Archive

Archive for February, 2009

links for 2009-02-28

February 28th, 2009
  • When it comes to MySQL 5 servers, Querious matches and exceeds the features of Sequel Pro with style. If you don’t need to connect to a MySQL 3 or MySQL 4 database, Querious is just more polished and feature-rich than Sequel Pro and is well worth the small price tag. I hope they add MySQL 3 and MySQL 4 support soon, as I will start using it the instant they do so.
    (tags: mysql osx dba)
  • Contained in this article are 80+ AJAX scripts and resources you should have at your side while designing your own applications. Auto-completion, instant field editing, menus, calendars, interactive elements, visual effects, animation, basic Javascript, as well as an extensive developer’s suite are contained here for a useful toolbox, so that you don’t have to go through a huge list of bookmarks.
    (tags: ajax reference)
  • That's gonna give a lot of us pause for thought—many PDFs contain information we don't exactly want floating around. Assuming the email you're receiving your conversions at is secure, here's what Nitro says about their PDF-to-Word tool:
    (tags: pdf converter)
  • (tags: logos)
  • (tags: logos)
  • I’m a big fan of JSON as a data exchange format. It’s simple, lightweight, easy to produce and easy to consume. However, JSON hasn’t quite caught up to XML in terms of tool support. For example, if you try to visit a URL that produces JSON (using the official “application/json” MIME type), Firefox will prompt you to download the file. If you try the same thing with an XML document, it’ll display a nice formatted result with collapsible sections. I’ve always wanted a Firefox extension that would give JSON the same treatment that comes built-in for XML, and after searching for it for a while I just gave up and wrote my own. The JSONView extension (install) will parse a JSON document and display something prettier, with syntax highlighting, collapsible arrays and objects, and nice readable formatting.
    (tags: firefox json)
  • jQuery is exciting library with lots of great plugins. This time we created another interesting collection. Below you'll find 20 interesting plugins.
  • We wanted a way to discover relevant and interesting items from the people we follow on Twitter. Most of the time something interesting is a link shared by a friend or colleague. So we built MicroPlaza to deliver us the filtered links from our Twitter timelines. It's our discovery engine, our personal newswire and just so god damn addictive!

web2.0

links for 2009-02-27

February 27th, 2009
  • Our datastore stores schema-less bags of properties (e.g., JSON objects or Python dictionaries). The only required property of stored entities is id, a 16-byte UUID. The rest of the entity is opaque as far as the datastore is concerned. We can change the "schema" simply by storing new properties.
  • Webrat lets you quickly write robust and thorough acceptance tests for a Ruby web application. By leveraging the DOM, it can run tests similarly to an in-browser testing solution without the associated performance hit (and browser dependency). The result is tests that are less fragile and more effective at verifying that the app will respond properly to users.
    (tags: testing ruby)
  • most popular repositories on github
  • In the overview below we present 10 useful tips, ideas and resources for Ruby on Rails-developers (both newbies and professionals). Please feel free to share your tips, ideas and suggestions in the comments to this post!
    (tags: rubyonrails)
  • TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears. Our first service will automatically save any links you tweet to the del.icio.us bookmarking service. We're working on connections to many other services — stay tuned!
  • SOAP is out, REST is in when it comes to the protocols being deployed as part of SOA. When asked to indicate their past, present, and estimated future use of SOAP-based Web services vs. REST-based Web services, respondents show a marked drop-off in use of SOAP, from 54% a year ago to a projected 42% in the next 18 months. The number primarily using or considering REST-based Web services is predicted to grow by a proportional amount, from 14% to 24% over the same time frame.
    (tags: soa restful SOAP)
  • Develop your ideas into a prototype without the need for programming skills. Visually specify the user interface of your software project online. Create interactive wireframes or mockups with reusable parts through a sophisticated layer concept. Describe the underlying processes by visually linking the single wireframe pages instead of using some abstract diagrams.
    (tags: prototyping)
  • The major point I wish to convey here is that all designers need to work smarter in independently determining what their talent, skill and expertise are worth and charge the client accordingly – without question or apology. Being smart in determining what you should charge for your work will hopefully allow you to “work less, charge more” in the future.
    (tags: freelance)
  • In this article we’ve listed 7 fresh and simple tools for cross-browser compatibility testing, tools that actually make this stuff pretty easy. Not only that, but every single one of these tools can be used for free.
  • So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the ideas expressed there.
  • If you checked into Oscar night this year, you may have caught host Hugh Jackman's brief but hilarious quip about finding the backup dancers for his opening number on Craigslist–dubbed 'Craigslist Dancers' in his ditty. Though Jackman's dance troupe was likely anything but discount, the utility of Craigslist listings is, for many, no ruse. And the more important a service is, the more developers will create companion services to enhance the basics (take Twitter, to wit).
  • Copilot OneClick is a new feature that makes it even easier to support the people you help most often. Install Copilot OneClick once, then connect to their computers with just a single click. Whether you are helping your parents each weekend or running a corporate help desk, Copilot OneClick makes it possible for you to help people quickly without them having to do a thing.
  • Paul Graham, Jessica's husband and partner in Y Combinator, has tackled this subject on his website. "The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized," he writes. "Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck)."
  • Ruby's not well known for being used to develop regular desktop applications. Part of the reason has been, until recently, a lack of good GUI-related libraries. Tk, which is included with Ruby's standard library, can be used to develop desktop apps, but they're frightfully ugly and the API is from the stone age (it also received the lowest scores in the survey for how well it met users' requirements). Things are changing quickly though with developments including Shoes, wxRuby, FXRuby, and Monkeybars (for JRuby).
    (tags: gui ruby shoes)

