 2009-05-05 (Tue) 9:03 * Google関連 * hatena button * hatena count * save this page del.icio.us Googleで検索するときに「&amp;as_qdr=y15」をつけると検索結果に「そのサイトがいつ公開されたか」を表示してくれます。 クリックしてみたけどえらい昔のサイトだったよ・・・という事態を防ぐことができて便利なのでは。 gs ↑ こんな感じ。便利。 なお、この日付は最初にクロールされた日ではなくて、最初に公開された日らしいです。サイトマップやらなにやらから計算しているらしいですが、100%正確ではないのでご注意を。そこらへん詳しく知りたい人は原文をあたってくださいな。 » Lifehacker - Display the Date a Web Page Was Published in Search Results - Search Techniques

"Googleで検索するときに「&as_qdr=y15」をつけると検索結果に「そのサイトがいつ公開されたか」を表示してくれます"

IDEA*IDEA ～ 百式管理人のライフハックブログ

Interesting perspective on RSS feeds and the future of information gathering.

A reasonably sensible look at the risks affecting children in modern life.

Stephen Fry's letter to himself: Dearest absurd childJust who was the young, arrogant and confused man to whom Stephen Fry recently felt compelled to write a long and heartfelt letter? Himself, 35 years ago

You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."

i am so charmed by old men writing wise letters to young men- rilke's, 'open letter to a young man', hofstadter writing to his young self, and now this one too

Stephen Fry: You wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time your future self had the decency to write back

oh Stephen!

An article Stephen Downes is/was preparing for submission to a forthcoming STRIDE handbook for The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU).

What is a blog? Why use blogs in education? How to use blogging in Learning?

What is a Blog?Definition, good practices, ... For education purpose.

Stephen Downes

A blog is a personal website that contains content organized like a journal or a diary. Each entry is dated, and the entries are displayed on the web page in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent entry is posted at the top. Readers catch up with blogs by starting at the top and reading down until they encounter material they’re already read. Though blogs are typically thought of as personal journals, there is no limit to what may be covered in a blog. It is common for people to write blogs to describe their work, their hobbies, their pets, social and political issues, or news and current events. And while blogs are typically the work of one individual, blogs combining contributions of several people, ‘group blogs’, are also popular.

Why and how to use blogs in the classroom.

financial crisis: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. "They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,"

アップルのトークイベント第一回講師は教授

Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need.

study of success and happiness or the lack of same

In The Court Of The Crimson King

Apple's Twitter case study

Might be a good alternative to Net/HTTP for Context Hero. How hard would it be to incorporate caching?

Uma história para descrever o funcionamento interno do Git

simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical incantations. Doing anything out of the ordinary will be terrifying. Until you understand the concepts upon which Git is built, you’ll feel like a stranger in a foreign land.

"The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. Read this parable all the way through and you should have very little trouble mastering the various Git commands and wielding the awesome power that Git makes available to you."

'The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up.'

Great walkthrough on getting Ubuntu running on a PC.

Introduction Desktop Linux For The Windows Power User : Well, it's that time of year again, when the latest version of Ubuntu is released. Version 9.04 of arguably the world's most popular Linux distribution is now available for free download. I've...

Top 50 Text Acronyms Parents Should Know 052009

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

who could wait only thirty sec

The marshmallow test -- longitudinal studies show that it may predict future success better than intelligence

The ability to delay gratification is a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. "Intelligence is really important, but it's still not as important as self-control."

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Don’t! The secret of self-control.

The problem with Google, from a design perspective

"The male brain, extreme or not, is compatible with visual design. It allows you to learn every font in the Letraset catalogue and work from a grid. In fact, the male-brain capacity for years-long single-mindedness explains why the heads of large ad agencies and design houses are overwhelmingly male. (It isn’t a sexist conspiracy.)"

Work at Google? (Via Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/27/clark-google ).

nice to have for beginners

series ejercicios

A good blog design for a beleivable and authorative information source

I have a love hate relationship with wireframes. In the last 10 years they’ve been a part of every web project I’ve worked on. There have been times when I can’t imagine how we would have solved a particular problem without them. Yet there are also times when I’ve been completely exasperated at the amount of time and energy they’ve consumed, seemingly to very little reward.

I have a love hate relationship with wireframes. In the last 10 years they’ve been a part of every web project I’ve worked on. There have been times when I can’t imagine how we would have solved a particular problem without them. Yet there are also times when I’ve been completely exasperated at the amount of time and energy they’ve consumed, seemingly to very little rewa

I have a love hate relationship with wireframes. In the last 10 years they’ve been a part of every web project I’ve worked on. There have been times when I can’t imagine how we would have solved a particular problem without them. Yet there are also times when I’ve been completely exasperated at the amount of time and energy they’ve consumed, seemingly to very little reward. This frustration has forced me to change the way that I approach wireframes. And as my approach has changed, I’ve been able to extract more and more value from black key lines and grey boxes…

Great series of blog posts about creating a 3d city scape.

Change of pace. In the last week I’ve had an idea clawing at the back of my head, and it’s clear the thing isn’t going to leave me alone until I do something with it. I don’t usually blog about my little programming projects (with the exception of the Terrain Project) because I like to imagine this site has some sort of focus, but the choice here is for me to blog about this or leave the site fallow for a week. So I’m blogging it. Perhaps you’ll find it entertaining anyway.

The creation of a procedurally generated cityscape

I cannot convey to you the size of my man-crush on Reg Braithwaite.

"Let's recap. When we explain something in our heads, our explanations have three properties that matter to whether we are optimistic or not: Whether we explain things in a personal or impersonal way, whether we explain things in a specific or general way, and whether we explain things in a permanent or temporary way. / [...] / Optimists explain good things as being personal, general, and permanent, and explain away bad things as being impersonal, specific, and temporary. And if you point out the contradiction in their explanations, they see no contradiction. To them, the bad stuff really isn't about them, it's just that one thing that one time."

a First Monday article on the creation and evolution of folksonomies

Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.

First Monday, 4 may 2009, Alexis Wichowski

Wichowski

e locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places li

Get Wired's take on technology business news and the Silicon Valley scene including IT, media, mobility, broadband, video, design, security, software, networking and internet startups on Wired.com

Thinking like a criminal is Tobias' idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you've never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He's the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.

"Marc Weber Tobias can pick, crack, or bump any lock. Now he wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities and corporate headquarters."

An article about someone with a gift for picking locks.

Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It's a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you've just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special. Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn't notice and wouldn't care anyway. He's as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a

It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date. Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives. And because, on Twitter at least, some of those people happen to be celebrities, the Twitter platform is likely to expand that strangely delusional relationship that we have to fame.

as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

Once just a fad, Twitter is developing into a powerful form of communication. What its growth says about us — and the future of American innovation

Twitter makes the cover of TIME Magazine.

"I'm going to talk about online auctions," says Hal Varian, the session's first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he's best known as Google's chief economist. This morning's crowd hasn't come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google's secret sauce

Google getta le basi per una nuova forma di organizzazione economica.

Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world's largest micropayment system. Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity, and a sales force more comfortable with whiteboard markers than fairway irons.

great manifesto for selling development projects and building an IT shop

Win without pitching

author of Growing Up Digital

DRM has affected how people use their content beyond simply protecting IP; restricts what would otherwise be considered fair use.

[ars technica]

A UK researcher has spent years interviewing people about whether DRM has affected their ability to use content in ways ordinarily protected by the law. Surprise! It has, even leading one sight-impaired woman to piracy.

End users are allowed to time-shift programs, but Jill Johnstone of the National Consumer Council notes that "the way DRM is being used is causing serious problems for consumers, including unreasonable limitations on the use of digital products and infringement of consumer rights. "

have a play with it when possible?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wave_our_first_hands-on_impressions.php

But to the stakeholders -- managers, CEOs, customers, shareholders, etc. -- software development is a mystery. They don't want to know everything about it, but they want to know enough to be able to predict the behavior of software development, at least approximately.

Why do we need an analogy? We know what we do. We program computers, with all that entails. And we know what that means, because we do it. But to the stakeholders -- managers, CEOs, customers, shareholders, etc. -- software development is a mystery. They don't want to know everything about it, but they want to know enough to be able to predict the behavior of software development, at least approximately.

t replace a programmer with just any other programmer and get similar results. It also suggests that you should evaluate what kind of project you're creating when you decide who your team should be, and how it will run. The creation of mysteries and young adult fiction and so-called "bodice rippers" and the vast sea of nonfiction books all have their own particular structure and constraints (you'd be surprised at how rigid and controlling publishers are about these things, as if they are manufacturing some kind of basic commodity -- "the murder has to happen in the first 10 pages" etc.). None of these are the mass-market bestsellers ("killer apps") that are sold by the author's voice and style (few of which I find readable). The mass-market bestsellers usually don't coincide with the great writers, since most people don't have the patience to read these meta-craftsmen, just as most programmers don't read the source code for compilers.

Agreed. Interesting comments, too. I write one-liners, short stories and novels in Python. I have many unfinished novels.

"This article describes a technique for overriding the equals method that preserves the contract of equals even when subclassses of concrete classes add new fields. "

Getting Design Approval:

design tips

# Actions” or “To Do” # “Maybe” or “Someday” # “Projects” or “Dependents”

The

user types at a terminal (a physical teletype). This terminal is connected through a pair of wires to a UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter) on the computer. The operating system contains a UART driver which manages the physical transmission of bytes, including parity checks and flow control. In a naïve syste

The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user.

buéno

2009-06-04 IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

"Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas."

"As a first step, Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients being treated at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg who would have to volunteer to participate in the scheme. Dr Pentland and his colleagues will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population. How public-health officials will use this information has yet to be decided: people who are thought to be infected could be contacted by text message and asked to visit a doctor, for example."

"Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients. [They] will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population."

Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas

F YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

Some simple customization tips for a fresh ubuntu installation to make it a productive, useful, desktop os that helps meet the needs of most.

My primary reason for using Ubuntu Linux, is that I find it a far more productive, cost effective and customizable system. Everyone has their own reasons and

This looks interesting. Might be worth passing on to others depending on how well they keep this updated.

Oh this really helps my life

"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says.

GReader: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion http://ow.ly/5xUu [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1725035126]

Retweeting @copyblogger: Penn & Teller Reveal the Neuroscience of Illusion - http://is.gd/vRUV [from http://twitter.com/apoorvgadwal/statuses/1698147950]

""People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple." For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli."

z-index is probably the CSS property that is more speedily abandoned than any other. Very often — when I previously didn’t understand z-index — I would try to apply it to an element, hoping that the element would automatically “jump” to the top in the page’s stacking order.

Most CSS properties that a web developer deals with regularly are instantaneous in their application to elements on the page. For example, when you add the background-color or font-size property to an element on your page, in most cases you will see the results immediately upon page refresh. But other CSS properties are not quite as “plug and play” as we would like. The z-index property is one example of the latter. I would venture to guess that z-index is probably the CSS property that is more speedily abandoned than any other. Very often — when I previously didn’t understand z-index — I would try to apply it to an element, hoping that the element would automatically “jump” to the top in the page’s stacking order. But that didn’t happen, so I would abandon that method and try some other way to solve the problem. Maybe you’ve had the same experience. Hopefully this article will clear up some misunderstandings regarding z-index.

According to W3schools, “The z-index property sets the stack order of an element. An element with greater stack order is always in front of another element with lower stack order.”

A Detailed Look at the Z-Index CSS Property

The z-index property sets the stack order of an element.

Every time I visit all of my favorite social media sites, all I end up seeing are the same top blogs ending up in the results, and for good reason! There are some blogs out there (Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Depot, Web Designer Wall…) that have created huge impacts in the web design community, publishing great content each and every day for us to look forward to. So I have compiled a list of the 21 greatest blogs for website designers, developers, and webmasters. These blogs usually include tips, tricks, tutorials, freebies, interviews, and much more to grab the average web designers attention. So without further ado, let’s hit the list (and all on one page, for you Diggers).

cal production Rails app on Ruby 1.8 can recover 20% to 40% o

Why attractive things work better

The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a “skin” that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.

This article takes you through 12 easy steps to understand how OSGi bundles can be used within an existing classic WAR application. Prior experience with Eclipse Web Tools (Tomcat runtime and launcher) is recommended. The code referred to in this article is available for download here [1].

Twitter citation So how do you build thought capital from retweeting? As Ben Parr wrote, “retweeting is an integral part of the Twitter experience.” Retweets are a simple, yet powerful idea: you are citing someone else’s work. This is what it looks like: In this example, @ashley0206 found something @kwtodd linked to interesting. This simple retweet builds both @ashley0206’s and @kwtodd’s credibility. Why? Because now all of @ashley0206’s followers are now aware of @kwtodd. @kwtodd is now seen as someone who understands marketing, so people following @ashley0206 (like myself) will see if they want to follow @kwtodd. This retweet also allows @ashley0206’s followers see what she is into, thus adding to her credibility. Why retweets are important Dan Zarella’s brilliant quantitative analysis places retweets into four categories, and while impressive, still misses out on the qualitative, human aspect of social networks.

Good article on the value of Retweeting as a tool to build thought capital on Twitter.

Retweet.

Статья, сравнивающая построение социального капитала на Твиттере с помощью retweets с механизмом цитирования в науках.

Being a first year teacher can be overwhelming to say the least. There is new curriculum to learn, unfamiliar school policies, classroom management challenges, and new teammates. Technology can help to ease some of these first year growing pains.

nice article with tips for any teacher

Visit http://twitter.com to create an account. Visit http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com to find other educators that teach in the same content area(s). Be

skip to main | skip to sidebar Insane Coding 'coz good thinking requires going outside the box This Blog Linked From Here The Web This Blog Linked From Here The Web Thursday, June 18, 2009

Effictiveness of sprint workouts, especially in swimming. "There’s a catch, though. Those six minutes, if they’re to be effective, must hurt. “We describe it as an ‘all-out’ effort,” Gibala says. You’ll be straying “well out of your comfort zone.” That level of discomfort makes some activities better-suited to intense training than others. “We haven’t studied runners,” Gibala says. The pounding involved in repeated sprinting could lead to injuries, depending on a runner’s experience and stride mechanics. But cycling and swimming work well."

Taleb was right ahead of the curve, again...Maybe there's something to the caveman diet, too...

I'm skeptical, but it sure would be nice

not so sure

Besides the fact that this comes from the NY Post, this article raises some legitimate causes for concern about our education system. Jack also provides some solutions worth thinking about and discussing...

Suppose all goes well. He'll be sitting in front of a teacher a good 18 months after first deciding to learn. What folly. The answer is to relieve schools of the job of validating knowledge and return them to a role of spreading it. Colleges should no more vouch for their own academic competence than butchers should decide for themselves whether their meat is USDA prime. As I write this, Google is putting every book ever written online. Apple is offering video college lectures for free download through its iTunes software. Skype allows free videoconferencing anywhere in the world. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other schools have made course materials available for free on their Web sites. Tutors cost as little as $15 an hour. Today's student who decides to learn at 1 a.m. should be doing it by 1:30. A process that makes him wait 18 months is not an education system. It's a barrier to education.

"A student who secures a degree is increasingly unlikely to make up its cost, despite higher pay, and the employer who requires a degree puts faith in a system whose standards are slipping. Too many professors who are bound to degree teaching can't truly profess; they don't proclaim loudly the things they know but instead whisper them to a chosen few, whom they must then accommodate with inflated grades. Worst of all, bright citizens spend their lives not knowing the things they ought to know, because they've been granted liberal-arts degrees for something far short of a liberal-arts education."

Author:&nbsp;Robert Fabricant Content:&nbsp; Over the past several months, I’ve been fortunate to meet and talk to a number of people — among them Jan Chipchase of Nokia, Peter Whybrow of UCLA, and Caroline Hummels of Delft University of

Great Article on User Centered Design

Robert Fabricant asks how designers can influence behaviour.

When you are embarking on the Linux experience for your initial time, there's a few things you should know.

Linux Mantainance

10 things you should do to a new Linux PC before exposing it to the Internet

excerpt from book by Jim Collins - How the Mighty Fall and why Some Companies Never Give In

Every institution is vulnerable, no matter how great. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall, and most eventually do. But all is not gloom. By understanding the five stages of decline we uncovered in our research for How the Mighty Fall, leaders can substantially increase the odds of reversing decline before it is too late—or even better, stave off decline in the first place. Decline can be avoided. The seeds of decline can be detected early. And decline can be reversed (as we've seen with notable cases such as IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Merck (MRK), and Nucor (NUE)). The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

overview of an upcoming book that analyzes the 5 stages to failure for a company or country.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, on how to spot the subtle signs that your successful company is actually on course to sputter—and how to reverse the slide before it's too late -- THE SILENT CREEP OF DOOM

-same as in PR

Establishing the look and feel of a site can be a point of contention. Web designers often become frustrated because they feel there’s a lack of respect for their expertise. Meanwhile, clients grow annoyed when their designer seemingly fails to listen to them.

# ays the best equipped to identify examples of good design—they tend to select sites based on their content rather than aesthetics. # Second, the qu

Establishing the look and feel of a site can be a point of contention. Web designers often become frustrated because they feel there’s a lack of respect for their expertise. Meanwhile, clients grow annoyed when their designer seemingly fails to listen to them. This confrontation inevitably leads to a loggerhead. On one hand we have a designer with years of design knowledge and experience; on the other, a client who knows his audience and business objectives. In this stare-off, sooner or later, somebody has to blink. Either the client will end up with a design that he is unhappy with that fails to meet his objectives, or the web designer will give in and produce a design that she believes to be less than optimal.

Print page

I think the notion of content templates will be useful. Both for the Collections overview working group and for the implementation of a CMS at NLA Web.

