- 2008 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards: Applications and Middleware
Clearspace wins ‘Best Community Platform’ award. Suhweet.
(categories: collaboration community infoworld awards clearspacerocks clearspacex clearspace ) - IT Conversations: Paul Tuckfield
Excerpt: “… the three important reasons for YouTube’s scalability are Python, Memcache and MySQL replication, the last having the most impact.”
(categories: mysql scalability replication database databases youtube performance ) - Obsidian Wings: Andy Olmsted
Quote: “I lived my life better than some, worse than others, and I like to think that the world was a little better off for my having been here. Not very much, but then, few of us are destined to make more than a tiny dent in history’s Green Monster.”
(categories: iraq war death blogger andy olmsted ) - Amazon Developer Connection : Deploying Distributed J2EE Applications Using Amazon EC2
I wonder if there’ll be such a thing as a non-clustered web application in a couple years.
(categories: clustering ec2 amazing java tomcat distributed scalability ) - Encouraging Dissent in Decision-Making ? HBS Working Knowledge
Quote: “History shows that the best and the brightest?the smartest guys in the room?often make mistakes because they won’t listen to what they falsely believe is not worth hearing… Decisions are seldom better for silence.”
(categories: quotes management dissent business ) - ClickHeat | Clicks heatmap
PHP app that logs clicks on a web page and can generate a heat-map from the resulting data.
(categories: heatmap datamining statistics tracking stats php ) - TED | Talks | Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do (video)
Cool stuff. If you see me swerving wildly in an empty parking lot, you’ll know why.
(categories: kids parenting videos education engineering culture )
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Links: 1-3-2008
- Enterprise RSS: 2008 : The Year of RSS
Quote: “A large segment of users are taking advantage of start pages like iGoogle and Netvibes to be their own aggregator, and are using RSS to accomplish this, there is no reason why this should not also happen behind the firewall.”
(categories: aggregators enterprise rss feeds syndication behindthefirewall ) - 2007: The Year in RSS – ReadWriteWeb
Quote: RSS “… made blogs readable, podcasts subscribable, wikis trackable and search persistent.”
(categories: 2007 rss feeds syndication trends feed ) - YouTube – Scotch Mist – A Film With Radiohead In It
52 minutes of Radiohead: every song from their new album. Brilliant
(categories: radiohead youtube video inrainbows from:billjive ) - ongoing · 2008 Prediction I: RIA vs. AJAX
Quote: “… the people who want to add UI ‘richness’ to the Web are always developers, never users.”
(categories: ria ajax flash gui usability ) - Xeni Jardin: Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands
Quote: “If someone’s misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.”
(categories: disemvoweller community moderation comments ) - If all your friends jumped off of a bridge? at Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar
Quote: Facebook is like: “Whispering endlessly into a room crowded with everyone I?ve ever met while simultaneously being badgered by evil robotic clone versions of those same people that insistently try to trick me into buy things from Overstock.com…
(categories: facebook signaltonoise social socialnetworks noise )
Links: 1-2-2008
- photophlow: preview
Group chat for flickr. Would be awesome to see exactly this in Clearspace for each space / community.
(categories: for:billjive for:awenckus clearspace groupchat photophlow collaboration ) - ongoing · Message From the Web · Good-enough today beats complete next year
Quote: Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.”
(categories: gallslaw complexity collaboration systems )
Links: 12-26-2007
- i completed reading (26 December 2007, Interconnected)
Geez… and I thought I did pretty well this year.
(categories: reading books 2007 )
Links: 12-18-2007
- Google Admits “Data is the Intel Inside”
Quote: “As the applications become apparent, the data will be valuable in new ways, and the company with the most data wins.”
(categories: megadata data datamining google )
Links: 12-16-2007
- Coding style – a non-issue – fa.linux.kernel | Google Groups
Quote: “… don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.”
(categories: evolution design process engineering linux linustorvalds ) - An exception to the Google rule? | LinuxWorld Community
Quote: “… one fundamental rule of the Internet: Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.”
(categories: innovation bigco programming ) - Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | Megadata Follow-up
Quote: “… just like using more methods and pushing information into the headers gives more information to the network, by denormalizing you are implicitly giving more information to the database, and that ‘extra information’ makes things run faster.”
(categories: databases denormalization megadata scalability data database ) - Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | ETech ’07 Summary – Part 2 – MegaData
Quote: “… we need a new kind of data store, a new kind of SQL, something that does for storing and querying large amounts of data what SQL did for normalized data.”
(categories: bigdata datamining dataveillance analytics storage database data megadata ) - Dehora.net | Weblog | Manufacturing Content
Quote: “It does seem thought that having your own datacenter and big databases is increasingly like having your own watermill in a world of powerstations and batteries.”
(categories: information bigdata megadata )
Links: 12-12-2007
- Pimp My Safari: about
Quote: “Many excellent plugins for Safari have been developed, but because Safari doesn?t have an official ?extension architecture?, many don?t know of these extensions.”
(categories: safari plugins extensions mac apple ) - Babe, Bill, Jack and Del: 1916 | Shorpy Historical Photographs
Awesome picture of Babe Ruth in a Sox uniform in 1916.
(categories: baberuth baseball redsox 1916 photography photos )
Links: 12-4-2007
- Paul Kedrosky: Defrag, Information Underload, etc.
A writeup of the last session at defragcon where ‘information underload’ came up. Pull quote: “The burning question of the near future will not be how much work a person can do safely, but how little.”
(categories: informationunderload attentionstream feeds syndication collectiveintelligence recommendations )
Links: 12-3-2007
- Shopping at Shelter Institute
Learn to draw a set of plans, engineer the structure, design a foundation, frame and enclose the house, wire and plumb it, install windows, design stairs, and create efficient ventilation, heating and cooling in 10 weeks.
(categories: homebuilding maine )
Books: Better Off
A couple of quotes from the book “Better Off: Flipping The Switch On Technology” that I thought were important enough to note here:
… tricks like these remove much of the onus from manual labor and add to the sense of physical effort a much finer satisfaction: the magisterial feeling that comes with wielding means precisely fitted to ends. Here, perhaps, is the first of all lessions in the use of power, whether technological or physiological: trimming back the means until only the essential remain; weeding out obstructions, man-made or not, to our goals.
(page 27)
Modern technology, I suspect, far from being neutral in its effects, has more than one purpose or built-in tendency: besides reducing the need for physical effort (a kind of material surrender), it helps us avoid the need for cooperation or social flexibility (a kind of social or metaphysical surrender). All too readily it countermands the uncertainty that goes with Gelassenheit. Cars, telephones, message machines, caller ID, and e-mail grant us unprecendented powers to associate with whom we want, when we want, to the degree we want, under the terms we want, finessing and filtering out those we don’t want — and thin out the possibilities of social growth accordingly.
(page 80)
… in true leisure there is mastery. If the enemy of self-direction was passion and impulse, its ally was quiet repose, mindfulness, perceptivity. Yet the act of reflection transcended the rational; it followed a course that could not be entirely foreseen, yielding conclusions that could not be reached if too deliberately pursued.
(page 133)
For those who would outstep and outsmart machines, a broad suggestion: remember the principle of minimation. Technology undoubtedly has, and will always have, some role in making life easier or better, so one shouldn’t exclude it. But the role is supplemental. Technology serves us, not we technology. The principle of minimation can be roughly stated thus: other things equal, it is better to find a non-technological solution than a technological one, or failing that, a less technological solution than a more technological one.
(page 229)