web2.0

links for 2009-02-26

February 26th, 2009
  • 9. Get ramen profitable.

    "Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.

  • The company has created an entire 37 page guide to the development process (below), decisions they made and what they learned during the creation of their PhotoKast app. Their hope is that the document might provide insights for other developers when they start out on iPhone App development projects.
  • You can practice and test and work out your presentations, you know. Author and speaker David Meerman Scott works from the perspective of perfecting his presentations, mapping them out to great detail, and then tweaking only small pieces while leaving the most of his work intact.
  • At Wiki-Teacher, we believe that there is an untapped resource within our nation's teachers. Wiki-Teacher is a forum for teachers to share their collective intelligence through their resources, insights, and practices. As a community of educators, we will control the direction of Wiki-Teacher as well as determine the relevance and value of the resources. Wiki-Teacher is made possible through the support of the Clark County School District's Curriculum and Professional Development Division.
    (tags: e-learning)
  • This article is intended for developers interested in accessing the Google Data APIs using Ruby, specifically Ruby on Rails. It assumes the reader has some familiarity with the Ruby programming language and the Rails web-development framework. I focus on the Documents List API for most of the samples, but the same concepts can be applied to any of the Data APIs.
  • This site is an attempt to document, in one place and in a uniform manner, the web services and XML data sources that are provided by the US government.
  • Everyone caches. This guide will teach you what you need to know about avoiding that expensive round-trip to your database and returning what you need to return to those hungry web clients in the shortest time possible.
  • A new follower? Should you follow back? Find out if you have common followings with them, and which people you follow that follow them…
    (tags: twittertools)
  • What if we could provision and deploy instantly? This is where the difference between “a little” and “none” comes into play. If it’s instant, the portion of time spent on it goes to zero. The development process can then improve at any speed, and deployment/provisioning will never become a barrier. Problem solved.
    (tags: scm)
  • Typically, with a RESTful API, you’ll have a well-defined URL scheme. Let’s say you want to provide an API for users on your site (I know, I always use the “users” concept for my examples). Well, your URL structure would probably be something like, “api/users” and “api/users/[id]” depending on the type of operation being requested against your API. You also need to consider how you want to accept data. These days a lot of people are using JSON or XML, and I personally prefer JSON because it works well with JavaScript, and PHP has easy functionality for encoding and decoding it. If you wanted your API to be really robust, you could accept both by sniffing out the content-type of the request (i.e. application/json or application/xml), but it’s perfectly acceptable to restrict things to one content type. Heck, you could even use simple key/value pairs if you wanted.
    (tags: restful php)

