New rule tomorrow…
Database geek
What if the scoring sheets for a squash match used this technology? You could record the progress of the game along with all of the interaction between referee and players. This could be cool!.
The Pulse smartpen captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing, so users never miss a word. Pulse is available in two models. Priced at $149, the 1GB model provides storage for over 100 hours of recorded audio. At $199, the 2GB model doubles the storage capacity and provides more flexibility for downloading future applications. In addition to the Pulse smartpen, consumers may also buy Livescribe dot paper and the latest accessories, such as the Premium Leather Case $24.95, 2-Pack of Journals $24.95, 4-Pack of College-Ruled Notebooks $19.95 or 5-Pack of Ink Cartridges $5.95. The Pulse smartpen, dot paper and accessories are also available for purchase at www.livescribe.com. Livescribe :: Press Center.
Wordpress now supports version tracking, you can track the changes made to a post or page like wikipedia or version control system. This feature is important for multi author blogs, you can track the changes made by others.
Another important feature added to 2.6 is “Press This” bookmarklet that lets you post quickly by pressing the bookmarklet. This is inspired from “Tumblr”, if you have ever used tumblr you will know how useful is this feature. It can recognize Youtube video embed codes and Flickr images, when you are on Youtube or Flickr click this bookmarklet for easy posting of videos or photos.
Not bad at all…
vonnegutSTYLE Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.
IM Feeds Beta - Feeds Feeds Home LIVE FEED There arent any news items/ alerts yet.
Writing Style for Print vs. Web | Jakob Nielsens Alertbox
Summary: Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.
The Finger Test to Check the Doneness of Meat:
There are two basic methods to test for how done your meat is while you are cooking it - use a meat thermometer, or press on the meat with your finger tips. The problem with the meat thermometer approach is that when you poke a hole into the meat with a thermometer, it can let juices escape, juices that you would rather have stay in the meat. For this reason, most experienced cooks rely on a “finger test” method, especially on steaks (whole roasts are better tested with a thermometer).
(Via Simply Recipes.)
This has been my method of testing for years. The examples and pictures show the technique well.
Trio da Paz Brings the Brazilian Heat : NPR Music: JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater, June 5, 2008
- Trio da Paz comes from a vital music tradition: Duduka da Fonseca came to the U.S. in the mid-’70s, and Romero Lubambo and Nilson Matta arrived a decade later. Together since 1993, the “samba jazz” band represents the cream of expatriate Brazilian musicians in the U.S., as well as a vital link to the bossa nova years
I let the computer listen to JazzSet on Friday evenings (KUAZ). This show is very tasty.
A List Apart: Articles: The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters)
The dawn of the web has frequently been compared to the invention of the printing press. But the web has also destroyed one of the greatest features of nearly every press since Gutenberg: the ability to publish pleasing type. The printing press gave us type that was clearer and easier to read than that produced from a typewriter, because the typesetter had additional tools at his disposal—and knew how to use them. The web has cost us some of those tools.
I feed myself (pun intended) a number of things that amuse me. My style is to use a NetNewsWire “script” feed, so it changes every time I refresh.
For all you folks out there I give you
It works best in NNW since I see the first line of the item in the directory.
Includes a cooking tip (limited for now); Dates - all the dates you can eat; Greta’s Vocabulary Word (look it up, use it in a sentence); Oblique Strategies; La palabra del dia en espanol; Zen saying.
It get’s updated once a day in the morning (just prior to 6 AM MST).
I would be happy to share the technical details with anyone who would like.
This make-ahead spice rub is delicious on grilled chicken; it makes enough to season about 16 breasts. If stored in an airtight continer, the rub will remain potent for up to three months.
Ingredients:
- ½ cup sweet paprika
- 2 tablespoons kosher salt
- 2 tablespoons garlic powder
- 1 tablespoon dried thyme
- 2 teaspoons ground celery seed
- 2 teaspoons ground black pepper
- 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
Directions: Combine all ingredients in small bowl.
To help ensure that each breast finishes cooking at approximately the same time, buy pieces of similar size. Barbecue sauce can replace the optional glaze in step 4.
