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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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# 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 -
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.
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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.
Archive | February, 2009
links for 2009-02-17
February 17, 2009
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links for 2009-02-16
February 16, 2009
0 Comments
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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).
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Office-themed "We Didn't Start the Fire."
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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. -
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.
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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.
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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. -
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.
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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.
links for 2009-02-13
February 13, 2009
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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.
links for 2009-02-12
February 12, 2009
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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.
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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.
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Exit! Your account will stay online and automatically answer with your text.
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sesame street flash site
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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automatic one-click software installations
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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.
links for 2009-02-10
February 10, 2009
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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."
links for 2009-02-09
February 9, 2009
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HAProxy (good) request queuing: instead of blindly passing requests to each app. server, in round-robin fashion, HAProxy allows us to limit the number of outstanding connections between the client and the server. For example, we can specify that each app server may only have two outstanding requests (which means that at most 4 jobs will be queued on our two application servers), and all other clients will wait in the HAProxy queue for the first available app. server. Beautiful! If one of our app. servers is taking a long time to respond, at most only one other request will be affected and everyone else will be processed by the first available server in our cluster.
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Another stress of ours is how fast Twitter is growing. Each day we have to process around 400,000 Tweets that contain URLs so we can group them and generate the homepage like we do. When they have a peak, our servers start to quiver, and occasionally throw in the towel and give us issues.
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Today, just as I promised in the recent Venture Voice interview, we’re releasing the various legal documents that we use as a starting point for seed stage financing for our companies. We’ve now done a dozen or so of these, and we thought it would be useful to release the documents to the community. We think that they’re great model documents for an angel or seed financing in the $250k-$2M range. They represent a “light” preferred equity financing and have very simple terms that are generally “balanced” but if anything lean toward the entrepreneurs and represent a great deal of trust in them, which we think is appropriate for angel deals where you are primarily investing in the people at the early stage.
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Twitter Clients, Feb 8, 2009
Shows Twitter client usage for all accounts tracked by @twitstat. -
If you have found your way to this site looking for technology tools for teaching that are quick and easy to download, learn, and start using in your classroom, you have come to the right place.
links for 2009-02-06
February 6, 2009
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Peter Norvig wrote a simple spelling corrector in 20 lines of Python 2.5,
so I thought I’d see what it looks like in Ruby. Here are some areas I’m not pleased with: -
This article looks at one way of cracking the problem of regression testing (retesting previously working parts of an application following a new build) a modern web application, using two superb open source projects: Hudson and Selenium.
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Privately we though Basecamp would be successful if it could generate $5,000/month after 12 months. A $60k/year side project could pay someone’s salary. It turned out that Basecamp was generating $5,000/month after only 6 weeks. We were on to something.
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Who we are. KIPP is a national network of free, open-enrollment, college-preparatory public schools with a track record of preparing students in underserved communities for success in college and in life. There are currently 66 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving over 16,000 students.
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"I'll end by conceding a point: It's hard to make money in the Tail," Anderson wrote. "The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change."
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ObjectiveResource is a framework for the iPhone that makes interacting with Ruby on Rails applications dead simple.
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tatft
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More than 70 percent of the nearly 15,000 school districts in the United States currently offer at least one online course, enrolling more than a million students last school year alone, said Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, which estimates that online enrollment has increased about 30 percent annually since 1997. “It’s growing faster than any other innovation in K-12 education,” she said.
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Calculate a website's value:
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Bill Scott presented Designing Web Interfaces, a slideshow based on core items from his book (co-authored by Theresa Neil). There are some really interesting posts on the site, such as 30 Essential Controls. Theresa has been pinging the major frameworks and will be posting a matrix of coverage by the various frameworks. But more generally it is a nice checklist of controls that can liven up an interface.
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Which controls are provided from jQuery UI?
Which controls are provide by a jQuery plugin? -
The value is calculated with a Ph.D algoritm that is based on the public information available on your Twitter profile.
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# Deadlines come from external sources, for example, “Feature X needs to be ready for the summer trade show”.
# Estimates come from internal sources, for example, “Feature X will take me N weeks to complete”. -
I definitely am not suggesting that this pattern replace the use of modules. Modules are very handy, and as I said before, we still use them extensively. But if you find yourself bumping into some of the limitations of modules in a specific instance, extracting the module in question into a model can provide some really nice benefits.
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a few months later, in early 2004, i was told jeff was interested in the virtual server as a service idea and asked for a more detailed write up of it. this i did, also incorporating a couple of requests jeff had, like the idea of a "universe" of virtuals, which i translated into network-speak as a distributed firewall to isolate groups of servers.
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After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
The lesson, Marissa said, is that speed matters. People do not like to wait. Do not make them. -
Finally! We are pleased to announce the initial release of the New York Times Article Search API. Articles are the basic building blocks of The New York Times. As a child, I was often reprimanded for (among other things) not sharing my blocks — well, today, I am happy to share.
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The new Highrise site features video interviews with customers (the first time we did this was for Basecamp). Here’s a look at the process that went into creating these videos:
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#4 – Using simpler permissions when you issue GRANT statements enables MySQL to reduce permission-checking overhead when clients execute statements.
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Why is linked data important? Curing cancer, understanding economy, global warming. A lot of the state of the knowledge of human race is stored in databases that are not shared — stored in "silos." Now they are linking the data, bridging across different disciplines. "When you connect data together you get this huge power out of it."
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automatically generate slideshows from pictures and music in minutes
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That’s why today we wanted to highlight 15 jQuery solutions for the most common browser issues that you’ll encounter when building web applications among other jQuery plugins that will give you a nice browser effect.
