Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Nice video of an ajax paper prototype. (via)

Cool. Automatically add filesizes to links (like PDFs) with JQuery and Google Appengine.

Google should let these useful webservices (and others like tinyurl and such) run free on appengine, no limits, sponsored by Google. That would let people build loads of useful little webservices with no worries about monetization, open up a whole new area of innovation.

Yesterday she had her first chocolate and her first mussel, today her first cornflakes with milk.

Yep, I’m a daddyblogger now.

Hey, what happened to sketchcast.com? Loved the idea and the execution, but the site seems down?

That’s some good speech writing.

The stock market long term:

I created a new company to do my business with: funkymonkeycorp.

It’s the 12$ PC. And strangely enough, it seems viable.

When I was still trying to become Jakob Nielsen, back in 2000: the draw-what-you-saw methodology. Haven’t heard of anyone using it?

Hey, someone still enjoyed my themes and metaphors of the semantic web. Ah, them ol’ days!

I always hated misguided attempts at visual search engines, but weirdly, searchme.com kind of works. You just browse through results pages, in an Apple-like coverflow UI.

I’ll probably never use it again, but I was quite surprised at the effectiveness of just browsing through screenshots of websites, instead of scanning result lists on Google.

Creative Commons and other “free” licenses have been confirmed by an important court decision.

Hacker humor :) “Would like to put self replicating robots on the moon capable of
refining silicon and building photovoltaic cells. Will need experience
with robotics, AI, and Drupal. Ultimate plans trend towards world
domination.”

Nice, Amazon now has scalable persistent storage blocks (ie. harddrives) to use with EC2 (to store your database on for example), and they come with backup capability to S3. They’re from 1Gig to 1Terra. You only pay what you use, $0.10 per allocated GB per month.

Make Something People Want, the video.

Sometimes really old posts can be helpful years later. Gotta love archives.

FireEagle is one (of the many) reasons why I still think Yahoo is a great company with some damn great products.

Google moved it’s center of Latin American operations to Brazil, where it also develops and manages Orkut.

Here’s a wonderful video about Youtube and anthropology:

This means (talking about MySQL servers) upgrading to default configuration to 128GB of memory will
cost you just $9600 (list price). I’ve been able to configure on a web
the system with 8*2.5″ hard drives RAID and 2 CPUs (just as we usually
configure PowerEdge 2950) with 128GB of RAM for about $16000. This
means talking to Dell Sales rep it can purchases within $15000.

A clear explanation on why Rails can be slow: a slow page can cause other pages to be slow too. Weird. Perhaps Jonathan’s engineers are missing something, or else Rails just has inherent problems. PHP has nothing of the sort.

This is fun: Google uses this code instead of an image with a down-arrow:

<small>▼</small>

In Google analytics, how can I set up a report that shows traffic to all pages in a subdirectory?

Payment is

1) A way of connecting.

2) A sign of approval.

3) A vote.

4) It indicates an alligence with the maker.

5) It feels good to the payer, to support.

I don’t know, I like these drawings.

Has anyone heard of or worked with http://circleofexperts.com/?

Underdog in Flemish is onderhond

Yahoo is doing some amazing stuff with search. One of the things they’re doing is allowing some selected third parties to customize search results. Here’s a screenshot of a vanity search with a customized result from LinkedIn. Nice! That is possible the nicest, best presented search result for my name that I can imagine, and it’s on Yahoo, not Google.