October 2009
66 posts
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Everything Is Now Augmented Reality
These days if it’s not about real-time web or the next iPhone killer, then it is definitely about augmented reality.
Maybe I am not reading correctly the ☞ ReadWriteWeb post about the junaio iPhone app, but my impression is that the app is just a pure photo enhancing app. And that’s not new at all if you consider apps like Captions ( ☞ AppStore link) have existed for a...
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VMWare Releases Fusion 3
VMWare has announced the release of a new version of its desktop virtualization for Mac OS: ☞ Fusion 3. The list of new features available in Fusion 3 can be found ☞ here.
VMWare Fusion is probably the most well known and also the best desktop virtualization solution for Mac OS. While Fusion has a couple of competitors, like ☞ Parallels, ☞ VirtualBox or even ☞ HXen (nb Xen’s strongest point...
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Observations from a real-world Clojure project →
An “old (?) Lisp hacker” posts his observations from using Clojure in a real-life project. I like this one the most:
1. Clojure works.
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GMail: Finally, the Missing Feature is Here →
If you are reading this blog or following the iPhone apps for Geeks series, then you probably know that there was one missing feature from the GMail mobile that I cried about. This missing feature made me look for alternative better GMail iPhone apps (like GMateMail or iGMail) and even buy one of them.
By now you are probably already asking what’s this feature I talk about: it’s the...
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Orange Romania Registers Decline in Revenues (ro) →
I am quite happy to see this happening considering their crappy strategy (read cheap) and the way they (mis)treat their customers.
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WordPress 2 is now available in the App Store →
For all WordPress iPhone users out there.
Continue to read other articles from the iPhone apps reviews series.
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Listhings: The Virtual Corkboard →
Have I told you that I really like corkboards? Not to mention that his corkboard is online. Well, minus the fact that you cannot really stick a real needle into your boss’ picture.
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Google Maps Navigation is Cool, But What About the...
I don’t think there’s one single tech blog that haven’t picked up the announcement of ☞ Google Maps Navigation and categorized the app as the killer of navigation software or GPS
There is one major thing that these commenters are losing from their analysis and that is related to the fact that “Google Maps Navigation is connected to the Internet”: the associated costs...
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“You know who thinks the iPhone 3GS stinks? Steve Jobs. No one is working harder...”
– For all iPhone fans out there (me included), that’s so true!
The proof I am an iPhone/Apple fan is the iPhone apps for Geeks series, which is covering the coolest and most useful iPhone apps and also provides hints on apps sales and updates.
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Red Delicious: A Delicious iPhone App Goes On Sale
If you are one of those still using ☞ Delicious and also an iPhone user, you might be interested to hear that Red Delicious is now available for $0.99 (original price $2.99)
The feature set seems quite complete and the app also has some nice functions like integration with Instapaper (an app for offline reading), optimized internet activity and offline access.
I am one of those 1 mil active...
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Two Short Comments about iPhone Apps
What is happening with the new Tumblr iPhone app? I wrote that the Tumblr 1.1 version was submitted for review on Oct.2nd submission and then it was confirmed again on Oct.15th when details about the new features were announced. That’s almost 4 weeks now. Any news?
I love being able to use Skype on my iPhone. Unfortunately it looks like the app is still missing a lot of essential...
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The Future of Publishing through the eyes of Tim... →
If you are into the publishing business, you should definitely set aside 31 minutes, make sure everything is quiet around you, grab a notebook and watch the ☞ video (I’ve missed the quiet part, so I’ll have to watch it again).
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LucidDB compared to MonetDB and InfoBright →
The MySQL Performance guys are continuing their series on NOSQL storages, now comparing ☞ LucidDB to previous results obtained for ☞ MonetDBand ☞ InfoBright. It looks like while offering quite a few goodies, LucidDB comes last for the ☞ tested scenario.
Make sure you check
myNoSQL a NoSQL blog featuring the best daily NoSQL news, articles and links covering all major NoSQL projects and...
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A Pile of Videos
I have a ton of videos piling up and fighting for my attention. Firstly, the videos from ☞ Web2.0 Summit and then ☞ Startup School videos.