Ingredients:
- ⅓ cup table salt
- 6 bone-in, skin-on chicken breast halves (about 12 ounces each), ribs removed, trimmed of excess fat and skin (see note)
- Ground black pepper
- Vegetable oil for cooking grate
- 1 recipe glaze (recipes follow, optional)
Led Zeppelin: The Essential Album-By-Album Guide : Rolling Stone
Led Zeppelin: The Essential Album-By-Album Guide
From the First Album to “Mothership”: An Expert Rundown of Every Studio Album, Live Disc and Reissue
DOUGLAS WOLK
Posted Jun 12, 2008 3:30 PM
277 - The Biggest Drawing In the World:
“With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self portrait on our planet,” writes Swedish artist Erik Nordenankar on his website for the project, appropriately named http://biggestdrawingintheworld.com. “My pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around the world. The paths the briefcase took around the globe became the strokes of the drawing.” The resulting drawing’s dimensions are 40,076,592 by 40,009,153 meters – which are about the dimensions of the Earth’s surface, if it could be rolled out as a canvas.
A recent report now says that the Mozart effect is another charming urban legend.
The bad news for the hip urban professionals: playing Mozart for your designer baby will not improve his IQ or help him get into that exclusive pre-school. He’ll just have to get admitted to Harvard some other way. Of course, we’re all better off for listening to Mozart purely for the pleasure of it. However, one wonders whether, if playing Mozart sonatas for little Tiffany or Jason could boost their intelligence, what would happen if other composers were played during the kiddies’ developmental time? Read the rest of this entry »
Apple’s .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way.
Architecture astronauts take over - Joel on Software
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control.”
Jazz Excursion Radio Listen Now: Windows Media: 96 / 64 MP3: 128 / 64
Found this while I was reading about Bill Evans. Sometimes the radio works best 
The MP3 128K stream is tastier than the 64K.
There are a number of “stations” - Smooth, Dinner, Vocal. If you sign up to be a member of All About Jazz you get to download the tune of the day as well.
Bagatellen: Signifying Junkie:
So, to the listening library I was dispatched. It felt like a punishment even before I clamped on those thumbscrews-for-the-ears they called “headphones” and popped in a tape of Sunday at The Village Vanguard. (Isn’t there a part in all of us that rebels at unsolicited recommendations? Don’t you hate it when somebody gushes, “This is the awesomest, ever. You’ll love it.”) Village Vanguard, I thought, what’s that, some medieval theatre-in-the-round? The way my teacher described it, the experience I was about to receive would be pianistic heaven on earth, Mount Olympus on the 88’s, and god himself would vibe me from those solid grooves. Bill Evans was at that time the summation of everything that was ever worthwhile doing with a piano or a piano trio. Forget Monk – not really a piano player; didn’t he write some quirky tunes? – forget Hines and Tatum – hopelessly old-fashioned, heavy-handed stuff – who? Cecil Taylor? Get out of my sight, infidel.
Bill Evans - The Vanguard Sessions - 1961 - quoted on the last page of this month’s Jazziz Magazine.
I have a “fair bit” of Bill Evans in the collection. Turns out that I have 2 copies (not identical) of the Vanguard sessions - “Bill Evans Trio: Sunday At The Village Vanguard” and “Complete Riverside Recordings (Disc 7)”. They are not identical, but appear to be the same sessions. The former is engineered a bit differently.
I wonder what’s different in the latest “Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961″ collection? The reviews and description at Amazon illumimnate.
Why not “Blog This” from Flickr?
TidBITS Introduces New Subscription Mode For those not in the know, LOLCat is a highly condensed patois, based on text messaging, and imagined to be produced by the grammatically challenged intellect of a cat. Its expressive potential is well demonstrated by the fact that the entire Christian Bible is currently being translated into LOLCat (as of this writing, the project is nearly 50 percent complete). Clearly, any dialect is worthy of serious consideration if it can recast the Second Beatitude from the Sermon on the Mount as, “U r doin good if U iz sad kitteh; U can has petting.”
Goo-ology : Fantasies I like Newton’s Egg and a few others. The mousetraps are too Jones.
Martian Headsets - Joel on Software Until you decide to make a new version, the Qxyzrhjjjjukltk 2.0.
“We are from, not there!”
X
The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
Mac OS X Things · Time Machine full system restore
Well, I hosed my printing system. At least it appeared that way. I know - let’s go backwards in time and make like it didn’t happen. Boot from the Leopard DVD. Tell it we want to restore from a Time Machine backup. Wait about 90 minutes for the whole thing to restore. So far, so good.
Apple - Downloads - Dashboard Widgets - hiddenfiles:
Simple widget that toggles visibility of files that are hidden from the Finder.
