Brent Sordyl's blog

Design the interface before starting to code.

So that's what I did. I wrote myself a little iPhone application to reach into Notes.app, pull out the Hiveminder todo list, and then sync it with the web service.

selected some of the most common in use JavaScript effects for modern web design.

24 Creative Business Card Designs

ten most easily implemented CSS table designs

how to build an alternate page and style sheet for the iPhone and iTouch.

If you’re looking to mock up an iPhone app during the design or coding process, a good place to start is the fully editable PSD file on teehan+lax that includes samples of most elements.

Download Free CSS Menus

icON Stage icon set. The set contains 49 free vector icons including PSD which can be useful for both corporate and personal setting.

Juggernaut is a combination of a small Ruby server, a Flash bridge, and a plugin that makes it easy to do server-side push systems in Rails

Auto Dial Firefox extension automatically places shortcuts to your most frequently visited web sites inside all of your new, empty tabs.

The only instant messenger designed for educators to advance and promote learning, Wimba Pronto includes unique features to specifically benefit students, teachers, and educational institutions including:

* Instant Access to Campus Services
* Queued Chat for Tutoring and Office Hours
* Automatic Population of Classmates and Courses
* Application Sharing
* Blended Audio and Video Conferencing
* Instant School-Wide Notifications

Startup Delayer allows you to setup how many seconds after Windows has started, to load each program.

everything about a website

Developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and investors will all find value in WindyCityRails. Developers and designers will relish the brain food of the Lecture Room.

According to the book, US pet food companies spent more on R&D last year than US utilities did

Calliflower is easy and interactive thanks in big part to our web interface – an easy to use interactive dashboard that makes organizing and participating in multi-party calls simple and engaging. Our dead simple call creation wizard, calendar integration and versatile call-in option are just icing on the cake. You can see more on our features here.

networking aggregator's planned Simple Update Protocol. In a nutshell, he describes it as a "simple and compact 'ping feed' that Web services can produce in order to alert the consumers of their feeds when a feed has been updated."

BackType is a website that lets people find, follow and share comments from across the web. BackType’s technology crawls and indexes millions of comments so you can search them by topic or follow those written by the people you care about.

BackType aggregates comments made by a name that matches to a linked URL. So if you, like most people, leave comments with the same URL across multiple blogs, they will be aggregated. You can also claim an account, like i did, and have your comments aggregated even if you use different URLs.

18. Search, don’t file. I used to spend a lot of time filing all my computer files and all my emails into nice, organized folders. I’d spend time every day doing this. Now, I just archive everything, on computer and email, and search when I need something.

Klok is a tool intended to be used by individuals, like myself, who have a need to track the time they spend on projects, tasks or anything else for that matter. It is a desktop tool that requires the Adobe AIR runtime

Import kuler themes directly into Creative Suite 3 Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. Select Save Theme menu to learn more. * Color inspiration. Browse and search color themes from kuler (kuler.adobe.com), an online application to create and share color harmonies.

Shrink O'Matic is an AIR application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs. Simply drag and drop images and they'll be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats.

Icon Generator is a little application that lets you generate a CS3 or Web 2.0 style icon, only 3 step. Pick color, type characters, and save it. Just create 4 different sizes of the icon.

Second, all technology has future liability. The more code you write, the more you have to maintain and support. That has a cost as well for the future.

This Excel spreadsheet watches approaching deadlines and shifts task priorities accordingly. In 20 minutes the steps below provide a more effective way to manage your priorities.

perf4j is a performance monitoring framework for Java. It includes a simple API for performance statistics gathering, with optional Annotation support. And classes for performance reporting (i.e. max, min, avg, stddev, TPM, etc.) with report options such as files and graphs. perf4j reporting may either be embedded, using included Servlets, or used with a command line tool.

RockXP is a tool that allows you to retrieve password. This tool retrieves HASH password of Windows.
- Allow you to get all Microsoft Software Serials
- Allow you to change your XP key
- Allow you to save your XP activation

My mandatory MBA Lifehacker course would cover three things: how to install a personal organization system into your life, automate and streamline repetitive tasks, and firewall your attention. In school we learn facts and figures and problem-solving and case studies, but not how to manage our own time and attention and the best ways to turn inputs into output.

What does jParallax do?
Parallax turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport.

Create your own social news site in seconds.

FireShot is a extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer that creates and edits screenshots of web pages entirely.

Jabbify is an instant messaging service, which you can integrate onto your website, as an added attraction and can also grasp feedback from the visitors about your website for further development and ideas.