Here are just a few that I find top priority:
☞ Tim Berners-Lee and Tim O’Reilly (Web2.0 Summit)
☞ Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook) (Web2.0 Summit)
☞ Evan Williams (Twitter) (Web2.0 Summit)
☞ Mike Schroepfer (Facebook) (Web2.0 Summit)
☞ Aneesh Chopra...
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On Facebook Philosophy and Culture
I have found a couple of extremely inspiring fragments from an interview with Mark Zuckerberg (via ☞ Business Insider
) on which are covered subjects like: how is Facebook environment different from Google (by being focused, quick and bold), getting user feedback the Facebook style, what means to be quick nowadays, etc.
On Facebook Culture
[…] combined with boldness to try new things....
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Digital Strangelove
… tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.
— Clay Shirky
☞ Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)
Found via ☞ Fred Wilson
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How long it takes to become a tech giant.... →
Good night. Sleep tight. But do not dream about overnight success
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Case Study: Using an LOI to get customer feedback... →
A must read case study for Minimal Viable Product strategy applied with screenshots and pure English Letter of Intent.
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Google Chrome for Mac is out! →
After using ☞ Chromium for more than 10 months, I cannot get excited anymore about Google’s Chrome for Mac… too little, too late
via danhacker
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“Staying focused is one issue; that’s the problem of information overload....”
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Google Can Keep All Web in Memory
A standard Google server appears to have about 16G RAM and 2T of disk. If we assume Google has 500k servers (which seems like a low-end estimate given they used 25.5k machine years of computation in Sept 2009 just on MapReduce jobs), that means they can hold roughly 8 petabytes of data in memory and, after x3 replication, roughly 333 petabytes on disk. For comparison, a large web crawl with...
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RIM is Building A WebKit Browser For BlackBerry,... →
So, I guess Nokia building an Android phone might not be so far either.
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If an iGoogle gadget deserves a post then...
… I am really wondering if fixing all these Google Reader issues will result in a novel on the Google blogs.
☞ Tasks iGoogle gadget
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Nokia Building an Android Phone
The rumors that Google might be building its own Android phone have been ☞ revived once again. I don’t think that would be a really big surprise. At the end of the day, just imagine for a second that the Android market will not take off even if there are ☞ quite a few devices available and ☞ new devices are announced every day. Google launching his own phone would probably be the last...
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Maximal Mimimalism
Two quotes of maximal minimalism:
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
— Theodore Roosevelt (via suzannexie)
“Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”
— via bleikamp via hiten via tedr
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6 More Apps To Help You Focus →
A list of 6 other apps you might find useful in case you are one of those that have realized they need tools to fight the lack of focus and you also believe that deadlines are the best motivators.
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The Real-Time Web Use Cases →
An interesting perspective on the various scenarios of real-time web. The article doesn’t seem to cover also some other important aspects of the relationships and interactions involved by real-time web:
centralized versus decentralized mechanism to manage the real-time web relationships
machine versus human processing and filtering
accuracy/correctness versus timeliness
But I guess...
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Tumblr 1.1 iPhone App: My features vs Official...
Finally I am hearing more official details about the upcoming Tumblr 1.1 iPhone app.
I will wait for the actual upgrade before concluding if I’m happy or not, but so far it looks like some of the 7 features I betted on for the upcoming Tumblr iPhone app will be on the update, while others will probably be considered for future versions.
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The Best Cloud Computing Definition
While not as confusing as the web 2.0 term, cloud computing has been defined in many different ways and everybody felt like they should contribute their own version.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is proposing some definitions that are better than many others I have read so far:
Definition of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand...
Calcule si socoteli. 86400. →
Scoate un creion si o foaie de hartie (n-ai mai auzit de mult propozitia asta, asa e?). Sa facem niste socoteli. 60 inmultit cu 60 fac 3.600, inmultit cu 24, vezi mai sus titlul si mai jos…
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MongoDB-as-a-Service →
You can request a beta invite to try out MongoDB-as-a-Service.
Make sure you check
myNoSQL a NoSQL blog featuring the best daily NoSQL news, articles and links covering all major NoSQL projects and following closely all things related to NoSQL ecosystem. Everything you need and want to know about NoSQL.
