Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease

Peter — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:20:37 +0000

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

Peter — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:08:58 +0000

The US eats a *lot* of corn:

Peter — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:02:15 +0000

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.

Peter — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:36:47 +0000

The alternative productivity manifesto. (via Jorge)

Peter — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:27:34 +0000

This is pretty fun.

Peter — Wed, 14 May 2008 06:25:34 +0000

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.

Peter — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:45:05 +0000

Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate John McCain.

Peter — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:38:57 +0000

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

links for 2008-05-12

Peter — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:34:16 +0000

Peter — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:46:27 +0000

Draw a very small elephant walking across the table:

Peter — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:47:23 +0000

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.

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:59:10 +0000

A great presentation on design & Star Wars:

| View | Upload your own

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 06:19:13 +0000

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:

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

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

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:23:10 +0000

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.

Peter — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:10:01 +0000

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.”