Watch carefully
Scrum process: The Chicken looks at the pig and says "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?"
The pig looks back at the chicken and says "Good idea, what do you want to call it?"
The chicken thinks about it and says "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?"
"I don't think so" says the pig, "I'd be committed but you'd only be involved".
Yahoo launches another crappy site called Shine, this time aimed at women. Condescending idiots ("chief household officers"?).
A cool concept by Victor: the food guide (rethinking the restaurant experience). I think this might work in places like nyc.
Not yet quite the season for it, but here's how to store fresh herbs.
Building value
I've been thinking a lot about value, and what it is. For example, when you build a platform as opposed to code you use once, you're building value, something you can reuse. For example, the value of many websites lies in the userbase they have and the team that runs it, not so much in the code they deploy. And so on.
Can anyone recommend some good reading on building value?
Snap preview still sucks
Hey, snap sucks is now a delicious tag. Dodgy practices, including character assasinaton attempts of people who disagree with their product, yea, I don't like snap preview or their methods.
About deploying upgraded code (releasing a new version for example) when you're using cloud servers like Amazon's EC2: "The power of the cloud is that we don’t need to touch our existing web server and risk causing damage during the upgrade process." Just use a new server! That blows my mind :)
Global IA workshop preview slides
I've uploaded the chapter slides (not the entire workshop) of my upcoming Global IA worskhop at the IA Summit in Miami. The workshop is Friday afternoon, go ahead and register for it if you're interested in global IA. Here is the workshop preview:Hey, check out ia play, another IA blog with a great name by Karen Loasby, who will be speaking at the IA Summit btw. I'm finding this year's IA Summit a great opportunity to find a bunch of blogs I didn't know or had forgotten about.
MarkWing.com: "Most sites encourage you to check back for updates, but I will not do
that. Don't waste your time. I don't have the time or desire
to expand it beyond what it is right now."
Doc Searls: (quoting Andrew Sullivan): "I recall very clearly one night before the war began. I made myself
write down the reasons for and against the war and realized that if
there were question marks on both sides, the deciding factor for me in
the end was that I could never be ashamed of removing someone as evil
as Saddam from power. I became enamored of my own morality and this
single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I
failed to grasp is that war is also a monster."
On clean design. (Too clean perhaps?)
Home made bread is never really that good (the oven is all wrong), but this technique seems to fix that.
Googley principles of design: useful, fast and simple.
Googley principles of design (and I have to agree with all of these, especially with the first three):Fast is still underrated by most UX people, I think mostly because it tends to be the domain of the techies. But fast matters so much.
Quickly: how fast are your webpages loading? What's your goal (should probably be a few 100 milliseconds, 400 is good, 200 is better, depending on the page)? If you don't know and are a UX person, that's not good, you.
- Useful: focus on people -their lives, their work, their dreams.
- Fast: every millisecond counts.
- Simple: simplicity is powerful.
- Engaging: engage beginners an attract experts.
- Innovative: dare to be innovative.
- Universal: design for the world.
- Profitable: plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
- Beautiful: delight the eye without distracting the mind.
- Trustworthy: be worthy of people's trust.
- Personable: add a human touch.
Holy @$#! Amazon does it again: storage (of physical goods) & fulfillment (packing stuff in boxes and sending it to people as a god damn webservice!
Joel on standards (another classic).
Mefeedia, the product I developed from end 2004 to end 2006 and sold in Jan 2007 to Frank Sinton (over a phonecall from Medellin, Colombia), has been doing good. Frank has kept developing the technology and the vision, traffic's way up, and now they've raised $250K to develop it further. More coverage at ReadWriteWeb. Congrats to the team!
Haha, friendfeed is blogging their CVS changesets. Why blog about new features if you can just send your changesets straight from CVS?
And here's another thought; the professional bloggers always post these long posts, but I always felt like short thoughts were more fun for me to write, and I also like to read them on other blogs, and (so here's the thought): short posts also fit nicely into friendfeed. At least, I think they do. Unless friendfeed doesn't show post texts.
Nevermind.
Friendfeed's my hangout bar of the week.
