December 2009
33 posts
Skribit Finally Launches, Aims to Cure Your... →
Skribit, the startup that is trying to help cure writer’s block, has opened its doors to the public after being in beta since its inception at Startup Weekend Atlanta in November of…
Run It Back - How we got 18,000 beta users in 4... →
Shared by alexpopescu
Interesting
How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks
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28 Rich Data Visualization Tools
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Flash, Flex, Ajax, and Silverlight tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines.
Franciza cu produse de unu, doi si trei euro →
Euro City este o retea de magazine care comercializeaza produse non-alimentare la pret fix - unu, doi sau trei euro. In prezent, exista doua cornere in franciza in Romania, dar reprezentantii…
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iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers →
Prepare your wallets for a long list of iPhone apps: 50!
The ones I liked from the post:
Source Viewer () or Web Source Viewer (free)
Analytics app ($5.99)
… so just a few from the long list. Maybe your wallet is safe though.
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Crane: Clojure Library for Amazon EC2/Hadoop... →
Not sure it is a sign of how wide spread the Amazon AWS or Hadoop are getting or that Clojure is becoming hotter and hotter, but this project sounds pretty cool:
Crane solves the problems for people running hadoop clusters; write all your config in clojure maps, and simply call (launch-hadoop-cluster config). You can run hadoop jobs from your local REPL, including the provisioning. All the...
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What makes a Tweet Relevant?
That’s the question that both Microsoft and Google are trying to answer since they signed deals with Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have these small “snippets of knowledge” included in their search results.
Couple of days ago, Google has announced that they are starting to push out results from Twitter and Facebook (this hasn’t reached all accounts yet though), so you’d expect that...
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What apps are on the Apple’s VP iPhone?
Anyone using an iPhone must have heard already of Phil Schiller, the senior VP of worldwide marketing at Apple, the first Apple figure that went out and spoke about the iPhone AppStore admission process.
Such people are very careful about getting their names associated with any 3rd party tools, software or anything, so I have found it quite interesting when The New York Times published an blog...
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A $15 External Battery for iPhone →
That’s what I’d call a perfect gift for the iPhone addicts out there. I just wish Santa is hearing me now!
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Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing
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Interesting piece of technology (a la Google Wave), but is it really useful? Remote pair programming maybe?
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Focused: A Multi-platform Focused Editor
You know that in a way I’m a fan of WriteRoom and use it on a daily basis for improving my blogging habits. Anyway, I do understand why others may not like it ($24.95) or may not be able to use it (Mac only), so I have written about some possible alternatives: Ommwriter: a Mac writing tool or ☞ JDarkRoom.
Today I’ve learnt about yet another multi-platform focused editor: ☞ Focused. It is an...
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Is This Still Google Chrome?
There have been a lot of discussions lately about the long awaited release of the Google Chrome browser for Mac platforms. And people seem to agree that it will arrive pretty soon, but it will miss some of the features:
no bookmark manager
no app mode
no task manager
no bookmark sync
no full extension support
no multi-touch gestures
If these are missing, can we still call this browser the...
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Myth Busters: Why No iPhone Videochat? →
The Gizmodo guys, disguised as the ☞ myth busters, are destroying all possible explanations of not having videochat support on the iPhone:
AT&T overloaded 3G network: make it work on WiFi first
limited processing power: nonsense
required VGA camera too expensive or big: other phones already have it
Conclusion:
My only guess: They just want to milk the hell out of their user base.
...
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Social Networks: Males vs Females →
Study shows that on non-geek social networks, females represent the majority. You could argue that this is according to the world population ratio, but I’m not sure that would be correct.
On the other hand, on ‘geeky’ social networks/sites the audience is predominantly males. Communication (females) vs geekness (males)?
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Is There a Business Model for Open Source? →
A New York Times article questioning the business model for open source. MySQL, RedHat, SpringSource are some of the company names mentioned in the article.
