I’ve been using the free version of Mozy to keep my business files (word docs, …) backed up, and it rocks. It reliably backups everything, I can easily restore files, and it’s free. There’s really no reason not to use that for backing up your files: it’s free and works great. If you want to back up big folders (like your pictures and music), you can get a paid account. Check it out.
The deadline for submissions for the European IA Summit is May 15th (in a week!). So hurry, they won’t be extending the deadline this year.
Kevin Rose listen up :)
Is there a word for “little optimization”? I mean, “early optimization” of code is the root of all evil, and that’s kind of the same thing, but what I mean is making changes to your code and making it less logical/readable in order to do “little optimization”, ie. get some gains that might as well be solved with an extra server or so?
(This post might not make sense, haven’t had my coffee yet.)
Joost are gonna have to do better if they want to be successfull. This kind of sums up my feelings, too: “Unfortunately, the content they offered was crap. The colleague who
invited me said the same - after the first amazement at the coolness of
it all, you spend about 10 minutes zapping through the programs, and
then you switch it off, bored already”.
Still, no good underestimating the Skype/Kazaa guys.
Old but good: “The user of social software is the
group, and ease of use should be for the group.”
You could use Anguish Languish instead of Lorem Ipsum.
“Many years ago I received a tree identification book for Christmas. I
was at my parents’ home, and after all the gifts had been opened I
decided to go out and identify the trees in the neighborhood. Before I
went out, I read through part of the book. The first tree in the book
was the Joshua tree because it only took two clues to identify it. Now
the Joshua tree is a really weird-looking tree and I looked at that
picture and said to myself, “Oh, we don’t have that kind of tree in
Northern California. That is a weird-looking tree, and I’ve never seen
one before.”
So I took my book and went outside. My parents lived in a
cul-de-sac of six homes. Four of those homes had Joshua trees in the
front yard. I had lived in that house for thirteen years, and I had
never seen a Joshua tree. I took a walk around the block, and there
must have been a sale at the nursery when everyone was landscaping
their new homes– at least 80 percent of the homes had Joshua trees in
the front yards. And I had never seen one before! Once I was conscious of the tree– once I could name it– I saw it everywhere.”
A great post that finally explains what Amazon’s SQS service does and (most importantly) why. I get it now.
“Write short 140 character messages. See your friends’ messages, and receive them as SMS on your cellphone. Popular with geeks. Growing crazy”
Try to explain twitter in 140 characters.
I’ll be at Barcamp Brussels tomorrow - looking forward to it! I don’t think I’ll talk, there seem to be loads of good talks already. Can’t wait!
Microsoft opened talks again with Yahoo to potentially acquire them for 50 billion $, it seems. As we’ve seen before, Microsoft’s profits continue to be staggering, they could buy Yahoo at this price with the profits of less than 1 year.
I don’t think it’d be a fit though. All the cool people would leave Yahoo, and it would open up space for another powerhouse to emerge.
What would be the pros for Microsoft:
And the cons?
OK, for your wayfinding presentations, check out this:
The memcached list is also regularly scaling porn. Today these gems:
“No clue if we’re the largest installation, but Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that’s where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now (though it looks like 32GB boxes are getting more economical lately, so I suspect we’ll roll out some of those this year.)”
That’s 3200 Gigs (!) of cached data on Facebook. At say 20Kb text per page, that’s 160 million cached pages. (I know it’s not entire pages they cache, but still). Of course those boxes don’t have all their memory for memcached, so it’d be less. :)
Cruxy is live now, it’s a great platform for bands and such to sell their music online *themselves*. Cruxy takes care of all the technical details, hosting, transcoding, SecondLife-ing and so on.
Michael (not a newbie, exactly) gets sucked in by tagged’s signup process which tries hard to spam all your contacts (and often succeeds).
Yahoo is launching a new web-based messenger client at http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ - no download! Good move.
“Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten” - from the horses mouth: so on Yahoo you can only get a fixed number of pages in the top 10 of any query.
Damn Mark Pilgrim still writes like the best. Silly season: “Reactions? “The web just got richer.â€? Well, somebody’s getting richer, but I doubt it’s gonna be the web.”
I learnt something today: sometimes, you repeat a lot of code all over, and it’s NOT a good idea to put that in a separate function, coz that means you’d be abstracting away too much stuff. (But usually it is of course.)
How I Unexpectedly Found Myself Doing IA Consulting For Startups (this is a post on my “professional” site. I haven’t been able to figure out when to post here or there, any tips on that?).
More thoughts on SilverLight (since that Digg story is sooo boring):
How often does the CEO of a startup fire himself? “Spending 6+ more months in development before re-entering the market is
not what I want to be doing, and as the single most expensive employee
in the company it really doesn’t make much sense to be paying me when 2
additional engineers would do the company far more in the way of value
creation.”
ok, too much silverlight hype for moi. This fox movie page: “Twentieth Century Fox and Microsoft® Silverlightâ„¢ bring a thrilling
video experience right to your web browser with this interactive player
and upcoming movie trailers. (Broadband connection recommended).” When really, it’s worse than Youtube. Even old stodgy Apple trailer page is better than this.
Silverlight does install fast, but I can’t get any of the demos to work. It doesn’t work with FF?
A better link to the myspace story. And some notes:
(via) Inside Myspace: how they got big while doing *all* the wrong things. The “css” feature was a mistake, because they didn’t know about xss. And so on.
I think someone will write one of these days the untold story of Myspace’s growth. And yes, before the viral stuff kicked in, marketing had a lot to do with it it seems.
Amazon S3 is getting even cheaper! From an email to their developers:
“Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below are the details of the new pricing plan (also available on the Amazon S3 detail page):
Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB - uploaded
$0.20 / GB - downloaded
New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB - all data uploaded
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge
New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests”
I’ve only worked twice with companies using .NET for web interfaces, and in both cases the UI was a disaster and the usability problems guaranteed lots of consulting hours.. Why is that? Or was that a fluke? (2 cases is hardly proof of anything) I know it’s possible to make usable and elegant web UI with any technology, but does .NET somehow encourage bad UI?