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This year, The Tempest ! read more

23 Jul 2008 6:58pm GMT

I've been using the redesigned Facebook profile and homepage for the past few days and thought it would be useful to write up my impressions on the changes. Facebook is now the the world's most popular social networking site and one of the ways they've gotten there is by being very focused on listening to their users and improving their user experienced based on this feedback. Below are screenshots of the old and new versions of the pages and a discussion of which elements are changed and the user scenarios the changes are meant to improve. Homepage Redesign OLD HOME ...

23 Jul 2008 1:29pm GMT

This one’s internal. If you’re a Mark Logic employee, look me up. If not, well, expect things to be slow around here for a couple of days. -m

23 Jul 2008 5:58am GMT

There’s a design flaw in Apple’s current lineup of Mac keyboards; easily fixed though. Obviously, someone like me has a long history and an intense relationship with keyboards. The Flaw Right now, Apple sells two keyboards: larger/wired and smaller/Bluetooth. The larger one includes the useful cluster with arrow keys, page up/down, home/end, “fn”, and the real “delete” key. The “control” key is large, at the lower left, and by some physical-mechanical equivalent of Fitt’s Law , is real easy to get to. It also includes the entirely-useless numeric keypad. All this occupies quite a bit of real-estate. The smaller one ...

22 Jul 2008 10:39pm GMT

It’s not often that I have a blog title that’s only acronyms (in fact, I think this is a first), and it’s also a first in that I’m posting looking for someone to join the team and project I’m on. I can’t write much about the project itself here, since we’re still in stealth mode, but I can write quite a bit about who we’re looking for. Experts in the above acronyms is the short version (the meanings in this context being user experience, user research, and user interface design); for the longer version you’ll need to jump past the ...

22 Jul 2008 4:51pm GMT

The W3C XQuery working groups has published the first working drafts of XQuery 1.1 and XQuery 1.1 Use Cases. So far there are just two significant additions listed: More...

22 Jul 2008 4:09pm GMT

Actually, instead of a review, let me quote the opening testimonial from the inside-front cover. Competing globally with dynamic capabilities is the top priority of multinational executives and managers everywhere. Rethinking strategy in a highly networked world is the big challenge. How can your company navigate successfully in this turbulent, highly networked and socially connected environment? … If this does it for you, I couldn’t recommend this book more highly. -m

22 Jul 2008 6:36am GMT

There’s nothing wrong with kids having some weeks of flat time in summer with an empty schedule; they’ll look back on those days fondly. There’s also nothing wrong with the odd soccer or basketball camp. I rather enjoy dropping the boy off at these and watching the other parents, who appear, pre-9-AM on a weekday, in a remarkable variety of apparel and presentations. I caught one of my recent faves for this summer day’s photo. This woman was dressed for work and I thought her shoes extremely superior; she was fearless striking off across the soft grass in them, too. ...

22 Jul 2008 5:10am GMT

Travis Swicegood :" Amazon's S3 service is experiencing it's second outage of the year. According to Amazon's status site , they're been down for roughly 6 hours right now. Sites like SmugMug are completely down as they rely 100% on S3 to serve photos from. Avatars on Twitter are broken because Twitter uses S3 to offload that content." Arguably you could be surprised those services aren't using a caching proxy for hot files (typically they would be the recently added ones). But I suppose that would feel like running your own generator. Or you could look at it this way ...

21 Jul 2008 9:38pm GMT

How many things can go wrong on the way to the airport? Let me count the ways…

21 Jul 2008 8:03pm GMT

Balisage: The Markup Conference has posted the call for posters. The poster session here is somewhat more informal and less peer-reviewed than at most conferences. Short version: anything goes.

21 Jul 2008 3:09pm GMT

Actually, it is not a knife and is known under the name of Finger Tree. Background : Created by Ralf Hinze and Ross Paterson in 2004, and based to a large extent on the work of Chris Okasaki on Implicit Recursive Slowdown and Catenable Double-Ended Queus , this data structure, to quote the abstract of the paper introducing Finger Trees , is: " a functional representation of persistent sequences supporting access to the ends in amortized constant time , and concatenation and splitting in time logarithmic in the size of the smaller piece . Representations achieving these bounds have ...

21 Jul 2008 1:13pm GMT

Yesterday Amazon's S3 service had an outage that lasted about six hours. Unsurprisingly this has led to a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the very same pundits that were hyping the service a year ago. The first person to proclaim the sky is falling is Richard MacManus in his More Amazon S3 Downtime: How Much is Too Much? who writes Today's big news is that Amazon's S3 online storage service has experienced significant downtime. Allen Stern, who hosts his blog's images on S3, reported that the downtime lasted 3.5 over 6 hours. Startups that use S3 for ...

21 Jul 2008 12:57pm GMT

For the past few years, the technology press has been eulogizing desktop and server-based software while proclaiming that the era of Software as a Service (SaaS) is now upon us. According to the lessons of the Innovator's Dilemma the cheaper and more flexible SaaS solutions will eventually replace traditional installed software and the current crop of software vendors will turn out to be dinosaurs in a world that belongs to the warm blooded mammals who have conquered cloud based services. So it seems the answer is obvious, software vendors should rush to provide Web-based services and extricate themselves from their ...

21 Jul 2008 11:45am GMT

Sometime last week I learned that podcasting startup PodTech was acquired for less than $500,000 . This is a rather ignominious exit for a startup that initially entered the public consciousness with its high profile hire of Robert Scoble and the intent to build a technology news media empire using RSS and podcasts instead of radio waves and news print. When I first heard about PodTech via Robert Scoble's blog, it seemed like a bad business to jump into given the lessons of The Long Tail . The Web creates an overabundance of content and products, which is good for ...

21 Jul 2008 11:39am GMT

We spend a lot of time on our back porch this time of year. Unfortunately, the beautiful plum tree that kept the setting sun from boiling our eyeballs died, and until the replacement gets big enough, we’ve been hoisting bedsheets on the west end of the porch roof at suppertime. Which can make for some interesting shadowplay, as in the Summer Picture for today. Actually, just this afternoon Lauren ran out of patience and put up a nice thick patterned curtain on real actual hooks.

21 Jul 2008 6:27am GMT