I'm not staring into space, I'm trying to live a balanced life

Everyone who knows me needs to read this article

The poorer you are, the more things cost.

You have to be rich to be poor. That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand. Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't o...

google on twitter all their accounts

Google accounts on Twitter - variety of updates available.

Google-related Twitter Accounts: who knew there were so many?

Las cuentas de Google en Twitter.

The neurological assessment of the benefits of swearing. Also, researchers found that when we swear too much, the words lose the power of emotion.

Web designers around the world are extremely excited about the power of CSS3 and the creative freedom it offers. With that in mind, we’ve rounded up 29 resources for you to learn more.

Carsonified

Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of a crisis-ridden industry and the elevation of Twitter as a platform for news dissemination, citizen journalism and audience interaction. So, how are journalists using Twitter? How is the service changing traditional reporting practices and what (if any) are the rules of engagement with the platform for professional journalists?

"So, how are journalists using Twitter? How is the service changing traditional reporting practices and what (if any) are the rules of engagement with the platform for professional journalists? I interviewed 25 of the journalists I follow on Twitter (most of them Australian with a smattering of South African and U.S. respondents) to find out first-hand."

Article by Julie Posetti about how journalists use Twitter - May 2009

Twitter became big news once journalists realized its power as a tool for breaking stories during the Mumbai Massacre in 2008. In the aftermath of the micro-blogging platform hitting the headlines, there was an explosion of professional journalists in the Twittersphere. This growth has been fueled by increasing mainstream awareness of the importance of social media to the future of a crisis-ridden industry and the elevation of Twitter as a platform for news dissemination, citizen journalism and audience interaction.

Very Interesting

Software Engineering: Dead?

"With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving."

Top 10 Travel Gadgets Under $50

# A converter between binary data description formats, such as Intel HEX. # Several versions of a recursive-descent parser for a simple language # Many scripts for Scite # At work I’ve developed a framework for using Python for verification of VHDL models. Python is used to write the test scenarios and generate VHDL testbenches from them. # A few applications for controlling embedded hardware via the serial port (with elaborate wxPython & PyQt GUIs) # A few applications for analyzing test reports and building summaries in a user-friendly format # A complex multi-threaded web-page download and analysis program for my own use # A couple of games: a Tetris clone with wxPython and a small game with Pygame as part of a tutorial # Analysis of numeric data with matplotlib # Parts of an assembler and linker for a synthetic language # Solved dozens of Project Euler problems, all in Python.

We work at the sausage factory, so we know how this stuff is made. And it is not pretty. Most software is created by bad programmers like us (or worse!), which means that by definition, most software sucks.

"One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you've ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven't come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers. Even now, writing about the stuff is making me physically angry. "

LOL

List of five hilarious fake facebook pages

mashable.com

beschreibung, wie innovation bei apple funktioniert

When what you teach and develop every day has the title “Innovation” attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth. Discover what makes them different. By Alain Breillatt

"abstract thinking makes it easier for people to form surprising connections between seemingly unrelated concepts"

blah blah

InfoQ: The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-08/st_best worst 1 wired 2 wiredwired 3

1 Sea mammal blowhole. Any animal that spends appreciable time in the ocean should be able to extract oxygen from water via gills. Enlarging the lungs and moving a nostril to the back of the head is a poor work-around. 2 Hyena clitoris. When engorged, this "pseudopenis," which doubles as the birth canal, becomes so hard it can crush babies to death during exit. 3 Kangaroo teat. In order to nurse, the just-born joey, a frail and squishy jellybean, must clamber up Mom's torso and into her pouch for a nipple. 4 Giraffe birth canal. Mama giraffes stand up while giving birth, so baby's entry into the world is a 5-foot drop. Wheeee! Crack. 5 Goliath bird-eating spider exoskeleton. This giant spider can climb trees to hunt very mobile prey. Yet it has a shell so fragile it practically explodes when it falls? Well, at least it can produce silk to make a sail. Oh, wait — it can't!

Few people would ever say proof-reading’s fun. Although a good edit does little to invite party hats or balloons, it is essential to effective writing.

10 quick tips on proofing and editing..

Good arguments against PPT

jose bowen suggests teachers teach naked, without computers, so that students are engaged in the discussion and not passively taking in powerpoint slides.

59 percent of students in a new survey reported that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw.

a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to "teach naked"—by which he means, sans machines.

How to Make Your Web Design Stand out from the Crowd

ThinkVitamin - Carsonified's blog about the web

Carsonified » How to Make Your Web Design Stand out from the Crowd

Few inspiring designs

“People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts.”

Great post!

Checklist when to use an ESB

At lunch last weekend I overheard someone at another table say that when she wanted a greater caffeine buzz, she chose a different roast. I can't remember whether she chose darker or lighter roast for the greater buzz, but it doesn't matter; both answers were wrong. The effect of coffee roasting on caffeine content is so negligible as to be immeasurable except under tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

the twitter dynasty

Light can be stopped and restarted?

i don't understand how cooling Na helps stop light - or what the "signature" encoded in the light is ...

Harvard brainiac Lene Hau uses Bose-Einstein condensates to "freeze" light, stopping it and effectively storing it as matter.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.news.harvard.edu%2Fgazette%2F2007%2F02.08%2F99-hau.html

Excellent Excellent Article.

ein without his pipe, George Burns without his cigar or Jackson Pollock without a cig

"Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it. " http://tr.im/vasK [from http://twitter.com/techpr/statuses/3088661236]

"When I lived with money, I was always lacking. Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

HE WASN'T ALWAYS THIS WAY. SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes.

A symbiotic relationship with industrialised society. He's almost as heavily dependent on everybody else as everybody else is. I'm not impressed at all. Nor is he all that bright: "Gold is pretty but virtually useless" - wrong. Gold is dense, soft, and therefore malleable, like lead, and both are very useful. Chimps would find such a metal (if they were bright enough to mine it, smelt it, etc.) rather handy. Then other chimps would get jealous... eventually they'd start trading it. A few thousand years later, some chimp would decide that gold is silly and go back to living in a tree (or a cage in a research facility).

"In leaner times, Suelo's gatherings include ants, grubs, termites, lizards, and roadkill. He recently found a deer, freshly run over, and carved it up and boiled it. "The best venison of my life," he says." ... ""I'll do what creatures have been doing for millions of years for retirement," he says. "Why is it sad that I die in the canyon and not in the geriatric ward well-insured?"

Out of sight in Carol Stream, 42 people move 60,000 discs daily with quiet efficiency. But don't drop off your flicks there.

Scary news story on SN outage all being about targetting one user

Why were Twitter and Facebook down for much of August 7, 2009? It looks like it was a denial of service attack... aimed at just a single person. Probably not a good strategy - taking out the network to silence an individual - because it mobilizes so many resources to fix the problem (people wouldn't care so much if just a single account was hacked). But still interesting.

InSecurity Complex - CNET News

article on lockpicker Marc Weber Tobias

Marc Weber Tobias can pick, crack, or bump any lock. Now he wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities and corporate headquarters.

Wired.com: The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit - http://bit.ly/fSW4Q (via @BlackHatEvents) [from http://twitter.com/jkordish/statuses/1997565339]

Pretty discouraging article about the efficacy of locks beyond keeping honest people honest.

Via ... someone's Twitter feed. The history of handwriting and the death of it. Does it matter that we are no longer tested for penmanship?

Don't blame computers for my chicken scratch. A shift in educational priorities has left an entire generation of Americans with embarrassingly bad penmanship. How much does it matter?

Don\'t blame computers for my chicken scratch. A shift in educational priorities has left an entire generation of Americans with embarrassingly bad penmanship. How much does it matter?

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive.

I was reading an article on "Lambda the Ultimate" about Bruce Mills's book "A Theoretical Introduction to Programming," and in particular about the difference between "menu-lookup" writing of glue code, and "real programming", which the author defines as "to increase the computational capacity, to begin with a set of operations, and develop them into new operations that were not obviously implicit in the original set."

A really nice and introspective peek into Kragen's development as a programmer. Lots of nice insights.

In the last post I wrote on caching in Hibernate in general as well as on the behavior of the session cache. In this post we will have a closer look at the QueryCache. I will not explain the query cache in details as there are very good articles like Hibernate: Truly Understanding the Second-Level and Query Caches.

Nine Essential Characteristics of Good UX Designers

What makes a good UX Designer / Information Architect

They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

been thinking about this since moving back to sf — this quote is nice, and not just for guys: " 'And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.' So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like."

I wish I didn't appreciate this, but I can't help it.

An interesting article on how many 20-somethings see the world.

Tongue in cheek Beschreibung der Lebensverhältnisse junger PhD und schlimmerer Versager.

Definitely one to read if you're twenty-something and less than content.

Yet another kid that makes me feel massively inferior.

Wow, that kid is a modern Mozart.

Two years ago, Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, this fleet of cars began an endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world.

For display during Teen Tech Week

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know Existed http://is.gd/1JjlR [from http://twitter.com/teedubya/statuses/2805323472]

ThinkVitamin - Carsonified's blog about the web

WEB DESIGN

death

hyperthymestic syndrome,

This piece blew my mind.

Researchers had never found a subject with a perfect memory — then along came Jill Price.

a mulher que não esquece nada

The woman remembers dates to the day. Amazing. But know few quizzers who can do the same.

One of the best things I ever did was quit my day job and become self-employed. I’m so happy with it that I’m recommending it to everyone: my kids, my friends, my sisters.

It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place. And, as I said in the talk, I think this often comes down to perceived barriers. Barriers to even the most modest kind of starting. Barriers that seem entirely real, external, and immovable...

Merlin Mann on how to get yourself on task with creative side projects and not rationalize against them using "Real-Life Obligations."

"It’s difficult to talk about how to get started with a project without addressing why it can feel so difficult to get started in the first place"

MaxFunCon: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work (via TSoYA) Here&#8217;s the audio from a short talk I presented a few weeks ago at Jesse Thorn&#8217;s awesome1 MaxFunCon in Lake Arrowhead, CA. The talk is subtitled, &#8220;With All Due Respect

by Merlin Mann

Great talk about overcoming creative barriers and getting stuff accomplished.

"Remember now, we’re not talking about finishing a project or even making something that you know will be the greatest thing ever made. Just starting. What’s the barrier for you?"

An excellent excellent podcast.

Larry Dignan, Sam Diaz and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.

One the most important — and most difficult — things to do when you first start using Twitter is to develop a good list of people to follow. You can check your friends’ lists of followers, watch for interesting people that come up in @replies, and look for personalities and brands who promote their Twitter addresses. But, it can take several months to build up a good list. For technology professionals, I’m going to give you a big head start.

ciekawy zestaw porad dla freelancerów

The best part about being a freelancer is having the freedom to set your own schedule and make your own rules. This, however, can also be the worst part. Without the normal structure of an office environment, many would-be freelancers find themselves wondering at the end of the day where all their time went. Getting the most out of your workday can be tough. So, to help, we present some simple ways that freelancers can increase their productivity.

Don't miss these guys at Copyblogger. It's a gold mine!

from Copyblogger

Interesting article with links to related info

August 19, 2009: Copyblogger writing a great blog post is like running a relay race. Your headline starts the race, but then it passes the baton to your opening paragraph, and its job is done. Sure, it’s important to start the race well, but if the next guy falls on his face, then how well the first guy did doesn’t much matter, does it? Every piece has to do its part.

how to write headlines that get attention

examples and rationnale of bad design ex: white font, black background; too large logo; bag photograph; flash intro; too much info on website

Using white text on a black background (for the web) is one of 5 most allday design mistakes all clients seems to want to have

Building brand equity is the most important concept !!! Veery nice article about finding work, building brand equity and charging more money :)

reglas de marketing para free lance

Freelancers have it hard. I mean, really hard. In theory, the idea of working for yourself, of being able to choose who you work with

I hate the term 'assisted suicide'. I have witnessed the aftermath of two suicides, and as a journalist I attended far too many coroners' inquests, where I was amazed and appalled at the many ways that desperate people find to end their lives. Suicide is fear, shame, despair and grief. It is madness. Those brave souls lately seeking death abroad seem to me, on the other hand, to be gifted with a furious sanity. They have seen their future, and they don't want to be part of it.

Terry Pratchett's thoughts on assisted suicide.

Must make a copy of this.

Moving!

Sir Terry Pratchett has made an emotional plea for the right to take his own life, saying: 'I live in hope I can jump before I am pushed.'

deploy

interesting study on how tech effects reading

Bases on a Stanford study there is evidence students are writing more than ever and they want to have an audience and purpose. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Ftechbiz%2Fpeople%2Fmagazine%2F17-09%2Fst_thompson

fascinating take on the ongoing trends in literacy. Study by Stanford concludes that today's youth are MORE proficient in writing because they've lived a life of writing for an audience. "We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all."

<<I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization"...For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—& pushing our literacy in bold new directions...The fact that students today almost always write for an audience gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading & organizing & debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms & smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.>>

Put an amazing portfolio together In the freelance business, having a solid portfolio is important. While many employers will accept your résumé, your portfolio is the bit of you that stands out. It shows employers what you can do and what you have done. Make it as creative as possible.

Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages

"Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages"

Must have extensions for using WordPress as a CMS

There are 2 ways to make WordPress into a better CMS. The first way involves a lot more time spent building your theme and ultimately a lot more cost. The second way uses third party plugins to extend your CMS’ functionality.

By http://bit.ly/Tweets2Delicious

apple stevejobs biography jobs mac

For five years the owner of the Jackling House in Woodside, California, has been trying to knock it down. He hates the place, calling it “one of the biggest abominations of a house I’ve ever seen”. He hates it so much, he has abandoned it to live a few miles away in Palo Alto. Pictures of the interior show a ghostly, decaying mansion. The owner can’t knock it down because of protests from conservationists. But a deal has been done. He will spend $600,000 to have it taken down and will have it rebuilt elsewhere — not a big victory by his standards, but a satisfying one. He has been having a hard time lately.

My own view is that a Jobsless Apple will seek a merger with Google. The two companies are rapidly converging... There is Apple’s iPhone and there is Google’s Android, not a phone in itself, but an operating system that can be used by other companies. Google also produce a web browser called Chrome, which competes with Apple’s Safari. And, most importantly, Google is working on a computer operating system, also called Chrome, which may well be a very serious competitor for Mac OS X... The point is that both companies are aiming to seize dominance of the world market from Microsoft... The loss of Jobs’s genius for products would mean Google’s innovation and Apple’s design and market sense would be a very good fit, although antitrust regulators might disagree.

"Apple Inc is worth around $140 billion. But is it worth anything without Jobs? It is a company formed around his personality and inspiration. It is also the most watched, envied, admired and adored company in the world."

Nokia N900

Please note - This article is nothing but our first impressions of the device and some musings about what's going to happen. The N900 itself has reached the stage when most of its elements are operable, so we decided we could publish this lowdown. 550! half it guys... or better quarter it.

I was ready to give up on Nokia (and their Symbian-based phones) and go for an Android phone next time.. but now I see that the HTC Hero won't have a keyboard, and now I get a look at this amazing Linux based Nokia, and well, maybe I might be able to salvage my relationship with Nokia after all.

Entire markets have been transformed by products that trade power or fidelity for low price, flexibility, and convenience.

But the experience taught Kaplan and Braunstein a lesson: Customers would sacrifice lots of quality for a cheap, convenient device. To keep the price down, Pure Digital had made significant trade-offs. It used inexpensive lenses and other components and limited the number of image-processing chips. The pictures were OK but not great. Yet Pure Digital sold 3 million cameras anyway.

The low end has never been riding higher.

** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more ** Being able to work just about anywhere is a mixed blessing. If you're tired of dying batteries, lost receipts, absent files, and l

If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, says novelist Lev Grossman, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work - WSJ.com http://bit.ly/X9oM4 [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/3680002494]

BA

iA is a strategic design agency in Tokyo, Japan. We analyze business goals and user needs, and develop interfaces that match.

When confronted with the necessity of offering news for free, editors are quick at pointing at the cost involved in news production. Which of course is beside the point. Information on the Internet is as common as snow in the arctic. You can’t expect Eskimos to buy a snowman. But, hey, wait; this is not just another rant with the usual talking points. After producing news site after news site for a wide range of customers, we actually have something to contribute:

the value of information

5 Tips on How to Write a Killer Slogan (with Interactive Examples)

Pre-alpha book release

# Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source by Richard Monson-Haefel # Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say by Kevlin Henney

ThinkVitamin - Carsonified's blog about the web

FreightRefunds.com - Provides freight audit for clients who ship cargo via ocean freight and the refunds are paid to clients directly from the service providers.If your company is not paid a refund, our service at Ocean Freight Refunds Inc. (OFR) is free of charge.

a good article on combining different fonts (ie. what serif works with a sans-serif).

The future of CSS is arriving fast, and many tools, languages, and solutions have been developed that make CSS a job not just for Web

An article describing the basic syntax of clojure

In this article, you will see some of the ways that Clojure addresses the key concerns of OO: encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance.

A great review of Predictably Irrational - the hidden forces that shape our decisions by Dan Ariely. Why we act the way we do when we buy and how we are constantly manipulated by companies and advertisers. The question we have is will this change because of social media?

"7. Capitalize on our Aversion to Loss" - : - A good reason for subscriptions to have multiple levels

# f what you've spent so far on a service, product, or relationship -- in effort or money -- is probably far less than you think. Be willing to walk away. # Once you've bought something, never rely on your internal judgment to assess its value, because you're too close to it now. A

It's a fascinating examination of why human beings are wired and conditioned to react irrationally. We human beings are a selfish bunch, so it's all the more surprising to see how easily we can be manipulated to behave in ways that run counter to our own self-interest. This isn't just a "gee-whiz" observation; understanding how and why we behave irrationally is important. If you don't understand how these irrational behaviors are triggered, the marketing weasels will use them against you.