web2.0

links for 2009-02-25

February 25th, 2009
  • Over the weekend, I mapped the spread of Walmart using Modest Maps. It starts slow and then spreads like wildfire in the southeast and makes its way towards the west coast.
  • 1. Ask a friend or colleague, or a volunteer from the audience to monitor the back channel and interrupt you if there are any questions or comments that need to be addressed. Jeffrey Veen calls this person an ombudsman for the audience.
  • This is a TextMate plug-in which allows you to QuickLook items in your project, either by selecting the item(s) you want to preview and using QuickLook from the context menu, or pressing ⌥␣ when the project drawer has focus.
    (tags: textmate)
  • Facebook is hosting 10+ billion photos, by some measures more than any other site on the web. If the URL of a photo were temporary and difficult to guess from the public address, this scheme might be okay. The photo server will in fact respond to a request from wget without any cookies at all.

web2.0

links for 2009-02-23

February 23rd, 2009
  • I've really been struck at how common bad apples are. Truthfully, I've been kind of haunted by my conversation with Will Felps. Hearing about his research, you realize just how easy it is to poison any group [...] each of us have had moments this week where we wonder if we, unwittingly, have become the bad apples in our group.
  • Now you can personalize your Twitter background like never before. The tool below will help you create Twitter backgrounds that have the same look and feel as those done by professional graphic designers. It's easy to use, and best of all, it's Free! Give it a try!
  • Open sourced version of a simple help ticket system that we use at BIG Folio and NextProof

    I wanted to share my help desk app with you guys. I built it so our customers could submit help tickets and our staff could reply (this is a support app, not a bug tracking app).

    Anyway, I decided to open source it and share with any startups that could benefit. I've learned a ton from HN over the last year, so this is the least I could do.

  • app will allow you to mirror your Delicious bookmarks to a MySQL database. How to display them is left up to you.
  • Through the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition, "providing users with Web-based e-mail, document authoring, spreadsheets, presentations and sites, all integrated with their online learning platform," explained Moodlerooms' West Coast Managing Director Michael Penney.
  • The best all-round image to use with rails is Pawl Dowman's Rails on EC2 bundle (or here). EC2onRails is great. Unfortunately, if you’ve never used EC2 before, you probably won’t be able to “Deploy a Ruby on Rails app on EC2 in Five Minutes” as the documentation claims, so this document will try to fill in the gaps for someone who has never worked with EC2.
  • god monitors your server processes and tasks to make sure they run smoothly, and performs maintenance tasks (such as restarting your application servers) as necessary. This Ruby application is written by Tom Preston-Werner and serves similar functionality to, and inspired by, a popular tool called monit.
  • Database backed asynchronous priority queue — Extracted from Shopify
  • …If you really need a queue, use Starling, which Blaine Cook of Twitter released, like, yesterday. Or SQS if you need really huge storage. If you just want to fire and forget a local process as you say, I think Spawn is pretty good ( http://rubyforge.org/projects/spawn ). I haven’t actually used it but seems like the best of the forking bunch. That should eliminate the startup overhead. On the other hand, you don’t get any message reliability or cross-machine scheduling. ..I agree that BDrb is shady (actually all of Drb is shady). ap4r is too
    bloated. Thruqueue is promising if you make it past the crazy dependencies list. BackgroundFu is like a worse Spawn.”
  • If you memcache first, you will never feel the pain and never learn how bad your database indexes and Rails queries are. What happens when scale gets so big that your memcache setup is dying? Oh, right, you're even more screwed than you would have been if you got your DB right in the first place. Also, if this is your first time doing scaling Rails / a db-driven site, there's only one way to learn how, and putting it off til later probably isn't the way. Memcache is like a bandaid for a bullet hole — you're gonna die.

