links for 2008-12-30

Law 5
So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life
Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once you slip, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

Yammer started in early September, followed a few weeks later by Present.ly. Each of those two services reports that it has been tried by more than 10,000 businesses.

I feel confident saying that we’ve covered much of what I consider to be the bare conceptual basics of horizontally scaling your application’s database layer, and that was the intent – to provide a solid primer and no more. This subject is easily worthy of a book, and in fact, the absence of such literature was largely the motivation for this article

It has long been common practice to use recurring solutions to solve common problems. Such solutions are called design patterns; standard reference points for the experienced user interface designer. This website seeks to better the situation for the UI designer, who struggles with the same problems as many other UI designers have struggled with before him.

FOAFlicious is an application for generating a FOAF file from your del.icio.us inbox.

Spending to much time at the airport? Boarding helps you find other stranded travelers by simply twitting #boarding along with your airport code (LAX, JFK, CDG, …). Therefore, Boarding will send you a reply with a link to the other Twitter users who you can message directly to meet up with.

Here is another idea – information server on the top of Twitter. Twitter 411 service lets you easily build your own information system, uses Twitter as a transport. The idea is very transparent. You can define your own keywords as well as data, associated with the selected keywords. Users will ask service via direct messages in Twitter and receive responses as direct messages too. Direct messages for the requests are just user-defined keywords. Direct messages for the responses are just user-defined reactions (data associated with the keywords).

This release includes updates of JRuby to 1.1.6 and JRuby-Rack to 0.9.3. It also adjusts our own version-numbering scheme to be JBoss and RPM-compatible.

Each library enables developers to retrieve profile information and persistent data from supporting containers without having to concern themselves with managing network connections, signing requests, or other lower-level details.

38. Add case studies to your website.

Funnel metrics
And in fact, they list some of the key conversion rates between each of these numbers:
* Visitors: 59 million uniques worldwide
* Members: 4 million new member registrations (on 270 million members total)
* Subscribers*: 900k paying subscribers
* ARPU: $19.06 per paying subscriber/paid user

Hindley-Milner (or “Damas-Milner”) is an algorithm for inferring value types based on use. It literally formalizes the intuition that a type can be deduced by the functionality it supports. Consider the following bit of psuedo-Scala (not a flying toy):