Links (11,732 links)

A classic quote from last time round: "The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster."

This short tutorial shall attempt to explain the git system to people who have no, or minimal experience on SCMs and version control tools.

While OmniTI has enormous breadth in the Internet space, we are primarily known as an Internet performance and scalability company. This made the fact that we received an F on YSlow! all the more embarrassing. This was a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing — something we evangelize against. I decided that I would fix that and aim to do it by the end of Steve’s presentation. A play-by-play follows.

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite. Here’s the list so far.

Enter the URL of any CSS file to view and modify its color spectrum

A Python library and command-line tool designed to streamline deploying applications or performing system administration tasks via the SSH protocol. It provides tools for running arbitrary shell commands (either as a normal login user, or via sudo), uploading and downloading files, and so forth.

The most interesting thing for Python fans will be undoubtedly their selection for the Web application framework. Maybe again unsurprisingly, they chose...Django

Wikia measures exit rate - the percentage of users that leave the site from a given page. Here they show that exit rate drops as pages get faster. The exit rate goes from ~15% for a 2 second page to ~10% for a 1 second page. This is another data point to add to the list of stats from Velocity that show that faster pages is not only better for users, it’s better for business.

This video was shot every Monday during March. All ‘news’, text and information was taken from internet news sites on the same days. All fauna was growing and prospering within a 2 mile radius of the Canary Wharf financial district.

Si Begg's next release out for free. "Don't get me wrong I'm all for me making money out of my music. But as I say, i'm not exactly churning out platinum hit singles here. I'm thinking its more likely I'll make my money a) from possibly licensing the tracks to compilations b) PRS royalties from radio play etc c) maybe getting the tracks used in film and TV d) gig, remix and production work encouraged by generally raising my profile. All of which is more likely to happen the more people that get to hear and hopefully enjoy my music."

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

'isReady' never gets set in FF3.5 if jQuery loaded after domready

I've heard that [this is good].

"According to parliamentary written answers received by Labour MP Tom Watson, the majority of departments still require staff to use IE6. Most have plans to upgrade to the more secure IE7, and some to IE8, but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has no plans to change." Deary me. Hardly surprising. IE6 still unfortunately a player.

Does about a billion things to optimize sites. Tempting but not sure how much I'd trust this; feels like a sledgehammer option.

"Social networking for your toaster". Heh. A "web platform for remote control and monitoring".

"Web Workers allow you to run JavaScript in parallel on a web page, without blocking the user interface." Mmm, cool.

It's funny because it's true.

notes: Dear Royal Mail, here’s an idea for you

“How about you make something that would take away that hassle, but still let us send postcards to the people we love – printed objects that would arrive through the letterbox and make those people smile? Hmm?”

Please do this, Royal Mail. Or someone else?

"How about you make something that would take away that hassle, but still let us send postcards to the people we love - printed objects that would arrive through the letterbox and make those people smile? Hmm?" Please do this, Royal Mail. Or someone else?

Each unit of UK electricity is currently causing this much CO2...

A full-featured content management and website development system, with Django templates and a custom data model integrated with GIT.

Kaltura allows publishers of all sizes to easily, quickly, and cost effectively enhance their web site with video and interactive rich-media functionalities, including video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising.

"This is a collection of e-mails I have sent to people who post classified ads. My goal is to mess with them, confuse them, and/or piss them off." Very childish, sometimes amusing.

In addition to launching a specific application when you connect a camera, you can also have your images download automatically. Never again spend time launching the right app or quitting apps that you didn't want to launch.

Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase.

To program songs for the game, you or your developer friend first needs a membership to Microsoft's XNA Creators' Club, which was launched a couple years ago to let independent developers create casual games to sell through the Xbox Live Marketplace; a membership costs $49.99 for four months or $99.99 for a year. You'll then be able to get free tools and instructions from the Rock Band Creators Web site to convert your master recordings to the MIDI charts used by the game.

Banks and card providers haven't really done enough to educate customers about the system, or to make the forms more usable, but retailers can at least minimise some of the damage to conversion rates by doing as much as they can to advise customers about what to expect during the checkout process.

We're a 20% company. For one day of our working weeks (sometimes more) we work on projects which have mostly non-commercial aims, like digital work for charities, or things which are just good fun.

Share your Spotify playlists with the world and discover new music

"Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself." Want.

This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason.

Twitter is becoming an ever present backchannel at conferences and events. However sometimes it needs curating and moderating, especially if it's to be displayed large as a part of the event. Here we talk about an app built in a few hours and open sourced today which we used for this purpose for The Guardian's Activate Summit.

A Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.

An open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.

Beautiful. Need an iPhone version.

The Typography Manual has several useful features and resources for designers, including a visual type anatomy glossary, a font size ruler, an em calculator, and enough content to fill a 60 page book. It has all the essentials of a desk reference in a regularly updated pocket resource.

The way we do this is by having a 1-hour meeting every Tuesday morning where my manager presents a PDF report that outlines these figures and colours the report either Red (we're in trouble and we better do something about it), Yellow (We're in danger, but it's fixable) or Green (we're on track to achieve our goals).

Looks cool. Wish I could be bothered to install the Webkit nightly so I could see it in context.

At no. 1, "Max Tundra’s Limited Edition Kosher Chicken Soup". Ah, Ben.

Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It's not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations. In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn't.

Statistics from Amazon, Google, Jupiter Research and others show that a faster web site increases traffic, repeat visits, clicks, and conversions. There are two other motivations, in addition to these user metrics, that I give for always working to improve the speed of your web site. First, even if your site is fast enough for some users, there are always other users with slower connections. Mediocre performance in the U.S. means an unbearable experience in other parts of the world. If you hope to attract and retain a global audience, your site has to be blazingly fast under normal conditions so that under degraded conditions it’s still usable.

We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences. But what if the 'users' themselves are the problem? What if users represent not a coherent set of needs but a messy mix of desires and influences? What, ultimately, is the role of the designer in sorting through these desires to determine which should drive our design decisions? And what frameworks, other than intuition, should we use to make these judgments?