web2.0

links for 2009-02-22

February 22nd, 2009

links for 2009-02-21

February 21st, 2009

web2.0

links for 2009-02-20

February 20th, 2009
  • Today began with a great Voice of the Customer presentation by Nicolas Peeters of Accenture sharing how over 90K of his colleagues use their internal instance of Confluence.
  • It is usually because it is too expensive. A dedicated on-site assistant costs thousands of dollars per month in loaded costs. And you have to find one and hire them and manage them. Where will you put them? If you're like most executives today, you can't afford it or your company does not have the budget. And even if you did have a company-provided assistant, would they be allowed to take care of all your personal arrangements? Probably not.
  • So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
    (tags: twitter)

web2.0

links for 2009-02-19

February 19th, 2009
  • 18) Know When to Stop
    Make sure all relevant stakeholders have the opportunity to give feedback but don’t turn this exercise into painting the Sistine Chapel. Typically I would say three drafts should get the job done. The first gets the idea onto paper. The second reflects feedback from other parties such as developers, and designers. The third should be the final polish.
  • The GOP.gov API (Application Programming Interface) makes it possible for you to receive data from GOP.gov using HTTP POST calls. There are many situations where this could be useful, including posting information on blogs, websites, software applications and other government webpages.
    (tags: api government)
  • Contribute to local media by tweeting news-worthy updates
    (tags: twittertools)
  • We’re going to build a Gem that translates from American to British, it’s going to be simple, but it will demonstrate how to think about what you’re making and how to go about it. We’ll be testing with RSpec, for more details on the syntax of RSpec, please see their site.
  • Description Understudy allows access to streaming video through the Front Row interface of Mac OS X. The user can subscribe to multiple feeds, and select a video to watch from them. Understudy currently supports Hulu and Netflix.
    (tags: osx hulu)
  • We’re developing a checklist that all websites should be checked against before launch. Let us know if we’ve missed something out, or if something needs further clarification. Some well-known and well-documented tasks (such as validation and accessibility testing) are not explained in detail as most web developers will know what these refer to.
    (tags: startup launch)
  • (tags: jQuery)
  • You’ll need Geek Tool to monitor incoming tweets. (Geek Tool is a free utility that runs as a Preference Pane and lets you embed shell output, URLs, and more in your desktop.) I set up a new Shell Command entry, with the following command (all on one line):
  • With Queued, you can quickly access and modify your Netflix queue from your desktop, search for movies to add to your queue, rate movies, and you can even launch and view Instant Watch movies directly in the application itself.
  • The channel servers are the most intricate piece of the backend. They're responsible for queuing a given user's messages and pushing them to their web browser via HTTP. We made an early decision to write the channel servers in Erlang. The language itself has many pros and cons, but we chose Erlang to power Chat because its model lends itself well to concurrent, distributed, and robust programming. It's easy to model our millions of concurrent users with a few lightweight processes each, where the same tactic in, say, C++ would have been more daunting. Programming languages are always a tradeoff; Erlang makes some hard things easy but, unfortunately, some easy things hard.
  • (tags: twitter humor)

web2.0

links for 2009-02-18

February 18th, 2009
  • 6. Advertgames (the whole experience is an advert), common on movie websites, can also be big like America’s Army or the Burger King games on Xbox 360. I did one of the first of these called “Cool Spot” for 7-UP. The advertiser helps fund the game and depending on the deal, that determines who earns cash out of the revenue. Your reputation will impact this equation.
    (tags: games)
  • Approach 1. Sites using the JS client must host a small HTML file that we’ll call caller.html. They should inform your JS client of its URL as an initialization step. When the XHR response arrives, the XHR iframe creates a child iframe pointing to caller.html and including a URL fragment containing the response status, content, and a callback name from the original window. caller.html simply parses its URL fragment and passes the response information to its grandparent window via a direct function call that looks something like this: parent.parent[callbackName](status, responseText).
  • # Fidelity — memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;
    # Fecundity — memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;
    # Longevity — memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.
    (tags: memes)
  • For some time now I’m devoted completely to Web Grid Design. First I built Emastic then Malo and now The Golden Grid.