I am using Time Machine (an experiment) to do backups. I had a perfect opportunity to test it.
Harvard Proposal to Publish Scholarly Research Free on the Internet - New York Times
Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free. Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
What’s in a Beethoven Quartet? A Full Curriculum - New York Times
In an unusual educational experiment Curtis has established Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in F minor (Op. 95) as the touchstone of the academic year for its 160 students. Imagine a year of medical school revolving around the liver, or a car repair course centered on the Chrysler LeBaron.
Science of Nascar - Stock Car Racing - Physics - Aerodynamics - New York Times
Less than a foot? Well, that’s the kind of experiment that Nascar fans will be watching for and, maybe, as Dr. Leslie-Pelecky hopes, it will also inspire some future scientists. I don’t recall growing too excited about the old textbook problems involving locomotives lumbering at different velocities out of cities A and B. But I would have paid attention to two cars traveling 200 miles an hour separated by inches.
From The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
Metaphors for Presentations
Years before today’s slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. Then, in 1984, a software house developed a presentation package, “Presenter,” which was eventually acquired by Microsoft and turned into PowerPoint.
This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?
A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.
Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.
– Edward Tufte, October 16, 2003 Read the rest of this entry »
Ask E.T.: ET textbook, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy: PDF files now available:
The 179-page book is for courses in applied statistics, particularly for policy making and the social sciences. It deals with making causal inferences from statistical evidence, research designs, predictions and projections, linear and multiple regression. All the examples are real, involving serious questions (no regressions of height on weight that are found in some statistics texts). The technical material is at the level of one or two classes in college math. There is one somewhat more technical part, on logarithmic scale transformations and their interpretation in regression and in graphics. The book was written very much under the influence of Frederick Mosteller, John Tukey, and my professor of statistics at Stanford, Lincoln Moses.
Ask E.T.: Executive decision support systems:
(3) For information displays for management, avoid heavy-breathing metaphors such as the mission control center, the strategic air command, the cockpit, the dashboard, or Star Trek. As Peter Drucker once said, good management is boring. If you want excitement, don’t go to a good management information system.
Ask E.T.: Sparklines: theory and practice:
Here are a few pages from the 18-page chapter on sparklines in Beautiful Evidence (2006).
Ask E.T.: Excessively hierarchical organization of information:
Excessively hierarchical organization of information is sometimes explained by Conway’s Law: “Any organization which designs a system . . . will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” So user guides represent Conway’s Law squared, a system for understanding a system; a PP user’s guide, the Law cubed.
Ask E.T.: Interface design and the iPhone
The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with “Where am I?” puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.
The review is a video. 56MB download, so be patient. Go ahead and read the excerpts from the book while the video is loading.
“Spatial Imperialism”!
This is for Lance to use with MarsEdit
- Create a draft post (on the server) with MarsEdit
- In the Wordpress manage posts click on the convert link
Voila
I know - it is 2 steps, but it isn’t that hard at all
P2P Converter - convert posts to pages
You don’t have to make it a draft - publishing for a brief moment isn’t that big a deal, is it?
It’s kind of a pain if you want to keep track of pages and/or edit them once they are created, since MarsEdit is only dealing with “posts”.
The connection between MarsEdit and a WordPress blog is the MetaWeblog API. That doesn’t give any kind of fine-grained control.
Now if we could convince Red Sweater Software that “enhancing” MarsEdit to take advantage of the WordPress XML-RPC API would provide enough control to be able to use ME as a full “controller” application for WordPress blogs.
I already bought my copy of ME, but I would be willing to buy a new copy if it could do the full control of my WordPress blogs (posts and pages)
Why Emacs Always Wins in the End | Compiler from Wired.com:
Emacs always wins - even if it does do text coloring in Leopard.
HOWTO make a camera stabilizer out of string, a screw and a washer:
Here’s a quick and clever HOWTO for making a camera-stabilizer out of some twine, a screw and a washer. Tie the string around the screw, screw it into the tripod mount on your camera, drop the other end of the twine (with the washer attached) onto the ground and stamp on it. Pull up on the camera until the twine is taut and vertical shake is a thing of the past, along with significant dampening of horizontal shake. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
(Via Boing Boing Blog.)
Smithsonian Magazine | Arts & Culture | Being Funny
Steve Martin - watch the video
In general, however, a comedian in shackles for indecent language, or a singer’s arrest for obscene gestures, thrilled the growing underground audience. Silliness was just not appropriate for hip culture. It was this circumstance that set the stage for my success eight years later.