OkCupid study using the messages sent by its users.

Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message

Mmmmm stats applied to online dating - fascinating looking at what words work best. I wonder if similar principles apply to blog posts.

We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message

Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between "emotional" decision-making and "rational" decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

From cake, steak and tapas, to oysters, chicken and burgers, Killian Fox roamed the world to find the 50 best things to eat and the best places to eat them in, with a little help from professionals like Raymond Blanc, Michel Roux, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray

Killian Fox roamed the world to find the 50 best things to eat and the best places to eat them in, with a little help from professionals like Raymond Blanc, Michel Roux, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray

"Here we’ll break down 5 awesome Bing-specific features that are really growing on us. From insightful information to help us better plan our trips to cashback on purchases, and a visually stimulating or Twitter (Twitter)-enhanced search experience, we’re starting to think Bing has some zing."

Here's an article about Google's Microsoft competitor, bing.com. It argues that bing may be better...

Bing() is now the fastest growing search engine. A Nielsen report shows that it currently holds 10.7% of the search market (to Google’s() 65%), but its month-over-month growth is 22%, which is astronomical. Here we’ll break down 5 awesome Bing-specific features that are really growing on us. From insightful information to help us better plan our trips to cashback on purchases, and a visually stimulating or Twitter()-enhanced search experience, we’re starting to think Bing has some zing.

Article from Mashable - Travel INsight, Cashback, Visual Search, Bing Tweets, Enhanced Tweets

Interesting read, although I usually end up feeling let down by Microsoft.

Visual results, travel results

Bing (Bing) is now the fastest growing search engine. A Nielsen report shows that it currently holds 10.7% of the search market (to Google’s (Google) 65%), but its month-over-month growth is 22%, which is astronomical. Microsoft has been pumping an endless supply of dollars into its marketing and advertising initiatives around Bing, and the strategy is clearly paying off. Hype aside, Bing happens to be a very viable search alternative to Google, and offers several incentives that Google can’t compete with at the moment. Here we’ll break down 5 awesome Bing-specific features that are really growing on us. From insightful information to help us better plan our trips to cashback on purchases, and a visually stimulating or Twitter (Twitter)-enhanced search experience, we’re starting to think Bing has some zing.

tipos de layout interessantes

nice article throwing light on the differences between ART and DESIGN

One of the most insightful articles on art and design. Concise and well written.

erview week rotating on actual production code, pairing with the same people they'll be working with if they're hired. Everyone gets a say in whether to hire a new recruit, and hesitance from a developer that actually paired with them means they do not get hired.

Event calendars and date pickers are really useful plugins for web applications. Wordpress does have a date picker, which allow bloggers to schedule the article. I am a big fan of jQuery, so i always use jQuery Calendar plugins to accomplish my tasks when the clients asked me to implement an event caldendar for them. In this article, i would like to share 9 really useful jQuery Event Calendar and Date Picker plugins that every web designers and developers should know.

9 Useful jQuery Calendar And Date Picker Plugins For Web Designers

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The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched. The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute.

GoogleのIEに対する目の敵ぶりが凄まじい。

った。でも、今のところターゲットはIEだけだ。 それは正当な行為だと思える。IEはGoogleの宿敵Microsoftの製品だが、ユーザ数ナンバーワンのWebブラウザであると同時に、Webの標準規格から外れたところの多い問題児だ。IE7からはやや良くなったが、まだほめられたものではない。標準性の問題だけでなくパフォーマンスも良くない。Chrome Frameは、ChromeのWebkitとJavaScriptエンジンの最

20+ Powerful Wordpress Security Plugins and Some Tips and Tricks

Plus Maths Magazine: Feature Article

The Carol syndrome

A mathematical explanation of how pretty girls scare boys away.

Mooie vrouwen worden zelden aangesproken. Wiskundige onderbouwing waarom

hatred

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.

windows vs osx

Windows works for me. But I'd never recommend it to anybody else, ever.

(via FakeSteve)

»But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness.«

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession.

By Paul Krugman

real time search explained

(3rd screen-shot down)

For those not familiar with the history of this discussion, the term "parse" here is being used in its strict sense to mean static parsing -- taking a piece of code and determining its structure without executing it. In that strict sense the Perl program does not parse Perl. As Jeffrey pointed out it means that you can't reliably parse perl code without executing it. This means that things like static code analysis, code transformation and syntax hilighting will never be reliable. This is a drawback indeed, but on the other hand it means that modules can extend Perl's syntax, and that other nifty stuff can be accomplished. So I understand this node as a proof of a property that is seldom fully understood.

[ UPDATE 14 Aug 2009: A series of three articles in The Perl Review, now available online, expands on this node. In that series, the proof is carefully laid out in three different versions, and is much more thoroughly explained. ]

most-used-and-abused-web-design-trends-of-all-time

The year is 1999. You've just watched the Matrix, and it's blown your mind. You sit down in front of your computer to work on a web design and then create or

Eric Wong’s mostly pure-Ruby HTTP backend, Unicorn, is an inspiration. I've studied this file for a couple of days now and it’s undoubtedly one of the best, most densely packed examples of Unix programming in Ruby I've come across.

"Eric Wong’s mostly pure-Ruby HTTP backend, Unicorn, is an inspiration. I've studied this file for a couple of days now and it’s undoubtedly one of the best, most densely packed examples of Unix programming in Ruby I've come across."

ruby + unix, know your history

Unicorn is basically Mongrel (including the fast Ragel/C HTTP parser), minus the threads, and with teh Unix turned up to 11. That means processes. And all the tricks and idioms required to use them reliably.

Serious problems like this aren’t supposed to exist nowadays. Every serious or visible exploit is found and fixed quickly. But here we will show you something simple and ordinary yet quite dangerous.

a

2009 Trends article on LogoLounge.Com - http://www.logolounge.com/logotrends/default.asp?Archive=True&ArticleID=680

Trends article

Rules to successfully retweet and gain followers.

via.shojin

『HTML5 を使おうとする人に、さまざまなリソースを提供することを目的として運営されているサイトです。このサイトで掲載されている記事は、HTML5 を習得する上で、非常に有益なものばかりです。特に、マークアップに関する記事が充実しています。』

html5doctor ( http://html5doctor.com/ )とは、Richard Clark 氏、Bruce Lawson 氏、Jack Osborne 氏、Mike Robinson 氏、Remy Sharp 氏、Tom Leadbetter 氏といった HTML5 に関して著名な方々が共同で運営しているサイトです。<html>5doctor は、HTML5 を使おうとする人に、さまざまなリソースを提供することを目的として運営されているサイトです。このサイトで掲載されている記事は、HTML5 を習得する上で、非常に有益なものばかりです。特に、マークアップに関する記事が充実しています。 HTML5.JP では、html5doctor の許可を頂き、記事アーカイブの日本語訳を掲載しましたので、ぜひ、HTML5 の理解にお役立てください。

次世代HTML標準 HTML5情報サイト

mashup is app

8 Awesome Mashups Made Possible by APIs http://bit.ly/BFfPa [from http://twitter.com/gohewitt/statuses/4713099243]

Really interesting/cool!

Geeks, as a general rule, are pretty easy-going. We like to think things through, so passionate confrontations aren't commonplace for us. When we get well and

“Mac, Windows, or Linux? Does it really make a difference?”

Geeks, as a general rule, are pretty easy-going. We like to think things through, so passionate confrontations aren't commonplace for us. When we get well and properly provoked, though, watch out! We won't stop talking until every last point that we can think of has been made at least twice. So, what do you say to provoke a geek? Glad you asked!

Top ten ways to provoke a geek argument: http://cli.gs/hBUzX9 (via @JinniDotCom) [from http://twitter.com/mkeagle/statuses/2118079070]

not so productive argument.....

Experience Themes How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products by Cindy Chastain on 2009/10/06

Como usar historias para elegir el tema general de un sitio y mantenerlo enfocado.

The more beautifully you shape your work around one clear idea, the more meanings audiences will discover in your film as they take your idea and follow its implication into every aspect of their lives.

There’s an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what’s important about the story. He’ll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing” the damn thing (i.e. what to keep, what to lose, what actually happens at the end). The story will be all the better for it because it all hangs together with a central idea that will give it greater impact and meaning.

The world is rife with business opportunity, and nowhere more so than online. I often think of the web as something of a wild west frontier, awaiting anyone

shopping cart

The world is rife with business opportunity, and nowhere more so than online. I often think of the web as something of a wild west frontier, awaiting anyone intrepid enough to stake out a claim. But to start an online venture you first need to have an idea of what you want to do. For many would-be entrepreneurs ideas are many and easy to come by, but not everyone feels this way.

So let’s say I was setting out to start a new business tomorrow. I would sit down and think about what sorts of problems I have, both offline and on, and how I wish they could be fixed with an online solution. When thinking of solutions, I always ask myself whether I, myself would really use the solution if some other company magically brought it to market right now. It’s important to be honest and realistic with yourself because if you wouldn’t use the thing, chances are neither will others.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Ftechnology%2F3304496%2FBe-lucky---its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

[A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.] haha! coincidentally I was talking with Frank M about this just today..

Very interesting. I tend to dismiss "luck" as a silly non entity but would definitely file myself under "lucky" rather than "unlucky" if you made me choose. I agree entirely that being positive and dealing with what you actually have rather than what you'd like to have are useful attributes. On the intuition front I don't think most decisions matter that much - making them one way or another and getting on with it is more important than what the decision is. I guess thinking you can make things work out either way is a "lucky" kind of a thing.

GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward.

ck or two here and there may not seem like a big deal. But if you're frequenting ATMs outside your bank's network

I grew up like Athena—covered with playing cards instead of armor—and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.

Ricky Jay profile in the New Yorker recommended by Whet Moser

Terrific profile of magician and historian Ricky Jay, and "the virtues of skeleton men, fasting impostors, and cannonball catchers".

A 1993 profile on sleight-of-hand artist and erudite Ricky Jay.

A profile of Ricky Jay from the New Yorker. April 1993.

Productivity builder

hartas transparentes

Hivelogic - Podcasting Equipment Guide (2009)

Great article! Check out this guy's site for other info re. podcasting and audio

Great list for beginning, intermediate

So, if you’re thinking about podcasting and have no idea where to start, if you’ve tried recording using your computer’s built-in microphone and realized just how bad that sounds, and if you’re ready to get serious about creating great audio, you’re in the right place. My hope is that this article will assist you in building a recording rig that suits your needs and meets your budget.

give Google Account users the option to sign in to websites with their Google credentials and without having to sign up for a new account at those sites

rd data formats such as Portable Contacts and OpenSocial REST APIs."

use 'via @' instead of 'RT @' and more details

Tips for using “via @”

Could this be the next RT?

There’s a Better Way to ReTweet! - http://tinyurl.com/dflfo2 [from http://twitter.com/FredericMartin/statuses/1354855281]

by Miles Tinsley - follow him at @milestinsley Retweeting is a popular way to share a useful or interesting tweet. The concept is beautifully simple, but

via or RT http://is.gd/nRcA I guess via is the better way, time to start trying it out [from http://twitter.com/afoster/statuses/1517730628]

"次期GFSが実装するマルチマスター構成は、Amazon DynamoやWindows Azureのキー・バリュー型データストア「Azure Storage」が採用済み。Amazon Dynamoはコンシステントハッシングというマルチマスター構成を採用し、Azure Storageはピア・ツー・ピア技術の基盤である「分散ハッシュテーブル」というマルチマスター構成を採用する。 　Amazon DynamoやAzure Storageは、データの主たる保存先をサーバーの物理メモリーとすることで、システムの応答性を向上するというアプローチを採用している。これまで、「データの永続化」とはハードディスクにデータを保存することを指していた。しかし十分な数の複製を複数のサーバーに作成すれば、保存先がメモリーでもデータの永続化が図れるというのが、Amazon DynamoやAzure Storageの発想だ。"

Googleのすごさ

やっぱりGoogleすげーや。

は

In the olden days, boys and girls used to spend hours using double cassette decks to carefully craft mix tapes to share in order to express their innermost

HTML5 - passo a passo 1

If we could tear into the fabric of time and look a decade into the future, what kind of experience might we find? In this article we will explore creating a timeless user experience.

What I can do!

300000

YouTubeなどの動画サイトで10秒ごとに動画がフリーズするのは、Firefox2.0以降に搭載されているセッション復元機能が原因だとか。Firefoxのデフォルト値では開いているタブを10秒ごとに保存する設定になっているそうで、多くのタブを一度に開いているとより動画が固まりやすいそうです。 では、これを解消するためにはどうすればよいのでしょう？ 答えはシンプル。セッション復元のための保存のインターバルを長くすること。具体的な方法としては、アドレスバーで「about:config」と入力しEnterキーを押すと、フィルターボックスが表示されますので、さらにフィルターボックスに「browser.sessionstore.interval」と入力しましょう。すると「10000（"10秒に保存する"の意）」が表示されるはず。この数値を5分ごとの保存とするならば「300000」、2分なら「120000」など、任意の数字に変更すればOK。

セッション保存のインターバルを長くする方法 / browser.sessionstore.interval = 120000 (=2分) など

Why Haskell is beyond ready for Prime Time

Here’s a concrete example: I’ve got a list of numbers, and I want to split it up into two lists — one consisting of the evens, one consisting of the odds. This seems like a pretty specialized task, so I doubt there’s a function written for it explicitly. So let’s look for a function that takes a list, and a boolean test, and splits it into two lists — one consisting of the elements satisfying the test, and the other consisting of the elements that don’t. That is, I need a function that takes a list of integers, and a function from integers to bools, and produces two lists of integers. No problem: I jump over to Hoogle and search for functions of type [Int] -> (Int -> Bool) -> ([Int], [Int]). It produces a short list of results, tells me what library they are in, and even gives a brief description of what the function does. I quickly see that partition is the function I want.

**** Great Haskell Advocacy . We’ve got all the usual things — source control by darcs, unit testing by HUnit, automated testing by Quick Check, and source documentation by Haddock. We’ve also got package management by Cabal (tied into Hackage, of course). We’ve got one other tool that is perhaps the strongest reason for the language — the Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler. You won’t find a more advanced compiler anywhere on earth. It produces code that is performance-competitive with C, has built in support for profiling, and features a rich interactive mode that both helps you test code and also explore types and interfaces.

InformIT: Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson > Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson

Entrevista com os autores do livro Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, 15 anos após sua publicação.

All successful standards are as simple as possible, not as hard as possible.

joes

@font-face for free commercial

tips for wed design

myInkBlog.com

CNN's New Website Design Deconstructed

It has been a while since I did one of these sort of posts and I think its long over due. Being that I am in a real simple design state of mind lately, I thought I would do a showcase of websites that feature very organized and clean designs. While many designs that fall into this category tend to be “minimal” themes, that’s not always the case. Some of the examples below are proof of that.

タモさんの生姜焼きレシピ

«надо что-то делать»

+лечение простуды, пишет врач, советы хорошие

лечение: "тепло одеть, увлажнить, проветрить, не пихать еду и напоить"

грипп - профилактика, лечение

Комаровский про грипп

как лечиться от гриппа и ОРЗ

!!!!

Dicas boas!!

argues that the process of requirements elicitation as project definition are secondary to the process of creation,testing and learning about nature.

What I cannot create I do not understand. --- Learn how to solve every problem that have been solved. --------- 1) The Space Shuttle Main Engine... many different kinds of flaws and difficulties have turned up. Because, unfortunately, it was built in the top-down manner, they are difficult to find and fix. 2) avionics system, which was done by a different group at NASA: The software is checked very carefully in a bottom-up fashion. First, each new line of code is checked, then sections of code or modules with special functions are verified.

Interesting to see the problems that are present at Google regarding staying in sync with the latest kernel code.

Notes on methods to eliminate corruption in a system by making honesty the most advantageous course of action

"Here’s a self-enforcing protocol for determining property tax: the homeowner decides the value of the property and calculates the resultant tax, and the government can either accept the tax or buy the home for that price. Sounds unrealistic, but the Greek government implemented exactly that system for the taxation of antiquities. It was the easiest way to motivate people to accurately report the value of antiquities."

You Can Get There From Here: Websites for Learners

The Steve Irwin approach to discovery on the web—“I’m going to click this here link…just to see what happens!”

Context

From A List Apart: "Content-rich" is not enough. Most websites are not learner-friendly. As an industry, we haven’t done our best to make our content-rich websites suitable for learning and exploration. Learners require more from us than keywords and killer headlines. They need an environment that is narrative, interactive, and discoverable. Amber Simmons tells how to begin creating rich content sites that invite and repay exploration and discovery.

What we find changes who we become

"But just as important as the narrative consciously built into a website is the narrative readers create for themselves. Readers build their own narrative as they work their way through a website, moving from one content object to another. This narrative emerges from interrelationships between content items and helps readers turn fragmentary pieces of information into knowledge. The more clearly a reader can discern these relationships, the clearer and more meaningful the narrative he’ll be able to construct."

Well it does, just not as much as expected in the study. Key thing: Use exercise to promote your health, not for the sole aim of weight loss. Slashdot: http://tr.im/EExN

Pretty good article on diet's role in weight loss despite exercise

For some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don’t necessarily lose weight. A study published online in September in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results.

For some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise dont necessarily lose weight. A study published online in September in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that.

Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?

Optimisation et ordre du code AS3

addedToStage

its nice website for flash phtoshop dreamweaver programming cn get lot of help from this one....

What if Google released a JavaScript library that sucked, and no one noticed? JavaScript expert Dmitry Baranovskiy has peeked under the hood of Google’s new Closure Library, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Follow along as he points out a few of the library’s many failings, and why the Web deserves better from Google.

