via The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software.

A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers.

via Developer Evangelism – home of the Developer Evangelist Handbook:

Thanks for the pointer @mollydotcom

via Mobile Usability Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.

The challenge has been around since the PalmPilot + application specific tools.

I suspect the success rate for doing “phone” tasks or “address book” tasks is much higher than the “web” tasks.

A custom application (which is all that a “Mobile Site” is, really) is going to provide a better experience.

Simple example? Google Maps – can’t use it on a “mobile” browser. The custom application for my phone works quite well.

Welcome to WhirCat

via Self-guarding storage for ultimate server security |Ahead of the Curve | Tom Yager | InfoWorld .

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

(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.

Here are a few pages from the 18-page chapter on sparklines in Beautiful Evidence (2006).

Mariano Belinky’s Sparkline work

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.

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”!

Emacs always wins – even if it does do text coloring in Leopard.

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.

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.

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.

Quite the humorous cartoon.

If you don’t smile, well…well

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…

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.

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.

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.

Idea Generator