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Google Wave Is Going to Create a Horrifying... →
An interesting Orwellian image of Google
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On A/B testing and actionable metrics →
Applying ☞ A/B testing is not as easy as one would think and the results are heavily depending on having a correct, well thought set of metrics. Even more important: these metrics should be actionable metrics
Any team can create a true split-test experiment that affects only the sandboxed parts of the product, however:
One team must see the whole experiment through end-to-end.
No experiment...
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Test Your Browser for HTML5 Input Attributes... →
Looks like Safari 4.0 has better support for HTML5 Input attributes than Firefox 3.5.
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“The three current big megatrends in the web/tech sector are mobile, social, and...”
– A nice quote, but a bit too generic in my opinion. I mean, what else is left outside?
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Smartphone Share Market
I don’t think there’s anything it should be added:
Apple is growing astonishingly fast. RIM is huge in the U.S. Nokia is huge in Europe. Microsoft is embarrassing itself.
— John Gruber (Daring Fireball) on Smart-Phone Market Update
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Lacking Focus?
Are you having problems when you must focus on your current tasks? Are you tempted to just flip through the windows on your desktop and look for something to save you? Are you tempted to check what’s going on on Facebook or Twitter instead of working on your goals?
If you are a Mac user, you may find the following two free applications quite useful then.
Isolator ☞
Isolator is an...
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Why is it important for websites to focus on... →
A couple of big names — Marissa Mayer (Google), Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress), Eric Schurman (Bing), Jake Brutlag (Google), etc. — talking and showing data about the influence of site performance on users behavior.
Eric Schurman and Jake Brutlag: Performance Related Changes and their User Impact
Marissa Mayer: In Search of… A better, faster, stronger Web
Philip Dixon:...
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Is Hadoop Champion Cloudera the Next Red Hat? →
Interesting parallel between RedHat history and the present of Cloudera (a company offering support and tools for Apache Hadoop)
Back in the late 1990s, the focus was on lowering the cost of infrastructure by moving away from proprietary software platforms to open-source operating systems. The focus today is on data and using it smartly. Unlocking the data, mining it for intelligence and...
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Nothing Motivates Like A Deadline →
Unfortunate, but f***ing true!
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WatchLearning from the experience of Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer
You will definitely find a ton of useful information for a startup founder. You’ll find references about hiring and initial organization, equity distribution, funding process dos and don’ts, funding myths, personal details, etc.
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Cappuccino and Atlas: The Future of Desktop and...
I was really impressed by the presentation given by Francisco Tolmasky of 280slides.com and it definitely caught my attention and made me add Cappuccino and Atlas to my list of technologies to try asap
In case you don’t have 28’ to watch the presentation, I’ll try to sum it up for you: ☞ Cappuccino and ☞ Atlas represent the framework and tool to build the future desktop and...
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iPhone Scanner
I know this will sound a bit weird, but I still do a lot of pen and paper. Well, I am not writing any books or novels, but rather jotting down different thoughts, ideas, possible solutions. And even if I don’t have talent I do a lot of “The back of the napkin” kind of drawings.
The thing I’ve always missed is an easy way to move from paper to digital. In the beginnings I...
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TheTumbler Tumblr iPhone App Goes on Promotion
Alternative Tumblr iPhone client: TheTumbler goes on promotion for $.99 (from initial $1.99). I assume this comes in reaction to the announcement of the official Tumblr 1.1 for iPhone and my advise would be to wait for the official Tumblr release as I really have high hopes of it (even if none of them was confirmed)
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Learning Clojure in 36... books
Very nice comments from the author of ☞ Programming Clojure, Stuart Halloway:
[…] both Clojure and Scala are
huge improvements over the language you are using right now. But you
won’t be effective in either one of them tomorrow: the learning curve
is not 1, but 5-10 books.
In fact, based on Rich Hickey, creator of ☞ Clojure, you can learn clojure in ☞ 36 books.
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Everything You Need to Know About FriendFeed...
Here are a couple of links that would get one up to speed to test or develop using the open sourced Tornado Python non-blocking web server and framework:
Bret Taylor: ☞ The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s web server
Bret Taylor: Talk about Tornado
☞ Tornado documentation
☞ Tornado source code
In what regards the web framework, Tornado seems to sit somewhere between web.py or...