Online Poker at Full Tilt Poker - Tips from the Pros
When you become indifferent to winning or losing over the short term, you won’t have to worry about going on tilt because you’re focusing simply on playing good poker. That’s all that matters at the end of the day - playing well. As poker players, we can do nothing more than to play our best game and let the cards fall as they may. When you adopt this attitude, your long-term results will take a turn for the better, no matter what kind of variance you face over the short term.
Ben Roberts
See a Flash Video that you like?
Copy the URL to the clipboard. Feed the URL to Flash Video Downloader Feed the resulting file to iSquint (or what have you) Add metadata to the video in iTunes
TV Critics Admit To Never Having Watched The Wire | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source:
NEW YORK—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire, television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show.
Typical Programmer - Why Programmers Don’t Like Relational Databases:
Complaining about relational databases is a staple theme of programmer blogs. Why are so many programmers irritated and frustrated with relational databases? Why do the perceived intricacies of SQL and the “object-relational impedance mismatch” launch so many rants? Why are DBAs more hated than managers? I have some ideas.
» Here’s what fake HD video looks like | George Ou | ZDNet.com
Apparently, DIRECTV switched from 1920×1080 resolution HD video to highly compressed 1280×1080 so they can shove a lot more channels on to their service which users not-so-lovingly named “HD Lite“. As you can see above, the DIRECTV image to the left absolutely stinks compared to the not-so-great sample from Dish on the right. This apparently angered a lot of DIRECTV customers and one such customer Peter Cohen actually filed a class action lawsuit.
Inter-Sections » Blog Archive » How to recognise a good programmer
t’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.
Reversal Of Alzheimer’s Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (2008, January 9). Reversal Of Alzheimer’s Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 11, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/01/080109091102.htm
I am right and the entire Industry is wrong - The Daily WTF
I looked at your code. Here is the problem. You are not using frames or CSS to mimic frames. This is not your fault. You were taught not to use frames in your class. There is a lot of misinformation in the information industry. This common idea that frames are bad is a perfect example. With the WWW, from here on out and especially in multimedia WWW applications, frames are your friend. Use them always. Get good at framing. That is wisdom from Gary.
I’m always right, and I never lie.
Lake Superior State University :: Banished Words List :: Banished Words List
***This year, in a gesture of humanitarian relief, the committee restores “truthiness,” banned on last year’s list, to formal use. This comes after comedians and late-night hosts were thrown under the bus and rendered speechless by a nationwide professional writers’ strike. The silence is deafening.***
From the internets somewhere
Ten Thoughts to Ponder for 2008
Number 10 - Life is sexually transmitted. Read the rest of this entry »
List of English words with disputed usage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some English words are often used in ways that are contentious among writers on usage and prescriptive commentators. The contentious usages are especially common in spoken English. While in some circles, the usages below may make the speaker sound uneducated or illiterate, in other circles the more standard or more traditional usage may make the speaker sound stilted or pretentious.
A few weeks ago, I shared the RemoveSpecialCharsExceptQuote AmpersandApostropheOpenBracket CloseBracketCommaHyphenFull StopCommaForwardSlash() method that Paul G. was forced to implement by his superior. Now this may come as a surprise, but there were a few more "oddities" at that organization. And shortly after leaving the longest-three-months-of-his-life contract, Paul was nice enough to share some more of them.
"The job interview went pretty well," Paul wrote, "everyone was pretty level-headed and seemed to have a pretty strong grasp of .NET and web technologies. Their description of the core application was like any other ASP.NET app: a Web Server communicated to a Database Server via ADO.NET and used a handful of Web Services. It seemed like a great fit."
However, after signing the contract and turning up to work, Paul got a slightly different impression about their system. His first clue was that everyone simply referred to it as The Beast. And for good reason. The Beast sported it all:
(Via The Daily WTF.)
cinco anillos dorados
Los 12 días de Navidad — ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ in Spanish:
The 12 Days of Christmas
El primer día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El segundo día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El tercer día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El cuarto día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El quinto día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El sexto día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El séptimo día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó siete cisnitos, seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El octavo día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó ocho lecheritas, siete cisnitos, seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El noveno día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó nueve bailarinas, ocho lecheritas, siete cisnitos, seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El décimo día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó diez señores saltando, nueve bailarinas, ocho lecheritas, siete cisnitos, seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El undécimo día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó once gaiteritos, diez señores saltando, nueve bailarinas, ocho lecheritas, siete cisnitos, seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
El duodécimo día de Navidad, mi amor me mandó doce tamborileros, once gaiteritos, diez señores saltando, nueve bailarinas, ocho lecheritas, siete cisnitos, seis mamá gansas, cinco anillos dorados, cuatro pajaritos, tres gallinitas, dos tortolitas y una perdiz picando peras del peral.
