Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Your Gmail account is now an OpenID. Cool.

How boy scouts use merit mechanisms.

Real estate in NYC being advertised in Euro.

Here’s a startup idea: a web-accessible API to postal services around the world. In other words, you can tie into this API to send a postcard or a letter through the postal service in any country, for example. Halfbaked ideas - you ask, I deliver!

Chris: “What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface for just one person?” Good stuff.

Incredible.

Consultants love Gordon Ramsey’s “Kitchen nightmares” show. In it, he visits a restaurant that is doing badly, pinpoints the problems (expensive menu, bad food, no leadership, no communication), and tries to fix it. And he shouts a lot at them too. It always makes me think of my consulting practice, other consultants seem to agree. I love his focus on getting the basics right, his honesty and his passion.

Patrick Kennedy wrote a smart blogpost about it, and Ruth Ellison gave a great presentation around the same idea:

The PHP guys are going to use / as a namespace separator, instead of the old ::

Bad decision because they forgot a criterion: semantic clearness. / already means a bunch of things, whereas :: doesn’t. class::function is clearer than class/function for that reason, I would think. But I’m probably wrong.

You can now do deeplinking in Youtube videos, something that was possible years ago with Google video.

Exactly!

I might have mentioned this before but I just love this design.

I dislike services that let me check the “remember me” box and then forget me after 2 weeks. Two weeks does not a relationship make, my friends! And don’t tell me it’s about security.

Is there a reliable way to block anonymous proxy servers? I especially want to stop people from signing up anonymously - can I disable javascript and then require it for the signup or something. (Browsing the site anonymously isn’t so much a problem).

Twitter’s fine, Facebook is very well designed and popular, but I personally still like my blog to write down my thoughts. Granted, it’s not as great at conversations, but it’s alright. And it’s mine, not owned by whoever will buy Twitter or Facebook.

Why it’s also important to talk to people who are not your customers.

I like this: how to boil milk (and why).

A strangely evil photo gets photoshopped into an internet meme. What can I say, it’s funny.

Simon seems to think Javascript might be the next language supported by Google appengine..

I don’t know, if I was a long term investor I’d think it’s a good time to start buying about now…

Democrats, please vote. Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.

Interesting. If you hve content behind a paywall, Google has a first click free program. Users get to see the first page for free, and you get your page indexed in the search results. Pretty cool.

Google published the roadmap for app engine, and in the next few months, they will add “support for a new runtime language”. Could it be PHP? There have been rumors about conversations with Zend…

Node is looking for an Arabic speaking interaction designer in Barcelona.

I like the tiny red line in Google’s calendar that indicates where in the day you are right now.

Todo lists are the new blogging platforms: everyone with some ambition but (apparently) little imagination wants to build one.

Vlogeurope, the European meetup of videobloggers, ended yesterday.

Hey, I totally forgot I had a Google profile!

Hey I noticed something, Google Chrome seems to add resize handles to formfields by itself. Interesting, but I’m not sure if it should do that?

ELGG is a pretty nice open source social networking package. But it’s relatively new, and installing on Dreamhost causes problems, I got an error message saying that it doesn’t support PHP4, even though Dreamhost runs PHP5.

It seems that the check for php5 is done in the .htaccess file, and somehow it doesn’t recognize that Dreamhost runs PHP5.

To fix the problem, comment out these lines in the .htaccess.

# php 4, apache 1.x
#<IfModule mod_php4.c>
#    ErrorDocument 500 “Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4.”
#    RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php
#</IfModule>

# php 4, apache 2
#<IfModule sapi_apache2.c>
#    ErrorDocument 500 “Elgg error: Elgg does not support PHP 4.”
#    RedirectMatch 302 .* index.php
#</IfModule>

An oldie but goodie.

A pretty good overview page of SEO tools (and yes, linkbait in itself).

Great post on group activities around usability and design.

The Vimeo plus package looks pretty sweet.

This is too funny.

Fliggo is like Ning for video. They’re in private beta, but I can get you an invite if you want.

John Cleese on Sarah Palin: “She’s like a trained parrot.”

“Observing these tests was more than a bit frustrating for the Yahoo!
OpenID team, and the test subjects may have been distracted by the
sounds of the groans and head-pounding coming from the other side of
the one-way mirror.”

“In South Korea, where Park is building a new kind of music-business
model, 80 percent of households have a broadband connection; downloads
via both PCs and cell phones make up an overwhelming share of the
nation’s music market. Download revenue there has soared 422 percent
since 2000, to $366 million, while CD sales have declined 83 percent
over the same period to just $70 million in 2007. And because almost
all digital music is purchased on a song-by-song basis, to the general
South Korean consumer, albums have become an irrelevant—even
alien—concept.”