    Emastic is a very complete CSS Framework integrating various CSS construction techniques like floats, absolute positioning, complete freedom of your default width, extra usability with em based grid system plus possibility of fluid columns and extra % based grid system and many more features. Then the question is why build another grid system.

    (tags: css grid)
  • It’s important to note that Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.
  • All of these bookmarklets/favelets will be useful to all web designers and developers, they are the quickest method for testing, analyzing and tweaking any web page.
    (tags: webdesign)
  • Renowned design theorist and social scientist Donald Schon famously described design as "a conversation with materials." By this he meant that as a designer comes up with an idea and begins to simulate how it will be constructed, she will learn new things about the forces acting upon the situation and change the way she thinks about the problem, thereby evolving her sense of the solution. Although this kind of prototyping can start to bleed into a technical proof of concept, this isn't always a bad thing. It's not just about figuring out the hypothetically ideal experience for your user audience, but more importantly, it's about figuring out the ideal experience that can actually be delivered to that audience, given a certain technical environment and development timeline.
    (tags: prototyping)

web2.0

links for 2009-02-17

February 17th, 2009
  • (tags: memes)
  • Never apologize
    Most people wouldn’t have noticed the issues for which you’re apologizing—and it just sounds lame.
  • The Short URL Wordpress Plugin allows short URL aliases to be created for posts on your Wordpress blog. This would turn http://tinyurl.com/6a7d4b into http://martinwright.tv/u/5. Not quite as short, but much more useful, I know which site I’m being taken to. Is it short enough? Yes. Twitter only applies TinyURL to URL’s over 30 characters.
  • According to my web designer experience, one of the most common requests from clients when it comes to Wordpress personalization, is to add a basic event calendar to their website.
    (tags: jQuery example)
  • Seesmic-AS3-XMPP is an all new XMPP 1.0 compliant library for Flash 9+. It features an easy to understand event-driven style, starttls support (using a modified Hurlant TLS lib), and a plugin based architecture for easy extending.
  • You'll want to stick to a couple of different categories of questions, and while these may vary from project to project, this post should serve as a good outline for what to ask. You want the client to understand that you are simply trying to meet their needs as best you can. They will generally be more than happy to answer all of these questions.
    (tags: webdesign)
  • If you have only an occasional need for running large jobs, $2/hour for a 20 node MPI cluster on EC2 is not a bad deal considering the ~ $20K price for building your own comparable system.
    (tags: data aws ec2)
  • Coming in at just 1541 lines of code so far, TinyRB is not going to be replacing your usual Ruby interpreter anytime soon. While it supports most of the keywords and some base classes including Class, Object, Fixnum, Symbol, and String, there's no support for Array, Module, Float, and a whole ton of essential stuff.
    (tags: ruby)
  • Pre-pre-pre-SAT n. An epithet for ReadiStep, the College Board's new standardized test for eighth graders. Touted as a diagnostic aid for teachers and parents, the two-hour exam will begin demoralizing pre-pre-pre-adults this fall.
    (tags: e-learning)
  • # 19 percent of online adults ages 18 to 24 have used it
    # 20 percent of those ages 25 to 34 have used it
    # 10 percent of those 35 to 44 have used it
    # 5 percent of those 45 to 54 have used it
    (tags: twitter)
  • Until the time comes when Amazon will offer a load balancing service in their EC2 environment, people are forced to use a software-based load balancing solution. One of the most common out there is HAProxy. I've been looking at it for the past 2 months or so, and recently we started to use it in production here at OpenX. I am very impressed with its performance and capabilities. I'll explore here some of the functionality that HAProxy offers, and also discuss some of the non-obvious aspects of its configuration.
  • I love my Google Reader shared items, but when I want to add a little commentary, I post a link to Twitter. I created a Greasemonkey script named Treader to streamline the process.