Yea yea friendfeed, been there, done that. Anyways, it's weird, I find myself hanging out there today (since others that I know are) and posting comments (since it's easy). Which leads me to think: if people I know are there (and I can find them), and it's easy to chat, I'll probably chat a bit.
OK this is crazily even better than those starwars robots, and its real:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww&hl=en]
Elastra looks really hot. A scalable MySQL service on EC2 and S3. If it works as well as advertised I'll probably end up using it for some project. The only disadvantage is that your database is hosted somewhere else than your servers (unless your servers are also on EC2 of course), but according to their benchmarks that only means a tiny slowdown. If so, this rocks.
I dislike how Firefox won't animate gifs, now that they're cool again.
Tibet
I got an email from a good friend of mine about Tibet. With the Olympics happening, Tibetans are risking everything to stand up against China and hope to get the attention of the world. Forward this if you can.
In short: go subscribe to this blog: http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org
This is happening now, and in the coming weeks, and you can be involved by simply blogging about it. Go subscribe to http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org
Here's his email:
"I am writing to you today not to ask for money or donations. I simply want
you to know what is happening in Tibet, from my perspective, and to share what I
tell you with others. What Tibet needs right now is just our attention. To those
of you who supported our Facebook fundraising efforts, thank you. Know that your
money is going to good work.
This video on CNN tells the complete story of
the last 50 years in Tibet and what will come in the next year:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/03/13/vause.china.tibet.troubles.cnn?iref=videosearch
(As
some of you may know, the protests from the story that occurred on Everest and
the Great Wall used some pretty amazing live satellite technology that I am
proud to have played a role in making them happen)
Tibetans across the "Tibet Autonomous Region" (TAR) inside of China are taking to the streets, risking everything they have. They do this knowing, expecting the world to be watching and to care. They are unarmed and (mostly) non-violent, isolated on the Tibetan Plateau, surrounded by countless Chinese police, military battalions and tanks.
When you protest in Tibet, it is not a small act. If you are a monk, you are arrested, often beaten or tortured, sometimes executed or imprisoned for life, and most always defrocked and forced into a life outside of the monastery.
Other lay Tibetans have lived their entire lives with memories of previous uprisings and the resulting crackdowns. No one has very much, and everyone lives under a veil of fear, balancing their need to survive and help their children succeed in modern China with their desire for the Dalai Lama to return and for true freedom. It is a heartbreaking situation.
Lhasa's internet is off and mobile phone service is generally restricted. There are no foreign press allowed openly to report, just a taste of China's standard reaction in these situations. Still, we are starting to see pictures and video here and there, a few of which are posted here: http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org/2008/03/14/incredible-images-of-lhasa-unrest/
I have been to the three main monasteries where the uprising began - Drepung, Sera and Ganden. I spent half the day with one monk at Drepung, eating food cooked in his small room, who was the brother of a former Tibetan nun and political prisoner who I am friends with in New York. My translation of "computer programmer" into Tibetan was "man who makes machines do things" which made him laugh as he endlessly filled by cup of butter tea. I took a day trip to Ganden and walked the long holy walk ("kora") around the monastery, stopping for lunch along the way with another one of my Tibetan foster families. I took two trips to Sera, one with the "Five Tibet Guys", a crew of young kids and amateur tour guides, and the other by myself, walking the long road from Jokhang square all the way up the hill, a road that today is filled with tear gas, burning cars and blockades.
Below is a photo I took in 2004 outside of Sera monastery of a young Tibetan monk. At this moment, that very spot is surrounded by armed police and military troops, and the monks inside are hungry, hurt and wondering if their actions will matter. For their sake, please, talk about this, tell people what is happening, share the video link above and the blog link below.
Students for a Free Tibet, the organization I am on the board of and have
volunteered with for over seven years, is staying on top of all the news and
doing our own coverage on our blog here: http://blog.studentsforafreetibet.org
This
is just the beginning. There are 146 days until the Beijing Olympic Games, and
we are going to make each one count.
Thank you for you time."
LukeW is teaching a full day (!) workshop on form design, which looks great and I'd love to attend (but won't since I'm teaching my half day on global IA, which you can also still sign up for. Ha, you didn't see that one coming, right?