The beauty of being a web designer is creating a detailed, creative, and original web design in Photoshop, without having to (for the most part) think about how it will be coded. During the design phase, it’s all about the look, and either the coding can be taken care of later, or be outsourced to a developer. Either way, not thinking about the development usability or functionality is a great way for a designer to not feel limited in the design process. This is a great way of thinking, and can lead to the best designs. However, once it does need to be coded, we as designers are in a tricky spot. In this article, you’ll find a few simple tips that can help designers learn basic XHTML/CSS conversion efficiently for a quick-loading website that is accurate to the original PSD.

The beauty of being a web designer is creating a detailed, creative, and original web design in Photoshop, without having to (for the most part) think about how it will be coded.

So... At the end of the day, what do I think? I like Go, but I don't love it. If it had generics, it would definitely be my favorite of the C/C /C#/Java family. It's got a very elegant simplicity to it which I really like. The interface type system is wonderful. The overall structure of programs and modules is excellent. But it's got some ugliness. Some of the ugliness is fixable, and some of it isn't. On balance, I think it's a really good language, but it could have been a lot better. It's not going to wipe C off the face of the earth. But I think it will establish itself as a solid alternative. And hopefully, over time, they'll fix some of the worst parts of the ugliness, without sacrificing the beauty or simplicity of the language. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fscienceblogs.com%2Fgoodmath%2F2009%2F11%2Fgoogles_new_language_go.php

"The most innovative thing about it is its type system. There are two kinds of types in Go: concrete types, and interface types. Concrete types are exactly what you're used to from most programming languages. Interface types are similar to interface types in languages like Java, with one huge exception: you don't need to declare what interface types you implement! An interface is a specification of what methods a type must provide to be used in some context. Anything which implements those methods implements the interface. Even if the interface was defined later than a type, in a different module, compiled separately, if the object implements the methods named in the interface, then it implements the interface." -- This is nice and all, but I (still) don't understand why this isn't just "abstract data types implemented in a language people might use." Didn't Barbara Liskov *just* win a Turing Award for this? Isn't this idea 30+ years old? (Yes, it is.)

Good Go, Bad Go.

How Twitter was hacked.

As Larry Page astutely observes: "There is a pattern in companies, even in technological companies, that the people who do the work -- the engineers, the programmers, the foot soldiers if you will -- typically get rolled over by the management ... you end up kind of demoralized. You want to have a culture where the people who are doing the work, the scientists and the engineers, are empowered. And that they are managed by people who deeply understand what they are doing."

"Don't settle"

Google 10個の教訓

Very clearly written

Metaprogramming in Ruby: It’s All About the Self

The CSS box model lies behind everything you do in CSS. Every element is defined by a rectangular box that encloses that element. Understanding how the box , Daily Resource for Web Designers and Developers.

PDB Overview

Fixed-Schedule Productivity. The system work as follows:1. Choose a schedule of work hours that you think provides the ideal balance of effort and relaxation. 2. Do whatever it takes to avoid violating this schedule.

Fixed-Schedule Productivity: How I Accomplish a Large Amount of Work in a Small Number of Work Hours

Refuse. Hmmmm.

Nt sure if it is true bt if yes then Yelp better hv an explanation.. http://tinyurl.com/cmach3 [from http://twitter.com/rohitharsh/statuses/1227620373]

...interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise

Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. "Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, 'Sorry, it doesn't make sense for me to do this,' ... then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing." To these mom-and-pop business owners, Yelp's sales tactics are coercive, unethical, and, possibly, illegal.

♺ @themartorana Turns out, YELP is evil. Corroborated by a local Philly establishment. I feel lied to by YELP. http://bit.ly/YelpIsEvil [from http://twitter.com/inxilpro/statuses/1231965312]

Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site ... for a price.

Psychology is one of those subjects that everybody likes to think they know something about. We love to go around diagnosing our friends and co-workers, both to make sense of the world and to make ourselves feel like we're smarter than they are. But like any science that makes its way into the pop culture, a lot of the "common sense" statements we hear every day are so wrong that they border on raving idiocy. Such as...

Fuel Your Creativity

creativity

Diet with no meat before dinner.

I've dropped about 10 pounds so far, and a little more falls off every day. The fix hasn't been running, lifting, or anything trendy&mdash;I'm just eating less meat, and enjoying what I eat more.

do you get the application up and running on your development environment. If you’re lucky, there’ll be some up-to-date instructions for getting it to kind of start up. Then you’ll get one of the other developers to show you how to run a few

http://www.developers.org.ua/archives/vseloved/2009/07/03/weekly-linkdump-182/

Article about grids in web design

Understanding Caching in Hibernate – Part Three : The Second Level Cache Performance, Scalability and Architecture – Java and .NET Application Performance Management (dynaTrace Blog)

In particular I read a whitepaper several years ago a

In the last posts I already covered the session cache as well as the query cache. In this post I will focus on the second-level cache. The Hibernate Documentation provides a good entry point reading on the second-level cache. The key characteristi

Guy Kawasaki's list of 25 top social media blogs

PART 1: Web 3/0: I've been following a fascinating 3-part series of posts this week by Greg Boutin, founder of Growthroute Ventures. The series aimed to tie together 3 big trends, all based around structured data: 1) the still nascent "Web 3.0" concept, 2) the relatively new kid on the structured Web block, Linked Data, and 3) the long-running saga that is the Semantic Web.

Lista de libros sobre programación que merece la pena tener

“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” - Albert Einstein

A year and a half ago, I was largely an amateur at what I do, but I had a passion for it. My passion has led me on some interesting journeys.

Introduction by John Brockman "What is this stuff, you ask one another," says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, "and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?"

There's an excerpt from novel here, but the important part is the non-fiction appendix analyzing and refuting the actual arguments for God.

A few myths and misconceptions about grids exist in the design community that can be detrimental, especially to designers who are new to the subject. I recently read an article, which is no longer online, claiming that grids have disadvantages and it listed the reasons why. As you can guess, I very much disagreed with the entire article and felt that it was providing a lot of bad information on grid systems. All of the listed “disadvantages” were distortions derived from the lack of understanding on how a grid works and functions. In response to that article, here’s my attempt at clearing up this mess. Grids are a design trend. Grids have been in use long before graphic design became a discipline. During the 13th– and 14th-centuries, scribes used the Villard Diagram to organize their handwritten manuscripts. In the 15th-century, Gutenberg and others divided their pages using the Van de Graaf canon. The use of a grid is not a trend, it’s a fundamental skill that designers should pos

A few myths and misconceptions about grids exist in the design community that can be detrimental, especially to designers who are new to the subject. I recently read an article, which is no longer online, claiming that grids have disadvantages and it listed the reasons why. As you can guess, I very much disagreed with the entire article and felt that it was providing a lot of bad information on grid systems. All of the listed “disadvantages” were distortions derived from the lack of understanding on how a grid works and functions.

8 tips voor een betere webshop

1. Remove clutter 2. Make sure the shopping cart stands out 3. Provide visual feedback 4. The bigger the better 5. Make buttons and links obvious 6. Always be there to help 7. Handle errors gracefully 8. Communicate your value add

8 ways we increased ecommerce sales by 10,000% « Boagworld

10,000% increase in sales over 5 years. Sounds incredible doesn’t it. Just to make that an even more incredible, their average customer is in their 80s! Who said the elderly don’t use the internet. When we started working with Wiltshire Farm Foods their monthly revenue was a 100th of what it is today. Of course in reality that success was not down entirely to us. Matt Curry, our client at Wiltshire Farm Foods has put his heart and soul into that website and as I say in Chapter one of the Website Owners Manual, it is the site champion who makes or breaks a site.

Web design has followed a long and windy road from it’s rather modest beginnings. Initially, the term “web designer,” described something much more akin to that of a graphic designer: a designer who concerns themselves with the presentation of text and pictures. Today, however, the majority of websites an applications online are interactive. In turn, modern web designers are called upon to make a number of considerations drastically different than those made by traditional graphic designers. To bridge this gap, we call upon the discipline of interaction design. This article serves as a good jumping off point for people interested in learning more about Interaction Design. To that point, we’ll briefly cover the history, guiding principles, noteworthy contributors, tools, etc. related to this fascinating discipline. Even if you’re an interaction designer yourself, give the article a read and share your thoughts in the comments below.

This article serves as a good jumping off point for people interested in learning more about Interaction Design. To that point, we’ll briefly cover the history, guiding principles, noteworthy contributors, tools, etc. related to this fascinating discipline.

engines out the wazoo!

via /.

ビルゲイツ、ジョブズ、ラリーペイジ

未来に先回りして点と点を繋げて見ることはできない、君たちにできるのは過去を振り返って繋げることだけなんだ。だからこそバラバラの点であっても将来それが何らかのかたちで必ず繋がっていくと信じなくてはならない。自分の根性、運命、人生、カルマ…何でもいい、とにかく信じること。点と点が自分の歩んでいく道の途上のどこかで必ずひとつに繋がっていく、そう信じることで君たちは確信を持って己の心の赴くまま生きていくことができる。結果、人と違う道を行くことになってもそれは同じ。信じることで全てのことは、間違いなく変わるんです.... 皆さんも自分がやって好きなことを見つけなきゃいけない。それは仕事も恋愛も根本は同じで、君たちもこれから仕事が人生の大きなパートを占めていくだろうけど自分が本当に心の底から満足を得たいなら進む道はただ一つ、自分が素晴しいと信じる仕事をやる、それしかない。そして素晴らしい仕事をしたいと思うなら進むべき道はただ一つ、好きなことを仕事にすることなんですね。まだ見つかってないなら探し続ければいい。落ち着いてしまっちゃ駄目.... ほかの誰もが『そんなcrazyなことはできない』と思うアイデアであれば、競争相手はほとんどいないということ 自信を持て。頻繁に失敗しろ。不可能に対して健全な疑念を持て。君たちにはエンジニアリング、テクノロジー、ビジネスの能力を活用して世界を変える大いなるチャンスがある。重要なことをしろ。楽しめ。さもなければ成功は望めない。旅をしろ。中国・アフリカ・インドがお薦めだ。そこには驚くべきことが沢山ある

"What the innovators have in common is that they can put together ideas and information in unique combinations that nobody else has quite put together before."

After a six-year study, researchers say they've found the five traits shared by all great innovators. Brilliant blue-sky thinking, they say, springs from acute observation and the active pursuit of new experiences -- and that's something anyone can learn to do. "Studies have shown that creativity is close to 80% learned and acquired," says one researcher. "We found that it's like exercising your muscles -- if you engage in the actions you build the skills."

"In an article published in December's Harvard Business Review the researchers identified five skills that separate the blue-sky innovators from the rest -- skills they labeled associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and discovering."

"The way they act is to observe actively, like an anthropologist, and they talk to incredibly diverse people with different world views, who can challenge their assumptions,"

Summary on a HBR December 2009 Article- 5 Keys to innovation, based on research HBS & Bringham Young 6 year study of 3K executives and 500 entrepreneurs: 1) Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields; 2) Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask "why?", "why not?" and "what if?"; 3) Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers; 4) Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots; 5) Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives

Writing for the web is a challenge. There are usually word length restrictions, the fact that users scan rather than read every word, and sometimes style guides to adhere to. There are enough writing tips online to keep you reading for longer than you probably desire. Here are 1o tips that have been the most useful to me: Know your audience This sounds obvious but is often taken for granted. The only way you can write relevant copy that is targeted at the right audience in the right tone of voice, is to understand who that audience is. Depending on where your audience are located, you may have to include local expressions or if writing for a wide audience be specific with things such as dollars. If it is US dollars then say so. If it is Cardiff in Wales then say so as there is also a Cardiff in New Zealand and other countries.

Summary of the Facebook architecture and the bottlenecks they have had to work around

After considering a variety of data clustering algorithms, found that there was very little win for the additional complexity of clustering. So at Facebook, user data is randomly partitioned across indiviual databases and machines across the cluster. Hence, each user access requires retrieving data corresponding to user state spread across hundreds of machines. Intra-cluster network performance is hence critical to site performance. Facebook employs memcache to store the vast majority of user data in memory spread across thousands of machines in the cluster. In essence, nodes maintain a distributed hash table to determine the machine responsible for a particular users data. Hot data from MySQL is stored in the cache. The cache supports get/set/incr/decr and

travel

This is no luxury liner hopping between Caribbean islands. It is a modern freighter. Hundreds of cargo ships, carrying everything from fire engines to apples, are crossing the world's oceans and many are happy to take you along for the ride. A far more intimate and relaxed experience than you might imagine, the experience on board is a sharp contrast to the rough and industrial outward appearance a container ship tends to project. You will be one of a handful of passengers amongst a crew that is unlikely to number more than a few dozen. There will be no organized games of bingo or evening cabaret show. You might, however, be invited to karaoke with the sailors and you will almost always dine alongside the captain, who is far more likely to turn up in shorts and a t-shirt than full uniform.

Tina Fey has rules. They’ve guided the 38-year-old writer-comedian through marriage, motherhood, and a career that went into hyperdrive this fall, when her Sarah Palin impression convulsed the nation, boosting the ratings of both <i>Saturday Night Live</i> and her own NBC show, <i>30 Rock.</i> The author reports on how a tweezer, cream rinse, a diet, and a Teutonic will transformed a mousy brain into a brainy glamour-puss.

Maureen Dowd and Tina Fey

Vipassana Fellowship's online Meditation Course provides a supported introduction to Buddhist Meditation as found in the Theravada tradition. Resources and support for meditators and authoritative texts from the earliest Buddhist sources.

glide

/via /cc /by

Neue Twitter-Konventionen: "slashtags"

"All of these are simple conventions for adding more standard metadata to a post in a specific, uniform way."

Since it’s apparently all the rage to design your own features for Twitter now, I figured I’d build on my success with the hashtag and crank out a few more. All of these are simple conventions for adding more standard metadata to a post in a specific, uniform way.

Slashers and pointers. /via, /cc, /by. Good ideas /via @ChrisMessina.

Information on starting a Freelance company. Found on the sixrevisions website.

Starting your own company is wonderful, scary, and exciting! I’ve recently gone through the process and started up my own freelance company, Snoack Studios, and I’d like to share my personal insight on how to get your own company off the ground, using my own story as an example. How to Start a Freelance Company Step 1: Find a Business Name First things first, you need a name. As a freelancer, you will probably want to be a Sole Proprietor and you can certainly use your own name. I wanted to plan for expandability and flexibility: I may have employees, I may subcontract some work to other freelancers, or maybe even sell my business one day, so I went with a company name of Snoack Studios. Whatever you choose, make sure it works for you and fits the service you provide. Perform some basic research Do your homework as well, search Google to make sure that your company name is unique, and mostly importantly, search trade names at the Secretary of State office in the state you live in (

While there remain certain specific contexts where it is advisable to craft and present wireframe layouts for client evaluation and approval, this practice is often a really bad move and one made at the wrong moment in the design process, and for the wrong reasons. Wireframes can be useful, valuable artifacts for informing the designer’s process. But they often fail miserably as a first-step deliverable for clients.

Design View | Articles and opinion on design professionalism, technique and culture by Andy Rutledge

before you create a wireframe for client evaluation and approval, ask yourself: how will this help my client in the project process? Again, evaluate your answer carefully before you decide to craft a wireframe for your client’s evaluation …and before you commit to do so as a part of the project deliverables. Context matters.

Some good points here. Sometimes wireframes are necessary, but other times they get in the way.

Last week Facebook rolled out a new version of their privacy settings to all users. Privacy settings are something that many Facebook users are regularly confused about. That’s why we published our original Facebook privacy guide back in February. After millions of people visited our privacy guide, we realized how important privacy is to Facebook users. With the new settings rolled out, we thought that now would be a great time to update the guide with the latest changes. In this guide we present a thorough overview of the most important privacy settings which includes previous settings that are still relevant as well as new privacy settings that have been added by Facebook. The majority of the old privacy settings are still relevant, however there’s a chance that you may now be sharing much more information with the whole world. Make it through our new Facebook privacy guide and you’re guaranteed to be safe.

But Wave is a revolutionary new way to keep in contact with people and collaborate on documents and could completely replace email.

The idiot's guide to Google Wave Because, admit it - you still have no idea what it's all about : TechRadar UK

Top 50 design blogs

by Jeffrey Zeldman

Why understanding the difference is what it's all about by Jeffrey Zeldman

"Another is that combat in orbit would be very different from combat in "deep space," which is what you probably think of as how space combat should be – where a spacecraft thrusts one way, and then keeps going that way forever. No, around a planet, the tactical advantage in a battle would be determined by orbit dynamics: which ship is in a lower (and faster) orbit than which; who has a circular orbit and who has gone for an ellipse; relative rendezvous trajectories that look like winding spirals rather than straight lines."

First, let me point out something that Ender's Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets' orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we'll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.

The Physics of Space Battles

I hope someone's working on the simulation.

By night, Joe Ades dines with his fourth wife at exclusive restaurants, sips Veuve Clicquot at the Pierre, and goes home to a three-bedroom Park Avenue apartment. By day, he is something else altogether. At 72, the “peeler guy” in the Turnbull & Asser shirts is a New York legend.

ohno! Joe Ades, the peeler salesman of Manhattan has died. RIP. http://bit.ly/ib6Z http://bit.ly/LHCF

great article.

hat meets the needs of the present without compro

When a word becomes so popular you begin hearing it everywhere, in all sorts of marginally related or even unrelated contexts, it means one of two things. Either the word has devolved into a meaningless cliché, or it has real conceptual heft. “Green” (or, even worse, “going green”) falls squarely into the first category. But “sustainable,” which at first conjures up a similarly vague sense of environmental virtue, actually belongs in the second. True, you hear it applied to everything from cars to agriculture to economics. But that’s because the concept of sustainability is at its heart so simple that it legitimately applies to all these areas and more. Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability.