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Seems like a printable transient version of tada lists.
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Its focus is on pure speed – it uses Nokogiri (an ultra fast Ruby XML parser that depends on libxml) and curb (bindings for libcurl – to do the HTTP work) so compilation is required.
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This is a very brief post to call your attention to yet more innovation in the Amazon Web Services ecosystem: in this case an iPhone console application that monitors and controls your Amazon EC2 environment. David Kavanagh and company cooked this up over at directThought.
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In this post I'll describe the steps I performed to create my own Amazon Machine Image using the AWS Management Console and Windows XP as my local machine.
Just recently Amazon released their AWS Management Console. It's still in beta, but it makes life already so much easier: before it was available, you had to use quite a few scripts to get your own AMI ready. -
These guides are designed to make you immediately productive with Rails, and to help you understand how all of the pieces fit together. There are two different versions of the Guides site, and you should be sure to use the one that applies to your situation:
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Your desktop is now a click away. Log in and explore from anywhere. Let your virtual desktop reside on Amazon's Cloud Infrastructure, while you access, share, upload and download your files and folders.
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Hyperic HQ for AWS automatically manages and monitors the software on your EC2 instances, giving you total visibility into the health and well-being of your computing resources. HQ starts with auto-discovery for more than 75 common technology components – including databases, application servers, middleware, web servers and more – then seamlessly monitors the availability and performance of those services. HQ for AWS-Developer Edition provides rich visualization capabilities, trend analysis and capacity planning, advanced alerts, built-in and extendable diagnostics, and remote control of system resources, so you can prevent, detect, and solve problems.
links for 2009-02-04
February 4, 2009
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This directory contains the complete plays of Shakespeare marked up in XML, courtesy of Jon Bosak.
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Some bigger news to come out last week other than the inauguration of President Obama was that the new White House.gov website uses jQuery! Below is a deeper a look into how they’re using it, and what plugins they are using so that you can use them too!
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FiftyP is a virtual bank, a money-management site, and a call to social action. It's the only place for kids to get the real-life experience they need to secure their own financial future…and to shape a world that's better for all of us. And FiftyP is a company that believes in giving back: 50% of our profits go to charity, which explains the funny name!
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If you are looking for that perfect icon for your web site, blog, web app or application, you will find them here. Below is a compilation of the best ever Web Design and Development Icon Sets.
Please note, this list has no ranking. -
This is a real customizable jQuery editable plugin. Currently it can convert any tag (span, div, p and …) to text input, password, textarea, drop-down list.
You can easily extend it by adding your own input type using its editableFactory object. -
A free online productivity tool that helps you get things done. Because Doris is designed without an imposed structure, you can use the freeflow grouping for a surprising amount of things.
links for 2009-02-03
February 3, 2009
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Facebook, despite its 150 million active users, only generated an estimated $US300 million in revenue last year, while MySpace, which has diversified into more of an entertainment site, was expected to book close to $US1 billion.
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RH: Over 34 million registered, 9 million in Europe, growing by over 1 million every 17 days. Twelve million people visit every month.
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If you compare the cost of a 200 user BrowserMob test for an hour ($200-$400) to the cost of using JMeter, we might look more expensive. And that is why we sometimes get questions about why we’re so expensive compared to Open Source Tool X.
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The Twitter Grade measures the reach and authority of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score. A grade of means that @ scores higher than percent of the users that have been graded.
* The number of followers you have
* The power of this network of followers
* The pace of your updates
* The completeness of your profile -
Webistrano is a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.
links for 2009-02-02
February 2, 2009
0 Comments
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This is a word cloud generated from the bios of @newsmavens followers.
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An Offset Printing Company using old methods to advertise new. A business card that quickly explains that the company can be found on the web.
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Crackulous, the one-click cracking application for software purchased from Apple’s AppStore, was previously only available to a select few. Now anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can start cracking software purchased from Apple so that they can share them with their friends, since Crackulous has just gone public.
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Money by itself can only motivate the quest for more money. A raise is only a raise for thirty days; after that, it’s just your salary.
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So in this tutorial I want to illustrate some useful tips to design this kind of layouts using CSS and HTML code, also adding a nice animated scrolling effect using JavaScript.
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@Jack became the CEO of a newly spun-off Twitter, Inc. during the Boom Times. People still didn’t quite “get it” but at least some people had heard about it. The team created permalinks and RSS feeds. @Blaine pushed for IM integration. Each major feature added tremendous gains in users, and in usage per user. Still small by social networking standards, Twitter delivered something immediate and vital that no other service could attain.
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Even if you could figure out what the right ad to serve next to a high-school girl's party pictures might be, she and her friends probably won't click on it. No wonder Facebook applications get less than $1 per 1,000 views (compared to around $20 on big media Web sites).
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Let's look at Craiglist. I've heard people estimate that they are doing close to $100mm in annual revenues at this point. Many say, "they could be doing so much more". But the Craigslist profit equation is interesting. They apparently have less than 30 employees. That's about $4mm/year in employee costs. Let's assume that they spend another $6mm per year on hosting and bandwidth costs and other costs. So it's very possible that Craigslist's annual costs are around $10mm/year. Their value equation then is 10 x (100-10) = $900mm. That's almost a billion dollars in value for a company with only 30 employees.
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In any case, if you'd like to be able to help a young-in research for a school report about cougars without having a conversation about the birds, the bees, and the economy of southern California, KidRex will provide more than adequate filtering.
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Juitter has a live mode which can display the latest tweets with an Ajaxed interface.
It can display tweets from/to a user and containing any keywords.
Optionally, this jQuery Twitter plugin can display the avatars & can be styled easily with CSS.