Great post on the economics of optimizing mysql, with good numbers.
Workshop: organizing global websites
There are 11 attendees already for my pre-conference workshop about global IA at the IASummit this year.I've been evolving my material a lot, this is the new outline:
- Themes of global IA.
- Locales. This part is getting much more interesting than I originally thought - it turns out that structuring and developing your locales is a BIG part of global IA.
- Exercise.
- Break.
- Global IA constructs.
- Translating taxonomies.
- Intercultural user research. This bit is rocking too.
Go sign up now if you're interested in global IA.
Google Calendar now synchs with Microsoft Outlook Calendar.
Lightweight PHP form api
I released a first version of a lightweight PHP form API today, open source. You can download the code, it works but it's just a first step (doesn't even do all possible formfields, and still has lotsa hardcoded stuff in it).
I was always a hater of these form api's, but I've finally clicked, and when you're coding a website with lotsa forms, this should come in handy. It's totally focused on being easy to program for, since I'm a lazy programmer, so the form definition is in YAML format, it writes like English almost. Define the form structure, define a function that should be called upon submit, and you're done.
Let me know what you think!
I have to say, Anil's description of how MT is better than Wordpress does sound kinda desperate.
An interesting and extendable taxonomy of relationships.
The problem with Google's social API
Google's social API group is pretty interesting (got a who'swho of alpha geeks on it). The biggest problem with testing seems to be that the API uses Google's index, which doesn't get updated that often, so if you make a change to your page, you can't test it immediately, you have to wait for Googlebot to catch up. I guess there's just not much you can do about that.
iA SUMMIT 2008
A quick promotion for my global IA workshop at the iA SUMMIT 2008 - it's shaping up to be the most in-depth workshop I've ever given, in a field that's so new that the wheel is being invented again and again all over the place. I'll post some more info on the coming weeks.
Front end developers rejoice
via Simon: "A quote from IEBlog: We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can. This decision is a change from what we’ve posted previously."
That's big news.
MySpace Russia Quietly Launches; MySpace Turkey Coming
MySpace Russia Quietly Launches; MySpace Turkey Coming: "MySpace likes to put a team on the ground before launching a localized site, Travis Katz told me today (MySpace’s Managing Director of International). The key to a successful launch isn’t just localizing the site’s language. It’s also about figuring out what local bands and artists are hot, and integrating them into the service. He confirmed that Turkey is on their short list of new launches, although he won’t say when the site will launch."
As opposed to Facebook's approach where there are no local offices.
What the heck do I really know?
Lou Rosenfeld: "So sure, I can make plenty of recommendations, but, ultimately, what the heck do I really know other than the stuff that's probably obvious to anyone else with some experience in the field?" Says the master.
Why? Don't ask why. Ask why not.
It's a classic. (check out the pants too)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlejfA5NCbQ&rel=1]
Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
Blogtard
One of my colleagues (I won't say who) thinks of themselves as a blogtard, but meaning the opposite of the Urban Dictionary definition.
Misery is not Miserly (PDF): a paper on how sad people spend more.
Mental model book discount code FOPVD10
Indi Young's mental model book is available, and if you use the code FOPVD10 (for "friends of peter van dijck get 10% off"), you get 10% off. So order it now, preferably from the Rosenfeld media website (as opposed to from Amazon) since they'll make more money like that :)
If you have a company, you can get a company license for the electronic format too.
Mental model book
The first book by Rosenfeld media (which you should buy for that reason alone), Mental Models, is now for sale in both digital and paper formats. Get it while it's hot.
Mux, the happy, hungry videobot
Mux, the happy, hungry videobot, created by my friend Nathan and running on Amazon services, is now in open beta. It lets you encode videos from and to pretty much any format.
A new mouse
When someone in the office asked: "what's that squeeky sound?" I knew it was time to get a new mouse. I went with the standard Microsoft model. My old mouse was also a standard one, but not optical. I cleaned it out every few months but it was really worn down. And now I'm flying around that ol' screen!
Aren't you glad you're reading my blog, btw?
Wouldn't it be incredible if Barack (is that how you spell it?) actually wins and becomes president of the USA?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEO_fG3mm4&rel=1&border=1]