Despite its simplicity, however, sustainability is a concept people have a hard time wrapping their minds around. To help, Scientific American Earth 3.0 has consulted with several experts on the topic to find out what kinds of misconceptions they most often encounter. The result is this take on the top 10 myths about sustainability.

ones zeros majors and minors: esoteric adventures in solipsism, by chris wanstrath

games flash fun online

What You Need To Know

Creativity, Innovation, Team Building, Leadership, Brainstorming, Idea Champions

Good Ideas to create a atmosphere for innovation

"Microsoft, Ozzie wrote, had to think and operate more like an Internet company and, as much as possible, like a Web startup. Consider ad-supported or subscription business models, he advised, viral distribution, and experiences that "just work." Instead of the clunkiness that Microsoft products so often displayed, focus on being "seamless." Bottom line: Change big-time, or else."

the back story on Azure and the good 'ol days

.

Previously, a big part of any development team at Microsoft was making sure its new product worked in lockstep with everything else the company produced. While that approach avoided annoying conflicts, it also tended to smother innovation. "This philosophy of independent innovation...is something Ray pushed very strongly," Ozzie's approach was to encourage people to rush ahead and build things. Then he'd have a team of what he calls the spacklers fill in the gaps and get things ready for release. He spent a lot of time on the physical workspace for his team. He had workers rip down the labyrinthine corridors on one floor and called in architects to create a more open design. Now, walking into the Windows Live Core group is like leaving Microsoft and visiting a Futurama set. Office windows open onto hallways so that quick eye contact can trigger spontaneous discussions. Whiteboards are everywhere. Pool tables, mini-lounges, and snack zones draw people toward the center of the space.

Enigma or not, Ozzie is the one who must lead—or drag, if need be—a software giant with 90,000 employees, $60 billion in revenue, and an untold number of blue screens of death across a chasm. Can he do it? Ozzie's big advantage is that he knows what's on the other side. In fact, he caught a glimpse of it 35 years ago and has been heading there ever since.

The Site is Now Missing (as of 10 march 2009) But Lucky i annotated most of the part , so click on the Expand and read from ther Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.magazinetimepass.com%2Foddities%2Fmost-bizarre-experiments-of-all-time

Broussard and Miller assembled a seven-person team to build the product. The pair had a knack for discov

On the last day, they gathered for a group photo. They were videogame programmers, artists, level builders, artificial-intelligence experts. Their team was — finally — giving up, declaring defeat, and disbanding. So they headed down to the lobby of their building in Garland, Texas, to smile for the camera. They arranged themselves on top of their logo: a 10-foot-wide nuclear-radiation sign, inlaid in the marble floor.

absolutely

"This is really bad," Cook told the group. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, "Why are you still here?" Khan, who remains one of Cook's top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional."

Why are you still here?

One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. "This is really bad," Cook told the group. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, "Why are you still here?" Khan, who remains one of Cook's top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.

If you've never been convinced before that Emacs is the text editor in which dreams are made from, or that inside Emacs there are unicorns manipulating your text, don't expect me to convince you.

んー、どうなんだろ。導入してる歯医者はまだまだ少なめ。一般販売してないってのがメンドクサイなあ。

一部の歯科医院で購入。500ml入りボトルで2,400円～3,000円

Great site on digital storytelling and how it relates to 21st century learning

article by Bernajean Porter

The only apps worth downloading for gamers who are broke from buying an iPhone

Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.

Sid Meier's Rules http://bit.ly/atPXx (via @newsycombinator) [from http://twitter.com/tadej/statuses/1715393349]

Source of Sid's famous "double or half it" rule.

Double it or Cut it by Half One Good Game is Better than Two Great Ones ...

Rules to game design by Sid Meier

"If a unit seems too weak, don’t lower its cost by 5%; instead, double its strength. If players feel overwhelmed by too many upgrades, try removing half of them. In the original Civilization, the gameplay kept slowing down to a painful crawl, which Sid solved by shrinking the map in half. The point is not that the new values are likely to be correct - the goal is to stake out more design territory with each successive iteration."

As more negative stigma is attached the the younger generations relying more heavily upon social networking sites to form relationships, could it be possible that some sites; such as twitter, feel that they are more capable of providing insight into the world than the mainstream news corporations? Maybe because they have less political bias and promote freedom of speech they could, in fact, be better equiped to present the truth.

If your like me you enjoy enhancing your photos in Photoshop. It's a lot of fun to take your shots and experiment with them. Have you ever seen photos in

If your like me you enjoy enhancing your photos in Photoshop. It’s a lot of fun to take your shots and experiment with them. Have you ever seen photos in magazines or on the web and wondered how they achieved that look. I have collected over 100 Photoshop actions that will help you achieve some of these looks and save you a ton of time in the process. Happy post processing!

Whole foods are the key to good health (and not very much sugar)

The most important consideration in constructing a healthy diet: Eat whole food with minimal processing. These 12 foods do the trick.

Nuts and berries.

A google cache exists at http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:lJPQ3N4Tj0kJ:ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/jsf-sucks/+game-over-java-server-faces&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

a hate list of hate articles against the hated jsf, chronicled over time

Really liked this. There's a lot more going than most realize.

"Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to."

Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.

I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.

article on twitter

So you’re drowning in a sea of information. Perhaps the answer is more information.

Gravity keeps our feet on the ground and our planet circling the sun, but we know remarkably little about it. New Scientist investigates the force's greatest mysteries.

Blogging with students

Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students - Good article on blogging in the classroom.

Includes 5 common mistakes instructors can avoid to make bloggin an effective tool.

The New York Times took on Portland on a budget and discovered all sort of local favorites and that the city is very affordable.

year-old Netflix Prize competition, offers a grand prize of US $1 million for an algorithm that’s 10 percent more accurate than the one Netflix uses to predict customers’ movie preferences.

Netflix's bounty for improving its movie-recommendation software is almost in the bag. Here is one team's account

Bell Labs explains their strategy for solving Netflix's collaborative filtering problem.

urban geography

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network. Networks of secret passages and tunnels have been built on a giant scale, from components of the Maginot line to the Viet Cong Cu Chi Network. Others perform a peacetime function, such as the half mile tunnel network H.G. Dyar built under his Washington home, as a hobby, the passageways under Disney’s Magic Kingdom or the unbelievable 5000 year old Lizard People tunnel network under Los Angeles that the L.A. Times published a diagram of during the depression. Here is a collection of our favorite tunnel network diagrams, drawings or models.

interesting subterranean stuff

This year the MIT class ring, the Brass Rat, hides a hackers’ diagram of a subterranean campus wide tunnel network.

My friend Chris would like this. So sweet.

Here is an overview of product design evolution over years:&#10;&#10; &#10;&#10;http://designreviver.com/tips/a-decade-in-web-design-1997-to-2009-in-pictures/&#10;&#10; &#10;&#10;Most of them have moved towards and clean clutter-free user experience. http://www.cnn.com/ stands out well (perfectly minimalist!)&#10;&#10; &#10;&#10; &#10;&#10;Thanks & Regards,&#10;&#10;Pravin

Evolución de conocidos sitios web

The letter I wish I could write to my former self, and have beamed at light-speed through some kind of vacuum tube and delivered at the precise moment when I finally decided to learn to program.

Hardship of programming

One in particular now has grown out of hand so bad that we've decided to start from scratch for a whole new version. Why? Lets say you have 3000+ php files, and your boss says "Hrm, we're seeing some problems with performance. Can you display at the bottom of each page the # of queries you use on that page?" If you coded your entire project like the example above, you would be totally screwed. You would have to find each and every mysql_query() and add some counter at the end. It would be a managing Nightmare. So how cold you solve this problem?

"Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit." ... "This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box."

Recomm. by Francois R.

Skip the 11 o'clock news, respect your mouth and 18 other stay-healthy mustsYou've heard it before: Eat a healthy diet, exercise and don't smoke, and you'll add years to your life. In fact, one study found that more than half of all deaths from chronic di

In the first half of his introduction to actor concurrency, Alex Miller discussed the limitations of shared-state concurrency and explained how the actor model is expressed in Erlang. While Erlang is a nonstarter for many shops, actor implementations do exist for languages that run on the JVM. Find out how actors work and see them implemented using Scala's standard library, Groovy's GParallelizer, and the Java libraries Kilim, ActorFoundry, Actors Guild, and Jetlang.

Comparison of the LISP and HASKELL (functional) languages

Interesting read on some programming languages I hadn't heard of until today, they are still very useful apparently

the ampersand

A história do "&".

História do Ampersand < & > | The ampersand is one of the most unique typographical characters out there.

the keyword-rich anchor text link isn't counted by Google because the first link is the image. You can use the brilliant First Link Checker tool to find out quickly and easily if this is a problem for your sit

For the first of my guest posts for Econsultancy I wanted to take a step beyond the generic, oft-rehashed ‘SEO tips’ (you know, things like “include keywords in your page titles” and “create great content”) and contribute something based on my experience of working across a number of e-commerce sites.

storytelling

HTML5

Here’s a riddle: Imagine there is a learning technique proven effective through 100 years of use that is now enhanced by the power of today’s technology. Imagine it can excite learners to continue their work well past the parameters of the school day. What is it, and would every school in the country do it? It is project-based learning, and the answer is yes, and no. Project-based learning can be traced back to John Dewey and it has come and gone since the early 20th century.

Gary Stager, the executive director at the Constructivist Consortium and an adjunct professor of education at Pepperdine, says the elements of a good project should include relevance for students, ample time to plan, change, and complete the project, and enough complexity to inspire intense work. There should also be a way to connect the project with people across the hall, on the other side of town, or across the world, an opportunity for students to collaborate with peers, international experts, and anybody in between, and a way for students to share their completed work.

Why new schools are choosing an old model to bring students into the 21st century.

It's not an intranet, it's a VPN. It's not an extranet, it's a VPN. Hahahaha, I remember PointCast! (But push is back, at least on certain mobile devices that don't let you run background processes ...)

This list is useful for 20-somethings, too. Now when the senior person in the office uses one of these terms, you'll know what he's talking about.

i'm gonna use these as much as possible from now on.

Article on challenges of living/working in a world that is full of distractions and the impact that this has on us as individuals - both in terms of productivity and sense of well being

Review of Gallagher's 'Rapt'

April 2009: Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book [Winifred Gallagher's "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life"] explains why learning to focus is the key to living better.

Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book explains why learning to focus is the key to living better. By Laura Miller

Very interesting perspective.

There seems to be a growing sentiment that interaction designers, visual designers and UI designers need to know how to write code.

Do not force user experience designers to learn how to code.

In 99% of interviews with designers we will always get asked the same question! “Where do you get your inspiration from?” It crops up time and time again

Why XMPP will be huge very soon

Interesting article about the fold

Insight on designing websites 'below the fold'.

CUTE, AND HE'S RIGHT, I WILL SCROLL, BUT ONLY SO FAR (try to paginate me and I'll get pissed off and leave instantly)

teaching for creativity

The field of web design is constantly changing and growing. Getting in a rut is often the result of not staying up to date with the latest trends and technologies in the industry. Even if we do stay up to date, many of us at one time or another feel anxious about whether we’re advancing. If you’re at a firm, you may be working towards a raise or promotion, or perhaps you’re thinking of jumping ship to a bigger and better company. For the freelancers out there, we of course determine our own destiny; but far too often our careers feel stagnant, too. This article goes over some ways to reignite your growth as a web designer.

How to Grow as a Web Designer | Webdesigner Depot - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/02/how-to-grow-as-a-web-designer/

รักษาโลก โลกสีเขียว

RT @adellecharles: The Art And Science Of The Email Signature http://j.mp/9IZT6i

Tips on email signature

Doug Bowman leaves Google: Comment

another ex-designer from google, a more tempered view of the politics

g heavily on the Google design process which, as he puts it, frequently puts data-driven design ahead of expert opinion.

Dear Google engineers and PMs: […] Please keep in mind that everyone has opinions on design, and that your UX professional has devoted years of their life to learning to separate their subjective opinions from their objective understanding about how the larger audience will interpret an interface.

Kevin Fox responds to Douglas Bowman's post regarding his reasons for leaving Google.

Great comment on using XFS and snapshots to reduce downtime.

If you think user testing is time consuming and expensive, ThinkVitamin.com will change your mind with their article on cheap, effective testing, allowing you to get back to designing for your audience.

Quotes from Steve Krug and Jakob Neilsen

Creating a website can be challenging but the hardest part lies in making it usable. The problem is the majority of web designers forget that the website wasn’t created for themselves but to solve the users’ needs.

Question

いい言葉だ

RT @estherschindler: I wrote: "Old-school programming techniques you probably don't miss" http://bit.ly/5BoWr - I disagree with some of it. [from http://twitter.com/nealrichter/statuses/1652091891]

apple itunes app store criticism iphone

This post covers the concept of design and what is a graphic designer. It will also give you six excellent tips on how you can drastically improve your designs.

Design is everywhere. We see it in on billboards as we drive down the street. When we go to a restaurant and look at the menus, we see it. When we sit down on our couch and watch television, it’s visible on the commercials, advertisements, and even the movies and TV shows. It is all around us and it stimulates and motivates much of our decisions subconsciously every day. The encyclopedia refers to graphic design as, “the process of communicating visually using text and images to present information. Graphic design practice embraces a range of cognitive skills, aesthetics and crafts, including typography, visual arts and page layout. Like other forms of design, graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created and the products (designs) which are generated.” Toothpaste What is design? What is design? To design is much more than assembling, ordering, or editing. To design is to add value and meaning to something, whether it be a men

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1111257

RT @thomasjhardy: How Social Gaming is Improving Education - http://bit.ly/a4vwi5 [from http://twitter.com/axbom/statuses/8777021752]

How Social Gaming is Improving Education

Enter social video games as a solution — immersive environments that simulate real-world problems. Today, technologically eager schools are replacing textbook learning with social video games, and improving learning outcomes in the process. Here’s how they’re doing it.

"The line between software development and software architecture is a tricky one. Some people will tell you that it doesn't exist and that architecture is simply an extension of the design process undertaken by developers. Others will make out it's a massive gaping chasm that can only be crossed by lofty developers who believe you must always abstract your abstractions and not get bogged down by those pesky implementation details. As always, there's a pragmatic balance somewhere in the middle, but it does raise the interesting question of how you move from one to the other." -- Simon Brown

"...I decided to ask some of today’s most exciting artists and creators what they do when the ideas aren’t flowing. I left the question fairly open ended and asked, What do you do to inspire your creativity when you find yourself in a rut? As expected, I was presented with an array of strategies, ranging from listening to Boards of Canada in a forest alone, to cooking up a storm (recipe provided) and waiting for the mind to clear."

Cookie cutter web sites | Carsonified - http://carsonified.com/blog/design/cookie-cutter-web-sites/

Atencion en "Details with personality"

How to the design a chees/poker AI without frustrating the player

An interesting Gamasutra article on how to introduce human-like stupidity into your AI by making your AI smarter rather than dumber.

"One big myth is that fruit juice is a healthy part of our diet. Wrong. Drinking a glass of fruit juice a day — which is the equivalent of one soft drink of 110 to 180 calories — has been linked in the U.S., Australia and Spain to increased calorie intake and higher risks of diabetes and heart disease. Eating a piece of fruit provides vitamins, fiber and, best of all, tends to reduce intake of other food. Most fruit juices are just sugary beverages, providing extra calories — all from refined carbohydrates — without sating appetite. ... The added calories can contribute to weight gain and increased risk of both diabetes and heart disease."

Fruit juices aren’t nearly as healthy for you as you think..

From the Room for Debate Blog, debonking some food myths!

Lots of Galactica goodness...

Sometimes a Great Notion is to read what the Trib is saying about BSG - yet another post, love it!

RDM talks about the final cylon

OMG, how cute is the picture here?

How Coverity built a bug-finding tool, and a business, around the unlimited supply of bugs in software systems.

“The unusual starts to occur with increasing frequency.”

We all suffer occasional lapses in memory. Some people suffer severe neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's, that rob them of their ability to form memories or remember recent events. Three new studies shed light on the way the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories. Experts say they could have implications for people with certain mental disorders.

Death comes for every man, but that doesn't mean you have to make it easy for the bastard. These are the men who, despite whatever terrible things they may have done in life, earned a place in our hearts with their amazingly badass deaths

Ya it's the classically Tetris implemented in javascript:)

Good Software Engineering Applied To A Javascript Tetris Game

Learning Styles

Learn Effectively by Understanding Your Learning Preferences

4MAT

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter.

Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web

Excellent in-depth look at how Google's constantly-improving algorithms make it superior.

With just a few weeks of training, you can learn to “see” objects in the dark using echolocation the same way dolphins and bats do. Ordinary people with no special skills can use tongue clicks to visualize objects by listening to the way sound echoes off their surroundings, according to acoustic experts at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain.

*

I need to try this!!

wired = weird

Ordinary people with no special skills can use tongue clicks to visualize objects by listening to the way sound echoes off their surroundings, according to acoustic experts at the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain.