ProofHQ is a smarter, easier way to manage review and approval of designs, artwork and documents. It is an online collaboration, proofing and approval tool built specifically for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.

ersistent access is key to many applications. With the release of this service, now you can simply use Amazon as a full-scale virtual data server. Another way to think about it: a storage area network in the cloud.

Five philosophers sit around a circular table. In front of each philosopher is a large plate of rice. The philosophers alternate their time between eating and thinking. There is one chopstick between each philosopher, to their immediate right and left. In order to eat, a given philosopher needs to use both chopsticks. How can you ensure all the philosophers can eat reliably without starving to death?

ProofHQ is a web application that manages collaborative review and approval of designs, artwork, documents and images.

good list comparing netbooks/ultra-portables

Stuart's major point: If you have a network link with low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several in parallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency then no amount of money can turn any number of them into a link with good latency.

several open source solutions out there that make a valiant attempt to compensate for Java's Calendar Management defficiencies

a quick walkthrough of deploying a Rails app using JRuby

Simple Animated Menu for Mootools 1.2

maatkit, formerly MySQL Toolkit, is a collection of command-line utilities that provide missing functionality for MySQL. Some of the tools implement lacking server functionality, such as online consistency checks for master/slave replication; others are client-side utilities such as a query profiler.

Zapproved has one mission: to invent technology that minimizes organizational and social barriers to decision-making. Our innovative, experienced technology professionals have teamed up to make a difference in how people work.

Simple is an asynchronous HTTP engine capable of scaling to large loads with a limited number of servicing threads.

The following are axioms for software architects by software architects.
11. One line of working code is worth 500 of specification
26. Scope is the enemy of success

The other 80/20 rule. 80% of enterprise IT budgets just "keep the lights on". Only 20% goes to new stuff.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) gives you persistent, high-performance, high-availability block-level storage which you can attach to a running instance of EC2.

If you ask your product planner to prioritize those features from 1 (high) – 3 (low), you’re likely to get a response like:
80 x priority 1
15 x priority 2
5 x priority 3

Jawed Karim is investing, of course. The 29-year-old tells his hometown paper, the Minneapolis-St. Paul Tribune, about his venture fund, Youniversity Ventures, which seeks out first-time entrepreneurs and students, offering $50,000 to $300,000 in seed funds. He's also will to offer his advice, gratis. "We will coach people along if it falls into our area of interest, even though we don't make an investment," he says.

The hardest part of design … is keeping features out.
Donald Norman

Depressing Twitter's internal value is a concept from British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who noted in 1992 that humans—like other primates—can handle only 150 relationships. If we try to add many more connections, our little brains get overloaded.

ICONIX Process is an open, free-to-use object modeling process. It's minimal, use case driven, and – when combined with the practices described here – extremely agile.

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del.icio.us is a great service, but when you search through your bookmarks, you are only searching through tags, titles and descriptions, not the page content. del.izzy lets you search through all content, including title, description and page content, for all your bookmarks.

Where Are the Tools? Once you get past ActiveResource, Restlet, and Jersey, I’m not aware of much. Seems like an opportunity to me because, you know, REST really actually truly works, as religions go it’s a very practical one.

BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each plugin adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact

BuddyPress is a social network in a box – a FaceBook style network you will be able to install into WordPress MU, the multiple user iteration of WordPress.

This sample deluge of facts shows how easy it is to feel overwhelmed by the amount of available information, an amount that is growing at an exponential rate.

“How do you make objective decisions on the best companies when the first decision is whether they can pay or not?” Mr. Arrington said. “Sometimes the hottest start-ups either can’t afford it or don’t need it.”

Adrian Holovaty is as red-hot as a techie can get. His EveryBlock.com tells you all about your neighborhood-including who's taking bribes.

Some applications look great in a screenshot, but deliver disappointing results when they are actually used. The driving force behind the development of SQL Buddy was not to produce a great-looking screenshot but rather to create a product that would enable developers to enjoy their work and get more done in less time.

3. The Scope Test:
Engineering and design resources are a scarcity at every company. Respect them. Understand the scope of what you’re doing, and if a single feature is going to hijack your team for months, be wary.

This means what it sounds like: Rails deployments on JRuby will use 1/Nth the amount of memory they use now, where N is the number of thread-unsafe Rails instances currently required to handle concurrent requests.

1. Watch your ratio.
If only a few people follow you, but you follow a thousand or more, many people will assume you’re a spammer. That’s because you probably are. Go away, spammer. We do not care about your Facebook app.

How much does it cost to create an Avatar with Face Your Manga?
Absolutely nothing! With Face Your Manga everyone can create his own Avatar in easy, funny and free way.