Amazon’s Dynamo - All Things Distributed
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and Werner Vogels
Amazon.com
Abstract
Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems.
This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience. To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use.
Canon violates journalistic ethics…twice! | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
Earlier this year the National Football League (NFL) announced new “security” rules requiring that all professional photographers wear NFL-issued red vests or lose their stadium access. What the photographers discovered was that these NFL-issued vests also carried the Canon logo, and that has led to outrage and protests across the professional community. Turns out that outrage was justified…
Washington Post annual neologism contest winners
Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating
- Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
- Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
- Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
- Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
- Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
- Negligent (adj.) describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
- Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
- Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.
- Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
- Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
- Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
- Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
- Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
- Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
- Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up on to your garage roof and gets stuck there.
Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.
In no particular order…
- When choking on an ice cube, simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat. Presto! The blockage will instantly remove itself.
- Avoid cutting yourself slicing vegetables by getting someone else to hold while you chop.
- Avoid arguments with the Mrs. about lifting the toilet seat by using the sink.
- To treat high blood pressure: simply cut yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing the pressure in your veins. Remember to use a timer.
- A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock, will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.
- If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of laxatives, then you’ll be afraid to cough.
- You only need two tools in life: WD-40 and Duct Tape. If it doesn’t move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn’t move and does, use the duct tape.
When confused remember, everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
Daily Thought:
Some people are like Slinkies: not really good for anything, but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe Exploits of a Mom - Little Bobby
Quite the humorous cartoon.
If you don’t smile, well…well
This is the day we install WP 2.3
Strategy Letter VI - Joel on Software
The C programming language was invented with the explicit goal of making it easy to port applications from one instruction set to another. And it did a fine job, but wasn’t really 100% portable, so we got Java, which was even more portable than C. Mmmhmm.
The prediction is at the end. If you write code for the web (on the client side, but the server side is not immune) you should read this all the way through. If you don’t want to be left behind…
Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
Putting the answer to a typical user’s main question in big red type at the top of your homepage would guarantee high usability, right? Wrong — at least for the U.S. Census Bureau’s homepage, where 86% of users failed to find the country’s current population when it was presented in large red numbers.
New Pedagogies, New Social Practices
Humans have been teaching, learning, and conducting research via information technologies since Socrates first complained about it in the fourth-century BCE “Phaedrus.” Now that we are into the second decade of the World Wide Web and the internet’s second generation, we have seen a wide range of practices emerge for teaching and learning with technology. As technologies have proliferated and developed, teachers have developed and shared techniques and projects through networks and institutions. In this cyberspatial milieu students have been guinea pigs and innovators, taking classes, experiencing projects, helping teachers teach and staff support instructors, graduating as alumni and sometimes returning as staff.
Thanks for the pointer Sam.
Follow this link to see a TV ad for the latest product to come from the rainy Northwest - the ZunePhone.
I think the rain does something to them. Really.
Stuart’s Blog: RSS in Plain English
Wayne Brent alerted us to a video called “RSS in Plain English” from a resource called The Common Craft. Right now it is on the homepage to that link. You might go there in the future and need to poke around to find it. I believe the actual link location is http://www.blip.tv/file/205570/ but I can’t verify it because the response time is so bad. It must be the hot item on the Web right now. “RSS in Plain English” seems like a clear explanation about how you can use RSS 1.0 to subscribe to blogs and news sources. Doesn’t get into RSS 2.0, which pushes audio and video for podcasts, but if one gets the gist of how RSS works for blogs and videos, they will make the connection for podcasts.
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
I’ve been reluctant to discuss one of the findings from our eyetracking research because the conclusion is that unethical design pays off.
This is too important to skip. Please read it.
mobile illuminating dub
Original Colossal Cave Source Code Found | HoffmanLabs
Colossal Cave Adventure has been around for many years, and parts of the game including XYZZY and PLUGH and the twisty passages are now widely known. This was the original Adventure game. And now, the original version of Adventure is available.