On Feb. 14 I awaken to this headline: "Professor Beaten to Death by Autistic Son." I scan the story while standing, my coffee forgotten. Trudy Steuernagel, a faculty member in political science at Kent State, has been murdered and her 18-year-old son, Sky, has been arrested and charged with the crime, though he is profoundly disabled and can neither speak nor understand. Sky, who likes cartoons and chicken nuggets, apparently lost control and beat his mother into a coma. He was sitting in jail when she died. This happens to be two days after my older son's 21st birthday, which we marked behind two sets of locked steel doors. I'm exhausted and hopeless and vaguely hung over because Andrew, who has autism, also has evolved from sweet, dreamy boy to something like a golem: bitter, rampaging, full of rage. It happened no matter how fiercely I loved him or how many therapies I employed. Now, reading about this Ohio mother, there is a moment of slithering nausea and panic followed immedia

a mother's story of her violent autistic son

about a woman whose autistic son is violent

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers Passionate Able to Learn, Unlearn and Re-learn Balance Principle and Practice Keep It Simple Software (KISS) If You Don't Know the Answer, Know Someone Who Does Focus on Value Puts the Needs of the Many Before the Needs of the One

modfelos de design em cor

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room. Udi Manber, Google’s head of search since 2006, leads the proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in vari

Filosofisk (?) artikel om googles algoritmer

Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything

Smashing Magazine

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I've been an employee of The Atlantic, that I'd eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism [...]

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I’ve been an employee of The Atlantic, that I’d eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism to disclose them all, and that the number of pieces I miss every year far exceeds the number I’m able to read.

and it's on track to become the open source world's canonical answer to the question of text search. MySQL and Solr, the two popular solutions, are showing their age. MySQL introduced full-text search in late 2000 as a way to more intelligently search blobs of text stored in databases. You can work a full-text clause into a query, and MySQL will rank the result rows by how relevant it thinks they are to the query. MySQL uses textbook search algorithms and doesn't allow for a lot of relevance tuning. It's like a drawing from a five year old: The heart is in the right place, but everybody knows that kids suck at drawing. Implementation details aside, MySQL still suffers from scalability problems. Having ignored the trend of chip manufacturers to build multiple cores into CPUs, hoping that this unpleasant trend that required them to actually think about multi-threading would just blow over sooner or later, MySQL's ability to handle parallelism is, well, see the five year old's drawing.

Sphinx can index 10 megabytes of data per second and can search up to 100 gigabytes of text on a single processor. It also supports multi-machine distributed searching, as in the case of Craigslist.

"The Books We Make embrace their physicality"

"As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?"

Very reasonable, and well said. I agree with his recommendations and conclusions.

Scanned, read in detail later.

SQL is Scalable and NoSQL Isn’t For Everyone The point is one that I think all rational people already realize: The ACID RDBMS isn’t appropriate for every need, nor is the NoSQL solution.

"[Though as Michael Stonebraker points out, SQL the query language actually has remarkably little to actually to do with the debate. It would be more clearly called NoACID]"

A sociology student placed a fake quote on Wikipedia, only to see it show up in prominent newspapers, revealing that a lot of the press doesn't go much further than most 'Net users when it comes to researching a story.

another media hoax; bad journalism....

A key part of the argument for maintaining traditional journalism is that its trained reporters can perform research and investigations that the untrained masses can't, and the content they produce is run by editors and fact-checkers. The revelation that their research is often no more sophisticated than an average Web surfer's, and that the fact checking can be nonexistent, really doesn't help that argument much. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fmedia%2Fnews%2F2009%2F05%2Fwikipedia-hoax-reveals-limits-of-journalists-research.ars

According to the AFP, the hoax traces back to Shane Fitzgerald, a student at Ireland's University College Dublin. Upon learning of the death of the Oscar-winning composer Maurice Jarre, the student modified his Wikipedia entry, adding a completely fictitious post that was nicely designed to fit perfectly into any obituary. "When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear," the added material read in part.

Excellent share for students about not only wikipedia's limits, but also about the shoddiness and PR core of much journalism. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fmedia%2Fnews%2F2009%2F05%2Fwikipedia-hoax-reveals-limits-of-journalists-research.ars

A Conversation with Martin Odersky

Scala, a general-purpose, object-oriented, functional language for the JVM, is the brainchild of Martin Odersky, a professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In the first part of a multi-part interview series, Martin Odersky discusses Scala's history and origins with Artima's Bill Venners.

This is awzzzzom

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students.

There are more than three million teachers in the United States, and Doug Lemov is trying to prove that he can teach them to be better.

please visit his profile page at Monitor Talent

Received this link a week ago, and still I'm sending it to ppl... it's an AWESOME read. http://is.gd/n4MY [from http://twitter.com/dc0de/statuses/1434156624]

The goal of continuous deployment is to help development teams drive waste out of their process by simultaneously reducing the batch size and increasing the tempo of their work.

the more he says it, the more it makes sense

People often ask, "How do I gain more Twitter followers?" Ars offers six Twitter etiquette tips to help you gain those followers without having resorting to dirty tactics or annoying habits.

“She has this thing with guys where she talks about sex really upfront and kind of puts people off balance,” said Joe. (It was also around November that a guy named Troy was at Union Pool, the Williamsburg bar, when the bartender passed him a note from another customer. It read, “I want to give you a hand job with my mouth,” and was signed “Korean Abdul-Jabbar.” It was, according to Troy, from Ms. Ferrell. Another time, a patron at Fabiane’s, the café on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, said Ms. Ferrell passed him a note which read: “I want you to throw a hot dog down my hall.”)

Fascinating!

A quarter century ago, Windows wasn't everywhere. In fact, some were doubtful it would ever ship at all. And Tandy Trower was there.

"The bickering is getting old. Here’s what we can do."

"Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web" /by @danielmall via @russmaxdesign http://j.mp/9hRhAB #webstandards #flash

lest I forget (Oli Studholme)

It seems my HTML5 id/class name cheatsheet article interested a few people, so here’s the start of an in-depth look at the document structures that fall out of the HTML5 spec. First, let’s introduce three easily confused HTML5 structural elements:

An in depth look at the HTML5 elements for semantically structuring your pages.

HTML5 yapısal araçları div - section, article

Needed to have a nap but read that article about "building a teacher" instead. Long yet int'resting ! http://tinyurl.com/education-rules

The quest for the special elements that make great teachers great and how to give that to everyone else.

behaviors of successful teaching

Good story on how much science is messed up by misuse of statistics

Tom Siegfried, Mar 27, 2010 "uring the past century, though, a mutant form of math has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos. Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot." "Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contra"

On the abuse and misuse of statistics by science

Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics

A useful article outlining the shortcomings of statistics when it comes to ascertaining scientific fact. Half of all medical data could be wrong. "For better or for worse, science has long been married to mathematics. Generally it has been for the better. Especially since the days of Galileo and Newton, math has nurtured science. Rigorous mathematical methods have secured science’s fidelity to fact and conferred a timeless reliability to its findings."

Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics

We hear a lot about “biblical marriage” these days. Some of us might not be clear on what that means. The website Religious Tolerance has provided a helpful article on the types of marriage found in the pages of the bible.

1. Polygynous Marriage 2. Levirate Marriage When a woman was widowed without a son, it became the responsibility of the brother-in-law or a close male relative to take her in and impregnate her. If the resulting child was a son, he would be considered the heir of her late husband. See Ruth, and the story of Onan (Gen. 38:6-10). 3. A man, a woman and her property — a female slave 4. A man, one or more wives, and some concubines The definition of a concubine varies from culture to culture, but they tended to be live-in mistresses. 5. A male soldier and a female prisoner of war Women could be taken as booty 6. A male rapist and his victim Deuteronomy 22:28-29 describes how an unmarried woman who had been raped must marry her attacker. 7. A male and female slave A female slave could be married to a male slave without consent, 8. Monogamous, heterosexual marriage

1) polygynous 2) levirate 3) wife's slave 4) concubines 5) soldier and kidnapped female prisoner 6) rapist-raped 7) two slaves (forced) 8) monogamous heterosexual

Keep this as a reference to common couch FUD :)

Richardson Maturity Model : A staged approach towards RESTfulness by @martinfowler http://ff.im/-hUO5V

/via Leonard Richardson

A model (developed by Leonard Richardson) that breaks down the principal elements of a REST approach into three steps. These introduce resources, http verbs, and hypermedia controls.

Design Resources & Inspiration

<p>Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.</p><p>The web is alive and growing more active with each new day. The increasing number of sites that crop up on the daily shows no signs of slowing, and as the online ranks grow, designers [...]</p>

Válogatás kínai designerek munkáiból.

In the instant design age many of us often stray away from the basics in design. If you had a professor in college who taught you the fundamentals of design these may be engrained into your skull. For the self-taught, you may have a book on your desk with these very principles that you refer to on a daily basis. However, the more and more people that flood the internet for design content need to learn the basics before trying to make a stellar gradient in Photoshop. While this is cool and amazing right now, there will come a point where this style is left behind and a new style is made. In history, this lesson has repeated itself with movements like the Bauhaus and Swiss Modernism and will soon label our current trends as part of history. The fundamentals of design will however, never change. They are the glue that holds the industry together and we need to learn & take them to heart.

Goemon 2

長期日本在住の外国人のブログ　てか長いなー

AmericanDad blogs about how lunatics and hypocrites in high places have hijacked the Republican party, and he calls for true conservatives to boot them out and take their party back. Tons of links and references.

Crazy amount of links about how the repubs are crazy

Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame directed against record companies, artists, internet file sharing and any other theories for which a case could be made. We've read and heard about the "good old days" and how things used to be. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. After 35 years as an artist in the recording business, I feel somehow compelled, not inspired, to stand up for our fellow artists and tell that side of the story as I perceive it. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well.

Statement about the state of teh music industry

As Mellencamp states rock and roll used to spur "social movements" that were influential enough change the fabric of our society. Rock was born in cotton fields South morphed into blues became when white kids started play blues. Then came hippies then punks rap. In every case music a protest for those who felt oppressed some way. What sucks is this medium has been take over by very people it meant oppose: old rich guys. . .(who are probably fat too. .)."--via comment.

Read this later.

Mellencamp paints a hopeless picture. http://tinyurl.com/dctse6 I think he's never seen myspace. MB new release on vinyl? [from http://twitter.com/MilkBoyArdmore/statuses/1388145040]

On My Mind: The State of the Music Business - The Huffington Post

е

Основные правила при разработке сайтов

нию на свет более сотни сайтов и около трех десятков интерфейсов. Среди работ есть проекты для таких компаний, как Sunbay Software,

even take driving tests, apply for passports, or enroll in college classes under one of his many aliases: J

a real-life master criminal

Briljant

the viemu/codekana guy talks about his incremental parser

CSS Sprites tekniği hakkında makale

What do you think? Should we reconsider the use of mega sprites in CSS development? Do the statistics in favour of the savings on HTTP requests warrant the use of...

CSS sprites, muito util e interessante a tecnica, neste post podemos ver que ele é util em casos de estilizacao... mas nunca no conteudo

Not too long ago, Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi were chatting with Eric Viennot, a French creator and writer. Jordan Mechner single-handedly pioneered a type of cinematic videogame with Karateka in 1984 and Prince of Persia in 1989. Eric Chahi similarly single-handedly created 1991's Another World -- known in the U.S. as Out of this World -- a painterly cinematic videogame in a similar tradition. Jordan Mechner had the following advice to share, I think it's great advice.

m. Google rates Web sites, in part, by how many lin

For years, I winced at what popped up when I Googled my name. The top result of a search on "Julia Angwin" was an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2005 after I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was indicted for making false statements, perjuring himself and obstructing justice by lying about how and when he learned the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. I hated seeing the story at the top of the list for a number of reasons: It was not a topic I normally wrote about; it had an underwhelming headline, "Novak's Role is Still Largely Unknown"; and -- most horrifyingly -- the story contained an error and had a correction appended to it. Mysteriously, this article had become my hallmark online, showing up in my top-five search results for years.

"内容を確認する。要約する。この際、自分の考えを述べる必要はまったくない。自分の考えや固定観念のようななものがあれば、それは捨てるべき。"まず理解する。批判や異なる意見を出すのはそのあとでいい。

アウトプットが出せない人の大きな問題は、我が強くて他人の話が聞けないことに依るものが大きい。

physical

Useful, in-depth discussion of how memory is handled on Windows and Linux with respect to Java Virtual Machines. How to diagnose memory problems; dealing with Java heap as well as native memory exhaustion issues. Source code / demo

Processors are described as being a certain number of bits. This normally refers to the size of the registers, although there are exceptions — such as 390 31-bit — where it refers to the physical address size. For desktop and server platforms, this number is 31, 32, or 64; for embedded devices and microprocessors, it can be as low as 4. The physical address size can be the same as the register width but could be larger or smaller. Most 64-bit processors can run 32-bit programs when running a suitable OS.

So, to sum up our experience with Google Checkout: they did not try to contact us to resolve any issue; there’s no way to find out why they closed our account, due to “security reasons”; there was no notice (we found out by accident, when we tried to pay for something with Google Checkout); they kept over $200 of our money; there is no appeal; there is no one we can contact; we cannot open a new account; our money is gone, even though people have received their products.

Amid the many uncertainties loosed by the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, one forecast seemed beyond doubt: Islamist terrorists would strike the United States again—and soon.

Clear overview of the prevailing theories about why no major attacks have occurred since 9/11/01.

$37.85 billion in 2009

2008 newspaper advertising revenues down 16.6% to $37.85 billion according to Newspaper Assoc. of America

US Newspaper industry lost $7.5 BILLION in advertising last year http://bit.ly/F9hfu [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/1417985578]

Links to several OSGi articles for introduction

Bunch-O-Links to OSGI stuff

expanding your biz model --- vertical & horizontal integration

"Think hard about what you do. Look closely at everything you do. There are probably by-product opportunities everywhere. Hell, even your office space could be a by-product. You rent it to work, but what about after hours? Could you rent it out for events? Maybe you could hold stand-up comedy shows like Maryʼs Futons in San Rafael, California does. Sometimes customers return to buy the futon they were sitting on during the show. That’s extra sweet."

WTF? Where's the capes?!?!?

Danny Fingeroth is an American comic book writer and editor, and an expert on superheroes. Author of Superman on the Couch, his latest book is The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels

Kaip išspausti geriausią garso kokybę iš į ausį įstatomų ausinių.

Here are 15 things everyone should know about Fred Rogers:

Think of all the different uses of typography on the web and you'll soon realize that not only is it a crucial part of a web design, but that it's a pure combination of art and science. We've come a long way since the start of the internet, but the use of typography is as important today as it was back in the day.

Gode eksempler på god brug af online fonts

Google unveils new search tools http://ow.ly/6zZk [from http://twitter.com/barbhd34/statuses/1783775050]

Google unveils 'smarter search'

BBC News, (13 May 2009)

On the first day of his fourth-year physics class, University of Ottawa professor Denis Rancourt announced to his students that he had already decided their marks: Everybody was getting an A+.

very interesting. top marks for the courage to experiment. Geddit?! :)

I hate grading...

Find out why REST interfaces are foundational for emerging architectures such as the Semantic Web. Brian Sletten takes a big-picture view of REST, now and in the future, in this final article in his series.

JavaWorld

Eradicate this fortification!

at Redfin Corporate Blog

Dicas para uma boa apresentação.

Vasily Vasimov/Techmic Studios, March 11, 2010.

As a designer, you will eventually have to face a couple of unfortunate truths in your career. Number one: just because you wear a bathrobe for most of your “business” hours does not actually make it business attire. Number two: at some point in your freelance career, you will encounter a client who does not respect the work you do. The most unfortunate part of this unfortunate truth is that it will all too often present itself in the form of a client who refuses to pay for your services once all of the work has been completed.

I would like to point out that in future I will be using this article as reference for my freelance work. Thanks for posting it :) Reply * 13 DIGITAL7 Media April 9th, 2010 7:27 am

e most unfortunate part of this unfortunate truth is that it will all too often present itself in the form of a client who refuses to pay for your services on

(1) You get part time results for part time effort. (2) You never heard of a never ending "campaign" - called building permission-based relationships and learning with the community. (3) You publish only "perfect" posts. (5) You think it's marketing's job to write and edit the posts. (6) Your readers' comments are in lemon ink. (7) You ask all your sales people to hit the blog daily to get good traffic. (8) You hire an agency to blog for you.

I wrote a post a week or so ago about 3 things you should know before starting a blog and we had a very good conversation around those themes. In the comments, Mack Collier added two things that I feel should be highlighted:

While I encourage social media usage, I'm increasingly finding the "why not to engage" reasons compelling and well worth ensuring it's part of the process.

Estrategias para curarse el insomnio

more on luxury or dearth of its necessity

Allison Arieff

Addressing other nations at the G-20 last Wednesday, President Obama suggested that the United States was unlikely to return to its role as a “voracious consumer market.” If Obama’s right — and the experience of Japan, post-recession, suggests he may well be — what might that mean for design?

LazyProxyFactory

Para compartir con Freslys y lograr Fitness

The journey of transforming your body from out of shape to fit as a fiddle is a long one with many twists and turns.

"Felix Dennis, publishing tycoon, has written a guide to becoming a multi-millionaire. All you need is thick skin, cunning - and a work ethic"

Good quote: "If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand little chance of ever getting rich." Reminds me of this quote from Lazarus Long: "People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt." As a bit of a pod who sometimes finds it all too easy to "turn off" my human concerns, and an on-again-off-again workaholic who was literally ridiculed by my friends for my study and work habits, I am very inspired by what he has to say.

excerpt from publishing tycoon Felix Dennis's book about how to get rich

Totally serious - a little mad but interesting

A history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it.

The closest thing to 'hello' in the Klingon language is 'What do you want?' Awesome. http://bit.ly/LPtZS [from http://twitter.com/ellaminnowpea/statuses/1803100377]

explication of social dynamics/etiquette, good links

establish a following policy

Unless you are a Twitter user who immediately follows everyone who follows you, we have all experienced losing Followers because, for whatever reason, we did not follow them in return. To be sure, deciding when to follow or not follow is not only a personal decision, but one which is driving a growing debate in the Blogosphere. How this debate plays out may have a profound impact on how people use Twitter and how the service will grow in the future.