web2.0

links for 2009-02-16

February 16th, 2009
  • I love my Google Reader shared items, but when I want to add a little commentary, I post a link to Twitter. I created a Greasemonkey script named Treader to streamline the process.
  • This specification defines a transport protocol that emulates a bidirectional stream between two entities (such as a client and a server) by efficiently using multiple synchronous HTTP request/response pairs without requiring the use of polling or asynchronous chunking.
  • Strophe is a library for writing XMPP clients. It is implemented in both JavaScript and C for use in a wide variety of languages. The implementations are production ready, well documented, easy to use, and easy to extend.
    (tags: xmpp)
  • With an expressive language such as Ruby or Groovy and with modern test practices, 100% C0 test coverage is readily achievable. But 100% coverage is meaningless without other supporting habits and practices. Over the last few years, we have taken dozens of projects to 100% coverage, and there are still plenty of things that can go wrong:
    (tags: testing)
  • The Initial Prototype
    As part of this announcement, we’re also releasing an early experimental prototype to demonstrate some of the concepts of Bespin and the possibilities that it opens up.
    Bespin 0.1

    * Initial prototype framework that includes support for basic editing features, such as syntax highlighting, large file sizes, undo/redo, previewing files in the browser, importing/exporting projects, etc.

  • Pet Catalog Photos is a simple JavaFX application that displays pet photos retrieved from a RESTful Pet Catalog app (implemented using JAX-RS) described in an earlier blog entry and in this screencast. This JavaFX example is a modification of the Interesting Photos : JavaFX Example Application.
    (tags: javafx ria)
  • Silverlight Performance

    Silverlight is faster than Flash at processing animations and compiled execution of commands. See the Bubblemark animation test for a working example of comparative animation speeds.

  • Typically in the Rails world, when someone mentions long-running, or background tasks, you think either BackgrounDrb or Starling/Workling. Those tools are fine and all — actually, don't get me started on BackgrounDrb — but I wanted something a bit more simple.
  • Credits: These templates were developed by Martin Hardee with inspiration from Casey Cameron, Kevin Cheng, and the web design teams at Sun Microsystems, Cisco and other companies. Illustrations, by ISD Group, are free for you to use. Please add a credit line at the end of your slides or storyboards (see the slides for an example).
  • A question to ask yourself is — if your audience can read this material then do you really need to be there? Maybe you could send an email and as a follow up have a quick interactive QnA which could be more valuable. Remember that a document is a richer mode of communication than a Slideument (higher resolution, et all).
  • Office-themed "We Didn't Start the Fire."
    (tags: tweet humor)
  • Eclipse-based IDEs
    PDT, Zend Studio 6, Aptana PHP and Aptana Studio Pro are built on the Eclipse platform. That means you can use any of the thousands of Eclipse plug-ins out there. If a feature you need is not integrated in the IDE itself, it is most likely available as a third party plug-in.
    (tags: ide php)
  • SimpleJPA is an open source implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) for SimpleDB.

    It supports ManyToOne references and OneToMany collections, both with lazy loading. It supports large objects using S3 and caches results. It also makes concurrent requests to SimpleDB to speed things up, and even supports a subset of the JPA Query language.

    (tags: aws simpledb jpa)
  • Why it is wrong: Average rating works fine if you always have a ton of ratings, but suppose item 1 has 2 positive ratings and 0 negative ratings. Suppose item 2 has 100 positive ratings and 1 negative rating. This algorithm puts item two (tons of positive ratings) below item one (very few positive ratings). WRONG.
  • With partitioning comes the CAP Theorem: you can only pick two of the following three: Strong Consistency, High Availability, Partition Tolerance.
    The second problem is the huge number of writes that happen. Digg has a write problem. If the average user has 100 followers that’s 300 million diggs day. That's 3,000 writes per second, 7GB of storage per day, and 5TB of data spread across 50 to 60 servers.
    (tags: scalability)
  • With the new tools in the AIR 1.5 debug launcher, Aptana has managed to recreate the debugging workflow in Aptana Studio, and provide step-by-step debugging, breakpoints, watches, and more. In this tutorial, we’ll run through how to debug AIR projects from start to finish. Veteran AIR developers can skip ahead to the Debugging on Wheels section.
  • Taps is a temporary web service you run on a server that has access to the database you want to export. You can then run the client to connect to that service and pull data out of it in chunks. It works through firewalls, doesn’t require a direct ssh connection, and – best of all – it’s database independent. So you can export from a MySQL database and import to PostgreSQL, or vice versa.

