December 25, 2009
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what if you could turn that habit into something that might actually be helpful to school or your career? That’s the premise behind Lingt, a new startup that’s looking to leverage gameplay elements to help with the mother of all repetitive tasks: learning a new language.
The Y Combinator funded company is launching today in public beta, offering a suite of matching games to help English speakers learn Chinese
(Link: YC-Funded Lingt Uses Games To Turn You Into A Language Learning Addict)
December 25, 2009
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The Adobe Flash Platform is the leading platform in the world for developing games on the web. The Flash Platform Game Technology Center is a great place to start learning how to develop your very own Flash games.
(Link: Adobe Flash Platform Game Technology Center)
December 25, 2009
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Database operations often tend to be the main bottleneck for most web applications today. It’s not only the DBA’s (database administrators) that have to worry about these performance issues. We as programmers need to do our part by structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and better code. Here are some MySQL optimization techniques for programmers.
(Link: Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices | TuVinhSoft .,JSC)
December 25, 2009
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The Bellevue, Washington company is shaking up what its investors say is a $83 billion market worldwide. It’s the first of a bunch of new companies that have emerged recently to teach people foreign languages online, including Myngle, Italki and Yappr. Livemocha appears to be in the leading position, according to Google Trends (see chart below). The company says it has 4.8 million registered members, from over 200 countries.
(Link: Language learning site Livemocha keeps growing — gets $8M boost | VentureBeat)
December 22, 2009
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Unintended Consequences
I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.
(Link: The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free « Steve Blank)
December 22, 2009
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Switch the spec process from push to pull. Start with a one-page spec, no more. Then, let the team ask questions of the product manager whenever they need clarification. In exchange, the team agrees to show each piece of working code to the product manager for his approval. They’ll find points of disagreement much faster, and resolve them in realtime. Plus, the team will get better and better at interpreting the concise specs that only have to be written once. (Eventually, they may abolish specs altogether)
(Link: Lessons Learned: The product manager’s lament)
December 21, 2009
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This document provides a set of guidelines for general use when designing new XML document formats (and to some extent XML documents as well; see Section 11). Document formats usually include both formal parts (DTDs, schemas) and parts expressed in normative English prose.
This guide is meant for the design of XML that is to be generated and consumed by machines rather than human beings. Its rules are not applicable to formats such as XHTML (which should be formatted as much like HTML as possible) or ODF which are meant to express rich text. A document that includes embedded content in XHTML or some other rich-text format, but also contains purely machine-interpretable portions, SHOULD follow this style guide for the machine-interpretable portions. It also does not affect XML document formats that are created by translations from proto buffers or through some other type of format.
(Link: Google XML Document Format Style Guide)
December 21, 2009
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Created because we’d rather not use Maven. JavaGems provides gem hosting and gem creation for the JVM-based-language community. Instantly publish your gems and install them. Use the API to interact and find out more information about available gems. Become a contributor and enhance the site with your own changes.
(Link: javagems | awesome jvm gem hosting)
December 21, 2009
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I hope you find the PowerPoint slides helpful as you consider if and how you will approach Freemium. Take a look and read through the slides I did not cover, as well as the notes included for some of the slides. Also, keep an eye on Pricing Observer as I post more actual examples of various approaches to pricing.
(Link: Understanding Freemium – How to Create and Grow Paying Customers)
December 18, 2009
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BLOOMINGTON, Minn., February 6, 2006 -Consistent with its prior commitment to the testing industry to embrace open standards, Pearson VUE today announced that the latest version of its testing system implements the IMS Global Learning Consortium’s Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) specification. QTI describes a data model for the representation of test questions, tests and test results to enable the exchange of data with other critical applications and tools such as item banking or data management systems.
QTI played a critical role in the recent successful global launch of the GMAT® exam. QTI is used to exchange exam content between ACT, the test development partner for the Graduate Management Admission Council® (GMAC®), and Pearson VUE, the test delivery partner. David A. Wilson, GMAC’s Chief Executive Officer said, “As a customer, I applaud Pearson VUE for doing what is clearly best for the industry. “
(Link: Pearson VUE Adopts Open Standard For Data Interchange – 2006)