How do motivate programmers? Depends on the kind of programmers you have. "Don't try to race sheep, Don't try to herd race horses". With the right level of programmers, peer pressure is the key, and you should lay off the guidelines and rules. Contrawise, with other developers, maybe my "peer pressure" approach won't work as well.

Google Earth 5.0 finds Atlantis

Resources

This article explores some of the Linux architectures that support real-time characteristics and discusses what it really means to be a real-time architecture. Several solutions endow Linux with real-time capabilities, and in this article I examine the thin-kernel (or micro-kernel) approach, the nano-kernel approach, and the resource-kernel approach. Finally, I describe the real-time capabilities in the standard 2.6 kernel and show you how to enable and use them.

very good summary about linux and rt

Great way to lose an hour - a must-read dialog between sports columnist Bill Simmons and author Malcolm Gladwell. http://bit.ly/3w857i [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/1796294654]

This will suck about 30 minutes from your life. As Truman Capote once said about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, it's typing."

Simmons Meets Gladwell Part II

Malcolm Gladwell talking about Nick Faldo. "Faldo in his prime was terrifying. He was surly and tough and charismatic and emotionally and psychologically bulletproof, and I feel like he'd do a better job of getting under Tiger's skin than anyone out there right now. What's the defining fact about Faldo? His ex-girlfriend once destroyed his Porsche with a 9-iron. The corresponding fact for Woods is that his favorite band is Hootie and the Blowfish. Hootie and the Blowfish? What's Faldo's favorite band? Joy Division? Or some kind of obscure Welsh thrash band too hard core for American radio?"

VIDEO tags how to make your videos seen

HOW TO: Boost Your SEO with a YouTube Channel Come incrementare la propria SEO con un canale YouTube

Excellent overview article on the goals of testing and various alternative testing strategies

some software is internal and not mission critical. In that

A post about testing, full of "from the field" advices. Number one: if it hurts you're doing it wrong. Jay describes a situation where common test patterns or tools are applied without a conscious decision like a big design up-front. Contextualize is again the keyword. There was a time I did the same: I thought mock-all development was the way to go and I started mocking all collaborators to discover interfaces. Which is of course not bad at all! The problem is if you decide that is the only approach possible for the entire application. Test maintenance is going to eat 100% of your time.

A down to earth view on the reality of putting your cool web agency feelings to one side and thinking about how to communicate with clients in a language they understand.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ's cells.

Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says.

8 Rules for Creating Effective Typography

8 nguyen tac typo

Rob Thomas's slightly conflated argument for marriage equality

Brain-Twitter

Adam Wilson posted on twitter "SPELLING WITH MY BRAIN." No keyboards, just a red cap fitted with electrodes that monitor brain activity, hooked up to a computer flashing letters on a screen. Wilson sent the messages by concentrating on the letters he wanted to "type," then focusing on the word "twit" at the bottom of the screen to post the message.

(CNN)

Adam Wilson posted two messages on Twitter on April 15. The first one, "GO BADGERS," might have been sent by any University of Wisconsin-Madison student cheering for the school team.

i

RT @andrea_r @sherina: WOW. http://xrl.in/22to &lt;= Twitter direct from the brain, right here in my hometown! (Telepathy, here we come!) [from http://twitter.com/CircleReader/statuses/1594935657]

Brain-Twitter project offers hope to paralyzed patients: http://bit.ly/pDt8i (via my Dad) [from http://twitter.com/sherrymain/statuses/1604887892]

RT @sherina: WOW. http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/22/twitter.locked.in/index.html { AMAZING } [from http://twitter.com/andrea_r/statuses/1594843677]

This has a lot of interesting stuff, for the most part. (Apparently, hot drinks make you feel more trusting than cold drinks!)

Research also indicates that women's perception of cold varies

New research is suggesting that we all feel the cold differently

Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren't cool enough, it's portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive

anti-meiert

Talk of transition to digital agencies

Digital and classical agencies - how to face the challenges of communication these days

Use good typography

[object Object]

Go to Number 3 for how to delete your FB account

Well I am screwed...

"Much of the perception about what makes for healthy and comfortable sitting has come from the chair industry." / "Chaise longues are good options."

Meet public enemy No. 1 in today's workplace.

Swopper

If yo

JeffCroft

Really nice article on the models behind Wordpress and Joomla.

WordPress’ extensions model is based on the execution of a set of functions attached to the system flow by mean of “hooks.”

Compares and contrasts templates and other aspects of these two systems. Might be useful if I ever need to get up to speed on Joomla! quickly.

Un VC et son explication : être un orchestrateur pour les utilisateurs avec une interface bien pensée et l'apport régulier d'innovations (et non toutes à la fois.

Union Square Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm based in New York City. The partners invest in young companies that use information technology in innovative ways to create high growth business opportunities in the Media, Marketing, Financial Services, Telecommunications, and Healthcare industries.

From the consumer to the enterpise... This is spot on assesment of where change is occuring. We used to hold not only the data, but the only workable tool to parse the data. that simply isnt the case now. Our current market and the end user market are simply TWO DIFFERENT CHURCHES and in waiting for our current users to get to grip with things, our actual users are leaving us behind. End users aren't smarter, more adept or engaged in info discovery (quite the opposite) it's the that the tools that are out there flatter their abilities to an ubelievable extent. Social engineering solutions (eg Google) are hated by librarians for one simple reason - a succesful soc eng solution removes them from the equation. In going for the end users, do we have to leave the libraians behind?

Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.

Designing a system that does that is not an electrical engineering problem. It is a social engineering problem. The best social engineers are working today on consumer facing web services. They understand that there is enormous potential leverage in those services. The creators of these services recognize that services like theirs will ultimately disrupt the economics of many, if not most, parts of the global economy in much the same way that Craigslist collapsed the multi-billion dollar classified industry into a fabulously profitable multi-million dollar web service.

Mega matéria na Wired

Awesome article in Wired "As Lost Ends, Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On" http://bit.ly/doLFq0 via @dougmeacham

"The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils' self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned."

We've been telling children they are unique and special for over a decade.

"Craftsmanship is a preservation method That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness."

"One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time."

really interesting article on the "trough of no value": you buy something it decreases in value until it has no value, but then after a while it has valuer as an antique

RT @ddudgeon & @andreaexpat #Freelancers The scariest pricing idea ever. Would u do it? http://bit.ly/bIAsKL RT @nona_jordan @freelancery

It goes like this. Instead of quoting a fee or negotiating a price in advance, you tell the client: “Here’s what I suggest. Let me jump in and do the work as we discussed. I’ll hit this as hard as I know how, and make it as good as can be done.” “When we’re finished, just pay whatever you feel the work was worth, based on what it contributed to your overall project.” “I’ll accept whatever you decide, no questions asked. Provided it is more than a buck sixty-five.” Scary? Absolutely. Risky? Maybe a little. Foolhardy and stupid? Not at all.

Getting clients to "fill-in-the-blank" on the invoice.

Very interesting: The scariest pricing idea ever. That works - http://bit.ly/9MXGsl - Will you try it? #smpricing – Smashing Magazine (smashingmag) http://twitter.com/smashingmag/statuses/12762457741

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01355/temple-wide_1355306i.jpg

RT @guykawasaki Man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple http://adjix.com/4zut - 와우, 대단하다. 아내는 좀 불쌍하지만... [from http://twitter.com/enamu/statuses/1256213630]

A model of biblical proportions: man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple

A model of biblical proportions: man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple - Telegraph telegraph.co.uk art architecture bible history religion news fun

Man spends 30 years working on model of Herod's Temple

#WordPress Version 3.0 due out this month: The 5 Most Important New Features @mashable http://bit.ly/drJlgU – Diane Bourque (DianeBourque) http://twitter.com/DianeBourque/statuses/13790289425

RT @mashable WordPress 3.0: The 5 Most Important New Features http://bit.ly/drJlgU #blog #blogging #blogs

Designing Without Gradients | Build Internet! http://bit.ly/9MLvzu

RT @mixonline The 7 ½ Steps to Successful Infographics http://bit.ly/d9Mjms

The right mix of down-to-earth and reach-for-the-starts.

ThinkVitamin - Carsonified's blog about the web

Sexy Interactions with CSS Transitions - http://bit.ly/bCPGgl – Smashing Magazine (smashingmag) http://twitter.com/smashingmag/statuses/13978117016

Sexy Interactions with CSS Transitions http://bit.ly/bCPGgl

10 Awesome Ads (For Traumatizing Children). Chocolate Axe Nightmare!

10 Awesome Ads (For Traumatizing Children) | Cracked.com

What makes a good Creative Director

Attempting to make Denver suck less, Daily.

What makes a good creative director? Part 1 of 2.

And it’s great. It’s annoyingly terrific. You kick yourself and wonder why you didn’t think of it. You look at the CD with a new-found respect.

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create. — Why the Lucky Stiff

RT @puredanger: beautiful portrait of _why: http://is.gd/cb25U a reminder to make art of your life.

Freelancing is by no means easy. You are given responsibility of your own future, your own earnings, to choose who and what you want to work for

More great tips for Freelancers!

This is an excellent takedown of family-values homophobia.

RT @stephenfry: The best letter I've read for a long time. http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/000504.html Not ashamed to say it made ...

A great empathetic responce to the religious morality police attacks on homosexuals

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people. I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny. My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

I don't love her, but she sure says it like it is. Nice Q & A on investing, student loans, debts, etc..

When someone tells you to invest in a stock because it was up 40 percent in two months, ask yourself: “is that normal?” When someone tells you to put all your money in technology stocks because they have doubled in value in one year, ask yourself: “is that return normal?” When you buy a home on the expectation that values will rise 20 percent per year, ask yourself: “is that normal?”

Great financial advice to refer back to from time to time

Earlier this week, we solicited your questions for Suze Orman. You asked about paying college debt, choosing a good retirement plan, and — especially with a week like this — how safe your money is. In her answers below, Orman also offers a question to ask whenever deciding what to do with your money:

Some choice observations on UX including: ‘People can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest. Only provide the information that's needed at the moment (see progressive disclosure...).’

Umfangreicher Guide einer Psychologin zu guter Usability

L'avis d'un psychologue sur la création d'interfaces utilisateurs

RT @draenews: Del Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live? - ReadWriteWeb: http://bit.ly/bVtDrm

RT: thanks @sarahintampa Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live? http://ff.im/-Ict0 [from http://twitter.com/jcookaz/statuses/1139811040]

the balancing act of using technology so much and missing the real life moments.

hat tip to Delaney Cunningham. Great article touching on medium influences message--new media means new type of stories. Worthwhile--not just rant. But there's another reason that these new media tell stories in different ways from their old media predecessors: They're telling different stories. TV sitcoms, novels, feature films, and other traditional forms are cages as well as frames. The reason that every sitcom lasts 22 minutes is that no one tries to make sitcoms about stories that take five minutes to tell. The reason movies last 90 minutes is that no one tries to make feature films about subjects that take 30 seconds to elucidate -- or 30 days.

heretofore

30+ Web 2.0 RSS Applications & Sites

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here. Google the phrase

Do you have a unique service or product? Most entrepreneurs have a pocketful of ideas, many of them viable. But they suffer from the "kid in a candy store" dilemma, not knowing which to choose. The trick is choosing the one that really is a winner and having the discipline (see item #9) to ignore all the others.

e-Learning portfolio considerations article

guias de Tom Khulman sobre como hacer un portfolio

On Engineering and Design: An Open Letter Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton calls for engineers and user-experience designers to learn to appreciate one another

"And when the surface is scratched, what you find below is extraordinary - or, rather, extraordinarily difficult to make good, clear sense of. Lying in wait are arguments that lead to, if not sheer lunacy, then bullets we're loathe to bite."

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

new version, new story

Tea is Booming in Silicon Valley

...say interweb chieftains

High tech hipsters, including Kevin Rose and Timothy Ferriss, love expensive teas.

Chief executive hints that Google could go into partnership with Twitter

May 19 2009

But he admitted that there is a trade-off between making information instantly available and ensuring its accuracy.

Google admits losing out to Twitter in real-time information provision http://bit.ly/16x3sR [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/1934493073]

Is The Guardian's Web site crashing because of the article about the partnership between Google & Twitter? http://bit.ly/16x3sR [from http://twitter.com/LoXD/statuses/1861951800]

RT @problogger: Reading: Google 'falling behind Twitter' - http://is.gd/BqnD [from http://twitter.com/chadwalker/statuses/1858252209]

accuracy vs speed

But, is there any truth to rumours of a merger?

in making attractive designs, but I think they can (and should!) be applied when designing user interfaces. This post

Graphic design has 4 basic principles that appear to varying degrees in all well designed works; Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. They are there to help guide you in making attractive designs, but I think they can (and should!) be applied when designing user interfaces. This post will show you how. Anyway, I like the acronym!

How to make your user interface CRAP: http://tinyurl.com/6o79yz [from http://twitter.com/tadej/statuses/913793683]

对比，重复，对齐，近似

The guy who created Comic Sans claims it was based on the lettering in "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Watchmen". Don't really buy it.

there is talk about the media world, as well as the open source world. And how businesses should "defeat" the masses. Timing, product features, and the skillful use of network effects across market segments [benefits of a business]. This is a very "odd" study

How can a business compete with a free product? It’s not easy, and it’s more than just a theoretical question. U.S. newspapers are finding it difficult to compete with free news and the commentary of bloggers and other internet sources. And in the software world, the rise of open source products, which are available for free on the internet, is reshaping the technology industry.

Ultimately, from the point of view of the buyer, free products provide an important benefit. “Even if consumers do not end up adopting the free product, it can act as a credible threat to the commercial firm, forcing it to both lower prices and invest more in product innovation,”

Businesses Can Win the Competition Against Open-Source Technology

比chrome更快的，下一代firefox浏览器

Firefox is outdoing itself with Minefield, which sets new speed records. Read this blog post by Matt Asay on The Open Road.

How fast? Some claim that it has the fastest javascript engine on the planet, which means it leaves Google's Chrome browser in the dust. In my own unscientific tests, I'd say that this assertion is correct. Ars Technica pegs Minefield as 10 percent faster than Chrome.

2528 diggs

Precordial Catch Syndrome (PCS) is the most common cause of recurring chest pain, sometimes known as

Just as our bodies are wired to react to stress, we're all also programmed to know how to wind down, whether it's by watching a funny movie, sitting in the sauna, sipping some chamomile tea (while dunking a cookie, of course!) or drinking a glass (or two) of wine with dinner. These activities switch on the brain's pleasure centers, blocking the production of the stress hormone cortisol and churning out happiness-inducing chemicals like serotonin instead.

Try a few of these instant soothers, and watch your own stress go from ARGH! to Ahhh.

In research published recently in Neuron, Marcos Frank, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, postdoctoral researcher Sara Aton, PhD, and colleagues describe for the first time how cellular changes in the sleeping brain promote the formation of memories.

The key cellular player is the molecule N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), which acts like a combination listening post & gate-keeper. It both receives extracellular signals in the form of glutamate & regulates the flow of calcium ions into cells. Once the brain is triggered to reorganize its neural networks in wakefulness (by visual deprivation, eg), intra- & intercellular communication pathways engage, setting a series of enzymes into action w/in the reorganizing neurons during sleep. To start the process, NMDAR is primed to open its ion channel after the neuron has been excited. The ion channel then opens when glutamate binds to the receptor, allowing calcium into the cell. In turn, calcium, an intracellular signaling molecule, turns other downstream enzymes on and off. Some neural connections are strengthened as a result of this process, & the result is a reorganized visual cortex. &, this only happens during sleep.

If you ever argued with your mother when she told you to get some sleep after studying for an exam instead of pulling an all-nighter, you owe her an apology, because it turns out she's right. And now, scientists are beginning to understand why.

In research published recently in Neuron, Marcos Frank, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, postdoctoral researcher Sara Aton, PhD, and colleagues describe for the first time how cellular changes in the sleeping brain promote the formation of memories. ... "We find that the biochemical changes are simply not happening in the neurons of animals that are awake," Frank says. "And when the animal goes to sleep it's like you’ve thrown a switch, and all of a sudden, everything is turned on that's necessary for making synaptic changes that form the basis of memory formation. It's very striking." The team used an experimental model of cortical plasticity – the rearrangement of neural connections in response to life experiences. "That's fundamentally what we think the machinery of memory is, the actual making and breaking of connections between neurons,” Frank explains

Caching paginated results

One of the many benefits of side projects is that you get to try out new things. In my job I can’t screw around too much—I’ve got a site to run. But with side projects, I can play with new APIs and try out ideas. Lately, Twistr has been my playground.

[object Object]

analytics API beta

Search technologies are too important for a single company to dominate

"Search is volatile and we'd be nuts to think that Google owned the last word in organising all human knowledge."

Enter search. Who needs categories, if you can just pile up all the world's knowledge every which way and use software to find the right document at just the right time?

good quotes about dewey and the internet

It may seem as unlikely as a publicly edited encyclopedia, but the internet needs publicly controlled search

Marissa Mayer on the future of Google | TechRadar UK

Maye [...] believes that personalisation – "What can we understand about the user and how can we tailor the results to them?" – will be an important part of search. Search engines will be better because they'll understand more about the user. "Maybe the search engine of the future will know where you're located," Mayer suggests. "Maybe they'll know what you know already, or what you learned earlier today. Or maybe they'll fully understand your preferences because you've chosen to share that information with us. We aren't sure which personal signals will be most valuable, but we're investing in research and experimentation on personalised search now because we think this will be very important later."