web2.0

links for 2009-02-13

February 13th, 2009
  • The world doesn’t need another arbitrary binary protocol. Just use HTTP. Your life will be simpler. Originally this came up when scaling a gaggle of MySQL machines. I would have killed for a reliable proxy. It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with my list of things that HTTP has that an arbitrary protocol will have to rebuild. Anytime you choose to use a service based on a non-HTTP protocol, look over this list and think carefully about what you’re giving up.

web2.0

links for 2009-02-12

February 12th, 2009
  • Kluster is a group decision-making platform that helps bubble up new ideas and see which ones fly. And with our super-cool EQ tool, you can fine-tune the system to reflect participants' real-world influence.
    (tags: crowdmind)
  • We heard that the SMART Table would be ready for playtime in Spring of 2009, and here she is, a few months early. The kid-friendly multitouch table is now available for purchase in North America and the United Kingdom, and as expected, it's being marketed towards educational institutions looking for new and exciting ways to help kids learn. The 230i (the only model currently offered) weighs in at 150 pounds and features an XGA DLP projector, integrated speakers, an inbuilt digital camera to track touches and multitouch capabilities courtesy of DViT (Digital Vision Touch) technology. We're still not told just how much resellers will be charging, but we'll stick to the "at least seven or eight grand" figure we heard when toying with one last October. Demo vid is after the break.
  • Exit! Your account will stay online and automatically answer with your text.
    (tags: IM)
  • sesame street flash site
  • Continuing my practice of putting online journalism lessons online, this is the second part of the week 1 lesson, where I introduce students to Twitter.
  • When it comes to transferring files, FTP services are as old as the Internet itself. Unfortunately, so is the logic surrounding the process of moving files. "Intuitive" doesn't exactly jump to mind. As such, a multitude of designers, photographers, and account managers struggle with technically challenged clients for whom the seemingly simple task of "exchanging files" is rife with difficulty. Onehub hopes to change that – and it's off to a beautiful start.
  • This post illustrates five interesting rich text editors ready to use in your web projects. I also provided some guidelines regarding how to implement them on your pages using a few lines of HTML code.
  • Noca is building a new online payment system to provide significantly reduced transaction processing rates for online shopping enabling efficient processing of micro-transactions for digital goods. Current payment systems have high fixed as well as variable costs and do not scale for online transactions. Noca's system offers merchants virtually free transaction processing. For the consumers Noca is building a "consumer experience" and incentivization strategy which will allow consumers unprecedented choice in incentives and provide for a radically improved way to transact online. Identity theft will be a thing of the past
  • Onehub is a web application that provides an easy and secure way to share business information and files with partners, customers, coworkers, and suppliers. Onehub is an on-demand service, so you don't have to install or maintain expensive server software. Nor do you have to be an IT genius to use it all you need is an internet connection
  • ABC Animals is a clever application because it can be used by children across a large age range. I'm not sure if the developers at Critical Matter intended this. But, I've found it can be used by children as young as 18 months, up to as old as seven – depending on their level of development. And, given the rate at which children grow and develop during the first 7 years of their life this a decent achievement.
  • automatic one-click software installations
  • The Brightkite Wall allows you to turn your monitor into an interactive, live Brightkite display. It's perfect for live events, bars, trade shows, retailers, gatherings, or just displaying on your desktop.

web2.0

links for 2009-02-10

February 10th, 2009
  • So is serious engineering. Two of the six people in this room are mechanical engineers, each with four patents to her name. One is Lizardo. The other is Papadopoulos, who offers the Foreign Correspondents card. She would enlist Ideo staff in different countries to watch the nightly news where they are and contribute their observations. Along those lines, Sklar wants to broaden the inquiry by using Extreme User Interviews, a card from the Ask suit. He'd try to understand the center by interviewing those who occupy the edges: "someone who doesn't have a TV, someone who gets all their news from the National Enquirer, someone who watches TV constantly."

web2.0