July 2010
1 post
June 2010
4 posts
“…This particular hashtaggery is weirdly amusing, because, for some reason,...”
– Free Range: Hash : The New Yorker (via manspeaker)
2 tags
Cory Doctorow on CC license →
“It’s hard to monetize fame, but it’s even harder to monetize obscurity.”
3 tags
Django ProTip: __unicode__ and __getattr__ on...
Just ran into a really curious situation. django runserver was dying the moment I would try to access a model I was creating. Didn’t give me any error, didn’t raise and exception, just died.
I opened up the console and checked, the value was in the database (objects.all().count() showed it). Then I got the error with a stack trace. I was causing a RuntimeError with a maximum...
Does Social Entrepreneurship Have an Ambition... →
This is a massive problem in the non-profit sector from my vantage point. People inside it get so focused on one particular task that they lose sight of the bigger picture. Rather than step back and look at the problem as a whole, they ask how they can fix one problem right in front of them.
The concept of “scale” is at the heart of many people’s definition of social...
3 tags
New project for the summer
According to the Nielsen Company, people spent an average of 6 hours, 43 minutes and 22 seconds on Facebook during April 2010. That’s 403 minutes (rounded to the minute) per user for that month; during March, it was 419 minutes. In February, about 388 minutes. Average those numbers together (and assume 4 weeks in a month), and that’s an average of about 100 minutes spent on Facebook per user,...
May 2010
5 posts
Mea Culpa →
I can’t count the times I’ve backed off of “really cool” designs because they weren’t going to be easy to explain or hand off to someone else.
Programming is an embarrassment compared to other fields of engineering and design. Our mainstream culture is one of adolescent self-indulgence. It is like something from Gulliver’s Travels, with the curly-bracketeers vs. the...
Antipodean - Node.js chat server in CoffeeScript →
Very cool little chat server for Node.js written in Coffeescript. Hope to see a lot more things like popping up.
Rock Star
unsuck:
Unsuck it: Adequate programmer.
April 2010
6 posts
4 tags
Why the new iPhone TOS would hurt Domain51
Earlier this year, we launched an iPhone app called Statehouse (iTunes link). It’s a simple app in its current form. The data had already been collected by Jake over at Kansas Grassroots, so the hard part was done. Over a beer on a Tuesday we decided we should make an app, it hit the App Store for download Friday afternoon that same week.
That would not have been possible for us to do...
4 tags
Does this hurt Appcelerator?
I’m trying to parse this.
Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications...
Design Reset (via Nathan Borrow)
Nathan Borrow did a side-by-side comparison of the New York Times website on the desktop and iPad. The simplicity on the iPad is amazing and a much more engaging site. Couple that with some tools (sharing, favoriting, navigating, etc.) that quietly hide themselves when not needed and they would have a home-run.
Typical story on nytimes.com:
Same story on the iPad:
Beauty and simplicity...
It's about the story, stupid! (non-profits online)
It truly is a shame that so many amazing non-profits are hidden behind horribly thought out websites. Most of these sites deluge their visitors with information, even though great sites such as Charity Navigator exist to provide raw statistics and facts about non-profits. The problem is that most non-profits are missing the point. Their websites are there to tell a story.
Let me say it again:...
A real person, a lot like you | Derek Sivers →
When we yell at our car or coffee machine, it’s fine because they’re just mechanical appliances.
So when we yell at a website or company, using our computer or phone appliance, we forget it’s not an appliance, but a person that’s affected.
It’s dehumanizing to have thousands of people passing through our computer screens, so we do things we’d never do if...
March 2010
5 posts
2 tags
What does "scalable database" mean? | James on... →
There are two kinds of scalability: vertical and horizontal. Vertical scaling is just adding more capacity to a single machine. Virtually every database product is vertically scalable to the extent that they can make good use of more CPU cores[1], RAM, and disk space. With a horizontally scalable system, it’s possible to add capacity by adding more machines. By far, most database products...
NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin! – stu.mp →
Do you honestly think that the PhDs at Google, Amazon, Twitter, Digg, and Facebook created Cassandra, BigTable, Dynamo, etc. when they could have just used a RDBMS instead?
Share on Tumblr - Google Chrome extension gallery →
So meta. :-)
New company blog
I’ve been wanting to build out personal blogs at Domain51 for awhile now, but we just haven’t had the time around here. Between creating iPhone apps and promos for Water.org, it’s been a crazy for months to kick off 2010.
Then yesterday I had a moment of clarity. Why not use Tumblr and let everyone in the office have their own blogs? So, this is the first of hopefully three...