As the self-proclaimed search addict points out, there's still a lot of opportunity for innovation, change and progress in search. Although typically tight-lipped about future products, she does hint at the direction Google is going to take. "We think it's really important to move beyond just keywords and allow people to ask questions, and maybe access things more easily from their mobile phone," she says. "We're also looking at how to weave new media into it and how we can bring books, videos and news right into the search experience. And then there are various pieces of personalisation."

Pretty much every product that Google works on has to go through gatekeeper Marissa Mayer, who decides whether it's ready to be released or needs more work. She even approves every single Google Doodle that adorns the search giant's homepages around the world. From being hired as the first female engineer nine and a half years ago to becoming one of the key decision makers at Google, she's come a long way.

3-1-2009

"I look for the insight and innovation that's baked into the idea," Mayer explains. "I also look at the overall energy and strength of the team that's presenting it. Then I develop an overall sense of confidence that it's both a good product idea and that we have a good team who are interested in moving it forward. If those two things come into alignment, it's going to be a successful product."

It's really important to move beyond just keywords"

"She's absolutely devoted to the needs of the 'end user' and often uses her mom as a reference point to check whether an idea is simple enough. But what other criteria does she take into account when she decides whether a product is a goer? "I look for the insight and innovation that's baked into the idea," Mayer explains. "I also look at the overall energy and strength of the team that's presenting it. Then I develop an overall sense of confidence that it's both a good product idea and that we have a good team who are interested in moving it forward. If those two things come into alignment, it's going to be a successful product."

[TechRadar]

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM. [Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this article.]

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM. Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep - when most dreams occur - were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep called REM sleep.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

"We found that, for creative problems you've already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions. "However for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity."

Copyright discussion for educators on TechLearning

T

A review of the online copyright from Ahrash Bissell, head of Creative Commons ccLearn division.

From the November 2008 Scientific American Magazine | 62 comments Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics? In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox By J. Miguel Rubí

Scientific American: In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox

discussion topic, allow students to discuss key points of article, provide them with selected passages. This is a good way to see if they understand as they will have to discuss how nature does and doesn't obey the laws of thermodynamics.

As you can see, the process of checking spellings and suggesting corrections is not an exact science, but there\'s no denying that it has made our lives a little easier and our publications a little less unpredictable.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745537

A common refrain for people thinking up business ideas is that all the good ideas have already been done. Finding an established competitor is not necessarily cause to quit on the spot. Here are six potential strategies on how you might go about taking on an entrenched competitor.

How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review http://bit.ly/d43fuV

against you.

During a conference call with the executive committee of a nonprofit board on which I sit, I decided to send an email to a client. I know, I know. You'd think I'd have learned. Last week I wrote about the dangers of using a cell phone while driving. Multitasking is dangerous. And so I proposed a way to stop.

Great rationale points and starting tidbits.

Designers often don’t take the time they should to learn about how basic psychological principles can effect the experience their visitors have on the sites they build. Psychological principles are either looked upon as unnecessary, or too complicated. But the truth is that they’re neither.

"Psychological principles are either looked upon as unnecessary, or too complicated. But the truth is that they’re neither"

Allow the negative space on your site to direct your visitors to the areas you want them to focus on. By combining empty space and properly styled and proportioned elements, you can encourage your visitors to look at a certain thing and take a desired action.

zappos culture

"social experiments"

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

Why I Sold Zappos Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

RT @draenews: Del Information Architecture: Enhancing the User Experience | Webdesigner Depot: http://bit.ly/afWXUZ

RT @draenews: Del The Ultimate Beginner’s Introduction to Exposure | Phototuts+: http://bit.ly/b3yCfM

r

In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age – and where it's taking us

By http://bit.ly/Tweets2Delicious

... just like patience

lazy or exhausted?

RT @draenews: Del The State of HTML5 Apps: http://bit.ly/95vE7h

Intérêt du HTML 5 pour les Webapps.

The state of #HTML5 apps http://dld.bz/hEAe

checking out: '10 Laws of Productivity' http://bit.ly/aExvGW (via @the99percent) #productivity

Designing for the new iPhone 4 resolution.

Here’s a list of tricks and techniques I learned so far. Over time we’ll see more design conventions, but for now it’s just a lot of guesswork.

You may or may not know some of the tips below — and you may or may not agree with everything listed — but hopefully it will give you some ideas for your own sites. This is the first part of a 2-part series.

Que ver en analytics

google basically being pro flash.

YouTube complains about the inherent problems of using HTML5's <video> tag, and advocates the usage of flash, providing several technical arguments in its favor. Good read, HTML5 is a nice standard-in-the-making, but is not a panacea; also flash is not going to disappear overnight

not gonna happen

We’re very happy to see such active and enthusiastic discussion about evolving web standards - YouTube is dependent on browser enhancement in order for us to improve the video experience for our users. While HTML5’s video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it.

It's important to understand what a site like YouTube needs from the browser in order to provide a good experience for viewers as well as content creators. We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does - there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video. The <video> tag certainly addresses the basic requirements and is making good progress on meeting others, but the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube:

Hint: 13/27

Great! When intuition and math probably look wrong: http://bit.ly/9ohKuV #mathematics #science – Amir Kassaei (AmirKassaei) http://twitter.com/AmirKassaei/statuses/17519030506

RT @dubayan: The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People http://bit.ly/bmF4Yn

"The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking. An established habit, whether getting ready for work in the morning or having a whiskey after, is a pattern of behavior we’ve adopted—we stick to it regardless of whether it made sense when we initially adopted it, and whether it makes sense to continue with it years later. From a human irrationality perspective this means that something we do “just once” can wind up becoming a habit and part of our activities for a longer time than we envisioned. To get some insight into this process, consider the following experiment:"

RT @dreig: The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People http://bit.ly/cy0xy7 #productivity

El formato Type1 en 256 caracteres se asignan a las teclas de nuestro teclado, se está convirtiendo en una cosa del pasado . Ahora el diseño y la producción de fuentes OpenType que puede constar de miles de caracteres - ligaduras adicionales , diversos conjuntos figura, valores de pequeña capitalización , estilístico suplentes, ...

The Type1 format where 256 characters are assigned to keys on our keyboard, is becoming a thing of the past. We now design and produce OpenType fonts which can consist of thousands of characters — additional ligatures, various figure sets, small caps, stylistic alternates, … — referred to as glyphs. With these many sets of glyphs integrated in a single font, we are faced with the challenge of including definitions instructing the applications we're using when to show which glyph. Simply adding a glyph with a ligature to your font doesn’t mean the program you’re using knows when or how to apply it. Whether you want your typeface to change the sequence of f|f|i into the appropriate ligature or want to use old-style figures instead of tabular, you’ll need to add features to your font — glyph substitution definitions — to make it happen. In this article we’ll give you a look behind the scenes of OpenType substitution features — a general rather than comprehensive overview as the subject is

CSS DIY Organization

RT @LevelTen_Colin: 10 Common Mistakes Made by Novice Web Designers - http://b2l.me/3vynb

Currently there is an overabundance of web designers out there that are extremely talented and can create some really cool stuff. But in my twelve years of experience designing for print, on both the Printer and Agency side of things, I have encountered multiple cases where people fall short in the delivery of their creative when it comes to print work, sometimes causing unnecessary charges from the printer to fix their mistakes. Add to that the fact that I have been approached by more than a few of my friends and colleagues with a “deer-in-headlights” demeanor when it comes to creating or delivering stuff for print. For this, I have compiled a list of good practices and basic guidelines to ensure that your jobs are delivered efficiently. This is, of course, assuming that you are using InDesign as your final delivery vehicle (which I recommend) regardless of which application you used to design the piece.

Smashing magazine on the evolution and future of the logo in a post-brand era. Very interesting. http://ow.ly/280jL – Simon Mainwaring (simonmainwaring) http://twitter.com/simonmainwaring/statuses/17971112135

Although it covers the history of logo development, the final paragraphs cover the future of brands and branding

Logo design has been a controversial subject in the design press lately. One branding professional recently claimed that logo design is not that hard to do and another said that logos are dead; some rebutted while others concurred. Why all the fuss?

RT @draenews: Del 10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design: http://bit.ly/blN9sT

10 Things CEOs Need to Know About Design

1. Design can change businesses 2. Design is more than pretty pictures 3. Talks benefits not features 4. Thinks in flows not screens 5. Doesn’t make the user think 6. Starts with a great story 7. Uses design as a lever 8. Gets out of the office 9. Has a bible 10. Repeats & refines

FutureWave Software

While the phrase “founding fathers” is often used in conjunction with men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, we wanted the think about the phrase on the global level. And what is more global than the world wide web? Thus, this holiday, we’re taking a look at 10 individuals who have been instrumental in helping to shape the world wide web and the culture of the Internet as we know it today.

Why Ruby is excellent.

The new ruby on rails ecosystem http://cot.ag/9U99mw #ruby #rails ^MG – Ruby Done Right (rubydoneright) http://twitter.com/rubydoneright/statuses/17371268990

ng of the above is revolutionary. Taken all together, though, these changes are a great display of the power of simplicity, testing, openness and relentless experimentation. In fact, I think that the development commun

Why Ruby is excellent.

The new ruby on rails ecosystem http://cot.ag/9U99mw #ruby #rails ^MG – Ruby Done Right (rubydoneright) http://twitter.com/rubydoneright/statuses/17371268990

ng of the above is revolutionary. Taken all together, though, these changes are a great display of the power of simplicity, testing, openness and relentless experimentation. In fact, I think that the development commun

Why Ruby is excellent.

The new ruby on rails ecosystem http://cot.ag/9U99mw #ruby #rails ^MG – Ruby Done Right (rubydoneright) http://twitter.com/rubydoneright/statuses/17371268990

ng of the above is revolutionary. Taken all together, though, these changes are a great display of the power of simplicity, testing, openness and relentless experimentation. In fact, I think that the development commun

Good read > The Creativity Crisis http://bit.ly/an2WvJ /RT @invisiblepilot

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”

Important article detailing research that indicates that tests of creative performance by children, after rising steadily from the 1950s to 1990, have been dropping sharply since that point. Story attempts to discuss some of the reasons why, how educators (here and abroad) are attempting to inculcate innovative thinking and action in schoolchildren and what sorts of familial and societal conditions spark creativity.

gauge

Complete Beginner’s Guide

Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question.

Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs—and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that addicts cannot will themselves into healthy sobriety—indeed, that ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and its principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

I'm not totally sure that I understand the conclusions the the scientist came to about goal setting, but I'm interested in figuring out what it means and how to apply it to more effective goal setting...

"Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question."

Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question

People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.

will i

RT @biomatushiq: pity for us, evening owls :) Morning people rule the world http://bit.ly/9Ov9Er [from http://twitter.com/matushiq/statuses/18620682631]

사진이..ㅎ RT @bookedit: "아침형 인간이 세계를 지배하는 이유"를 밝힌 연구 결과가 나왔네요. 현재의 사회환경에서 저녁형 인간보다 좀더 주도적으로 상황을 이끌어갈 수 있기 때문이라네요. http://bit.ly/dh5Mw8

"It is tempting to describe the Australian team as a bigger, better version of the New Zealand team. I am going to succumb to that temptation."

Ghana Ghana was the only African team to make it out of the group stage at the last World Cup, and expectations are high this time around. Unfortunately, their best player, Michael Essien, is hurt and will not play, but the team has talent, and they seem to be free of the organizational difficulties that plague other African teams—i.e., they have not fired their coach in favor of a Swede.

"Argentina has world’s best player in Messi & lots of other talent...legendary Maradona, who is bat-shit crazy...recently had stomach stapled because after he quit using coke he got super-fat. When Argentina qualified for World Cup, he held perhaps greatest press conference in history of sport...repeatedly told Argentine press "Que la chupen y sigan chupando"...next day apologized to all women in world who heard him say these things, especially his mother, but pointedly not to journalists he had repeatedly insulted. He recently had two luxury bidets installed in hotel room" "England has won World Cup before, but when hosting in 1966, & host countries always do well. That said, they weren’t a fascist country. Fascist host countries do really well; witness Italy in 1934 & Argentina in 1978. Apparently creating a hostile & frightening atmosphere for opposing nations, & being able to threaten your players &/or the referees with horrible fates, helps your chances considerably."

Watching the Swiss play is almost as painful and degrading as being an immigrant living in Switzerland. Will they lose in a dull, cowardly manner in the first round, or will they lose in a dull, cowardly manner in the second round? The world awaits the answer.

"It is tempting to describe the Australian team as a bigger, better version of the New Zealand team. I am going to succumb to that temptation."

Ghana Ghana was the only African team to make it out of the group stage at the last World Cup, and expectations are high this time around. Unfortunately, their best player, Michael Essien, is hurt and will not play, but the team has talent, and they seem to be free of the organizational difficulties that plague other African teams—i.e., they have not fired their coach in favor of a Swede.

"Argentina has world’s best player in Messi & lots of other talent...legendary Maradona, who is bat-shit crazy...recently had stomach stapled because after he quit using coke he got super-fat. When Argentina qualified for World Cup, he held perhaps greatest press conference in history of sport...repeatedly told Argentine press "Que la chupen y sigan chupando"...next day apologized to all women in world who heard him say these things, especially his mother, but pointedly not to journalists he had repeatedly insulted. He recently had two luxury bidets installed in hotel room" "England has won World Cup before, but when hosting in 1966, & host countries always do well. That said, they weren’t a fascist country. Fascist host countries do really well; witness Italy in 1934 & Argentina in 1978. Apparently creating a hostile & frightening atmosphere for opposing nations, & being able to threaten your players &/or the referees with horrible fates, helps your chances considerably."

Watching the Swiss play is almost as painful and degrading as being an immigrant living in Switzerland. Will they lose in a dull, cowardly manner in the first round, or will they lose in a dull, cowardly manner in the second round? The world awaits the answer.

It's like the Talmud via exitcreative

Apparently, it's like reading religious texts.

"It is tempting to describe the Australian team as a bigger, better version of the New Zealand team. I am going to succumb to that temptation."

Ghana Ghana was the only African team to make it out of the group stage at the last World Cup, and expectations are high this time around. Unfortunately, their best player, Michael Essien, is hurt and will not play, but the team has talent, and they seem to be free of the organizational difficulties that plague other African teams—i.e., they have not fired their coach in favor of a Swede.

"Argentina has world’s best player in Messi & lots of other talent...legendary Maradona, who is bat-shit crazy...recently had stomach stapled because after he quit using coke he got super-fat. When Argentina qualified for World Cup, he held perhaps greatest press conference in history of sport...repeatedly told Argentine press "Que la chupen y sigan chupando"...next day apologized to all women in world who heard him say these things, especially his mother, but pointedly not to journalists he had repeatedly insulted. He recently had two luxury bidets installed in hotel room" "England has won World Cup before, but when hosting in 1966, & host countries always do well. That said, they weren’t a fascist country. Fascist host countries do really well; witness Italy in 1934 & Argentina in 1978. Apparently creating a hostile & frightening atmosphere for opposing nations, & being able to threaten your players &/or the referees with horrible fates, helps your chances considerably."

Watching the Swiss play is almost as painful and degrading as being an immigrant living in Switzerland. Will they lose in a dull, cowardly manner in the first round, or will they lose in a dull, cowardly manner in the second round? The world awaits the answer.

It's been nearly five years now since the redesign vs. realign debate began. Many designers are still approaching website changes as redesigns, with little

Selecting a font is like getting dressed, Ms Strawson says. Just as one chooses an outfit according to the occasion, one decides on a font according to the kind of message you are seeking to convey.

(yes).

Consistently publishing content requires that we deal with a foe known as content management. Content management is just what it sounds like: a way to manage the creation and dissemination of content. To systematically do that, it’s imperative that publishers employ what’s (aptly) known as content management systems (CMSs). The most common of kind of which is called a blog.

Complete Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy

“If [Information Architecture] is the spatial side of information, I see content strategy as the temporal side of the same coin.” - Louis Rosenfeld

The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.

RT @joegerstandt: RT @valdiskrebs: Great post on confirmation bias by @notsmartblog -- http://bit.ly/a2f5yq

Weil gute mechanische Keyboards etwas tolles sind

This is an awesome resource. Awesome.

More than you ver wanted to know about keyboards.

All different kinds of keyboards

"In my opinion, the best keyboards available have mechanical key switches. They are known as mechanical keyboards, or mechanical key switch

SEO guide series

Three part series

I could hack on projects like this and nobody would care at all because I'm a famous programmer, and there is no such thing as famous programmers. I don't exist. I'm an enigma.

2010-06-20 14:47:48 <Acropolis> http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1275989245.html

There Are No Famous Programmers: http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1275989245.html via @dandean - wow #yam #dev #fame #philosophy

Let me tell you about this cool new web server. I figured out how to merge the ZeroMQ event polling system with the libtask coroutine library so that you can use libtask to handle tons of TCP/UDP and ZeroMQ sockets in a single thread. I then took this very cool hack, and started building a web server using my Mongrel HTTP parser, but I modified the parser so that the same server on the same port can handle HTTP or Flash XMLSockets transparently. The next step is to get this server to route HTTP and XMLSocket JSON messages to arbitrary ZeroMQ backends. I was inspired by this so much that I registered utu.im and may try to bring it back. Not sure how or when though.

A list of things Zend Framework can do and what benefits they give to a project.

Link given to me by Mark Tinsley

This is just delightful.

I don't know whether it's going to come in the form of a more successful movie franchise about librarians than that TV thing Noah Wyle does, or a basic-cable drama about a crime-fighting librarian (kinda like the one in the comic Rex Libris), or that reality show I was speculating about, but mark my words, once you've got Old Spicy on your side and you can sell a couple of YouTube parodies in a couple of months, you're standing on the edge of your pop-culture moment. Librarians: prepare.

A quick reminder from NPR.

RT @SterlingBooks: From @NPR Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries http://n.pr/bva1RY