Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Screencasts teaching code, only 5$ per episode? A new business model? Online teaching has potential, that’s for sure.

The LiveJournal Policies make for some fascinating reading by the way.

The breastfeeding moms can once again use a picture of a breast as a profile picture on LiveJournal. “non-graphic, non-sexualized nudity” it’s called. LiveJournal continues to serve its users and tackle the hard problems of community building.

A smart idea if you have kids/babies and live in the USA: instead of asking for presents (that get tossed aside), ask for contributions to a college fund. Freshmanfund.

How is Vox, the social blogging platform doing these days? Anyone know? According to Alexa and Compete, not particularly great, and I never got into it myself either.

http://www.uxsocial.org/: Youtube video interviews with UX people.

I tried the downloadable clients but it’s too much stuff coming in, I prefer to visit twitter.com now and then.

Some even better Visio tricks in the comments.

Funny video about raising capital and stuff. (via)

I like the "new!" pattern Google uses. It’s so old school it’s new school. Plus, when do you get the use the <sup> tag anyways? (And that exclamation mark. It’s new guys! New! Love it.)

It turns out that “community” is the official and best translation of “community” in Dutch.

A slideshow of Facebooks proposed redesign.

I’ve seen people export stuff in Visio into images, and then paste those into Word documents. There’s an easier and better way: you can copy and paste stuff from Visio straight into Word, and it’ll look better (and print nicer) too than if you turn things into images first. One disadvantage: you can only paste what you can copy, so backgrounds don’t get copied along.

Interestingly, if you use a program like Windows Live Writer (which I use for this blogpost), you can also copy and paste from Visio straight into the program. The objects will be turned into images and uploaded. Funky!

Here’s an example, copied from Visio.

ok this is cool. I just realized I can copy and paste straight from Visio into my blog editors (Scribefire or Windows Live Writer), and it shows up as an image! Not perfectly optimized, but that’s cool.

Google decides to be more open about their ranking systems: “PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger
system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle
phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query
models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time
models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and
some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and
personalized models (not all people want the same thing).”

test

Amazon web services now uses more bandwidth than amazon.com itself.

Check out UXSocial: A Not-for-profit Investigating Information Architecture in Policy.

The US eats a *lot* of corn:

The secret for going from zero to seventy million users overnight is to
avoid doing it all in one fell swoop. We chose to simulate the impact
of many real users hitting many machines by means of a “dark launch”
period in which Facebook pages would make connections to the chat
servers, query for presence information and simulate message sends
without a single UI element drawn on the page. With the “dark launch”
bugs fixed, we hope that you enjoy Facebook Chat now that the UI lights
have been turned on.

The alternative productivity manifesto. (via Jorge)

This is pretty fun.

Session variables without cookies (via Simon): it turns out you can store session vars in windows.name, they persist between sessions, even between domains. The browser still has undiscovered secrets.

Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

Jmaps: a handy library to display Google maps with all sorts of overlays and stuff with jQuery.

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Draw a very small elephant walking across the table:

Facebook is raising another 100 million (for a total of about 500 million) to get another 50,000 servers. That’s like what - 2000$/server I suppose. Sounds right. Google is supposedly adding 500,000 new servers a year, Microsoft 200,000.
Scaling cheaply is a great competitive advantage.

A great presentation on design &amp; Star Wars:

| View | Upload your own

If you’re applying to Founder’s Co-op, you should know that our default preference in terms of number of founders is as follows:

1. 2 founders: 1 technical and 1 business
2. 3 founders: 2 technical and 1 business
3. 4 founders: 2 technical and 2 business
4. 1 founder: 1 technical

Sounds right, although for 4 founders I’d prefer 2 technical, 1 business and 1 user experience/product.

Amazon S3 now lets you copy, rename or move objects in S3 buckets. The Amazon guys are on a roll, and have been so for a few years now. I’m still amazed nobody (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, …) has come even close to what they offer.

Fred Wilson: “Tim makes a passionate argument for “tackling big hard problems” in
his keynote. But Dave is correct in his assertion that the best way to
do that is one step at a time. Think about the way Linux was built and continues to be built. One
step at a time. Each one looks trivial. Taken together it’s awesome.
Same with wikipedia. Or a social net like Facebook.”

Hate your intranet? Check out Google’s internal tools.