"The product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months,
there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its
expenses but for no reason."

Oh yea.

Here's a question: sure Google appengine will scale, but is it also fast?

Brilliant parent blogging: "At that moment in my head I was dancing around, giving myself a high-five and mooning you."

99designs is a brilliant way to get a logo designed. You write the design brief and the prize, designers compete, you select the best one and pay them. Brilliant and simple.

Today (in about an hour) they will attempt to create antimatter in a huge scientfic complex 100m under the ground in Switzerland. If Europe gets sucked into a black hole in an hour, it was nice knowing you all!

And here's a video explaining it:

I like learning and doing things that are not "My job". I did the "Hello World" of Google's appengine the other day, it was fun. I want to do more things like that.

This is fascinating. Google tests *everything* in their search results page, even minute changes in whitespace, that have statistically measurable effects.

De nieuwe Google Chrome doesn't do RSS - doesn't display feeds in a good way, and doesn't display the little icon in the adress bar. Oh well, back to Firefox for now.

Here's the official Google page for the Google Chrome comic book.

That's funny, Techcrunch is down. 503 error.

Google Chrome comic book all on one page

I was reading a scanned version of the comic book (see and link to this blog post) that is introducing the Google browser - "Google Chrome" - but the site's way slow and seems down now, so I saved the images in my cache and am publishing them here under the same Creative Commons license.

They're all on one page, so it'll be kind of long. Here goes.

"It might be a good rule simply to
avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have
had to make it prestigious."

Nice video of an ajax paper prototype. (via)

Cool. Automatically add filesizes to links (like PDFs) with JQuery and Google Appengine.

Google should let these useful webservices (and others like tinyurl and such) run free on appengine, no limits, sponsored by Google. That would let people build loads of useful little webservices with no worries about monetization, open up a whole new area of innovation.

Malaysians Overwhelmingly Choose Friendster

Yesterday she had her first chocolate and her first mussel, today her first cornflakes with milk.

Yep, I'm a daddyblogger now.

Hey, what happened to sketchcast.com? Loved the idea and the execution, but the site seems down?

That's some good speech writing.

The stock market long term:

I created a new company to do my business with: funkymonkeycorp.

It's the 12$ PC. And strangely enough, it seems viable.

When I was still trying to become Jakob Nielsen, back in 2000: the draw-what-you-saw methodology. Haven't heard of anyone using it?

Hey, someone still enjoyed my themes and metaphors of the semantic web. Ah, them ol' days!

I always hated misguided attempts at visual search engines, but weirdly, searchme.com kind of works. You just browse through results pages, in an Apple-like coverflow UI.

I'll probably never use it again, but I was quite surprised at the effectiveness of just browsing through screenshots of websites, instead of scanning result lists on Google.

Creative Commons and other "free" licenses have been confirmed by an important court decision.

Hacker humor :) "Would like to put self replicating robots on the moon capable of
refining silicon and building photovoltaic cells. Will need experience
with robotics, AI, and Drupal. Ultimate plans trend towards world
domination."

Nice, Amazon now has scalable persistent storage blocks (ie. harddrives) to use with EC2 (to store your database on for example), and they come with backup capability to S3. They're from 1Gig to 1Terra. You only pay what you use, $0.10 per allocated GB per month.

Make Something People Want, the video.

Sometimes really old posts can be helpful years later. Gotta love archives.

FireEagle is one (of the many) reasons why I still think Yahoo is a great company with some damn great products.

Move your social network to the country where it has success

Google moved it's center of Latin American operations to Brazil, where it also develops and manages Orkut.

Here's a wonderful video about Youtube and anthropology:

This means (talking about MySQL servers) upgrading to default configuration to 128GB of memory will
cost you just $9600 (list price). I’ve been able to configure on a web
the system with 8*2.5″ hard drives RAID and 2 CPUs (just as we usually
configure PowerEdge 2950) with 128GB of RAM for about $16000. This
means talking to Dell Sales rep it can purchases within $15000.

A clear explanation on why Rails can be slow: a slow page can cause other pages to be slow too. Weird. Perhaps Jonathan's engineers are missing something, or else Rails just has inherent problems. PHP has nothing of the sort.

This is fun: Google uses this code instead of an image with a down-arrow:

<small>▼</small>

In Google analytics, how can I set up a report that shows traffic to all pages in a subdirectory?

Payment is

1) A way of connecting.
2) A sign of approval.
3) A vote.
4) It indicates an alligence with the maker.
5) It feels good to the payer, to support.

I don't know, I like these drawings.

we are all refugees

Has anyone heard of or worked with http://circleofexperts.com/?

Underdog in Flemish is onderhond

Yahoo search getting better

Yahoo is doing some amazing stuff with search. One of the things they're doing is allowing some selected third parties to customize search results. Here's a screenshot of a vanity search with a customized result from LinkedIn. Nice! That is possible the nicest, best presented search result for my name that I can imagine, and it's on Yahoo, not Google.

OK somehow half of the internet seems down?

I'm looking for some very clean and simple CSS code to create a dropdown menu with some links. No levels in the menu, just click on a link (or hover, although I prefer click) and a dropdown shows (white background, simple links, nothing more) with some links in it. Something like that. Suggestions? My CSS skills are negligable, that's why I ask, and all the stuff I find on google is way overkill.

Getting rid of navigation

I'm playing around with a redesign of poorbuthappy.com, 1 of the problems is that there's way too much navigation:

So after a little sketching and some HTML, I came up with this:

A kind of breadcrumb now serves as the main navigation, showing where you are and letting you go up in the chain. (You can go sideways too by clicking the little arrows, which gives you a dropdown.)

A lot less vertical space taken up, but also less clues towards the navigation. You don't immediately see things like "pictures" and "forums". Which makes it less usable. On the other hand, it's a lot less clutter and space, which I like, and likely makes it more usable. And I do have a nice sitemap at the bottom of each page, which I like and gets lots of clicks, so I'm not too worried about taking away navigation options at the top. It's a bit del.icio.us-like too...

What do you think? I'd love to hear some comments.

"Reportedly digg is 50% Google traffic, About.com 85%, and Wikipedia 70% Google traffic."

Indeed. Google Knol is a HUGE mistake. How can anyone trust them anymore to stay out of the content game - and this time it's not just video, but text. Our lifelihood Google!

I'm still a little confused about Google's knol concept. And the url's are weird too: check out this one about Colombia that I made

"Yes, my version requires the most lines of code, but it is also the easiest to maintain and understand."

No it fucking ain't. Compare:

login($username, $password, $remember);

with

$authenticationController = new UserAuthenticationController;
$user = new User;
$user->username = $_POST['username'];
$user->password = $_POST['password'];
$user->rememberMe = true;
$authenticationController->login($user);

So Amazon's gossip protocol caused the S3 downtime :)

What happens when every single person carries a camera?