There’s only one company making real money out of open source, and that’s Red Hat
— Simon Crosby, CTO Citrix Systems
Makes you think twice in case you were planning to go with the open source business model.
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useKit: A Different Kind of Bookmarklet Bar →
Interesting idea. It would become really useful if it would allow me to create my own bookmarklets (useKit calls them “missions”). In that case I can imagine how this would completely replace the bookmarks bar in my browser freeing some more space.
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Steve Souders: Front-end or Back-end...
From an interview with Steve Souders published on ☞ O’Reilly Radar:
The first thing I recommend website owners do is get a handle, get an idea of the overall page load time. And then the second thing I say is break that into two parts: the back-end and the front-end. And if you find that like most websites, your back-end time is less than 10 or 20 percent, then you’re correct in...
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Microsoft Demos Silverlight on the iPhone
For a couple of seconds I really thought this is the announcement of the year. Don’t get me wrong, but there were a lot of things to be read between the lines from such a headline. But then I paused for another second and re-read the announcement… and I realized there isn’t much about it (like with most of PR these days).
Let me reformulate the title so everyone can see why it...
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What Is the Best Multi-client IM for the iPhone?
It looks like the iPhone AppStore provides plenty of multi-client IM apps from where you can pick your favorite(s). Unfortunately as with Twitter clients, when there are too many choices picking the right one is quite difficult.
So, here is the list of multi-client IM iPhone apps I am currently running in parallel:
fring: Skype, GoogleTalk, MSN, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo, SIP, AIM
Nimbuzz!:...
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On Google and The Future of News
Google ☞ reacted pretty quick (Dec.1st) to the pressure news corporations put on them when mentioning delisting from the search engine. In case you missed this part see the resource section for a couple of links to give you more context.
What exactly are they offering? Nothing: 1/ a change to the “First Click Free” program (see link for more details ☞ Changes in First Click Free), whose...
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The App Store review process is not evil →
I think these guys may be a bit confused. In my opinion, I’d say they should be ashamed they used their media position to pull some strings to get in front of the line. And Apple probably knew that they will get back this sort of cheap PR. Bad, bad, bad!
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Safari JavaScript Console Trick
I have found an extremely simple and nice trick for using the Safari JavaScript console: the window.console object. It provides a couple of interesting functions:
for(var a in window.console) {
window.console.log(typeof window.console[a] + ':' + window.console[a]);
}
function:function profileEnd()
function:function count()
function:function assert()
function:function...
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Yahoo and Facebook Climbing Project Rushmore →
All posts I’ve read on this subject are covering it from two perspective: how stupid is Yahoo! for externalizing this feature of the future or how smart is Yahoo! for opening their gates to the fascinating Facebook. But there is one dimension that is missing from these perspective: Facebook’s opportunity to tap into those 800mil Yahoo! users.
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Three Improvements for Tumblr Email Posting
I have no idea how many “tumblers” — or is it “tumblrers”? — are using the post by email functionality, but I know it is quite big on another platform ☞ Posterous. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should probably start with the ☞ help section.
While most of the functionality is there, I have found three things that once solved would make the posting by email feature...
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Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age
More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.
Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller.
The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.
These are not mine. It is Joshua-Michéle Ross that published these three paradoxes of the internet over a three...
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Startups, You Need to Find Your Niche
Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post about identifying ☞ underserved markets and focus your startup efforts towards these. He goes on and writes that even if some will feel like
Finding an underserved market sounds like getting the winning ticket in a lottery
, still the signs are out there and you just need to pay attention to them.
The first pattern is looking for activities people like...
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Tim Bray on The Future of Programming →
Are there any computer programs that you wish were faster? Time was, you could solve that problem just by waiting; next year’s system would run them faster. No longer; Next year’s system will do more computing all right, but by giving you more CPUs, running at this year’s speed, to work with. So the only way to make your program faster is to work with more CPUs. Bad news: this is hard. Good...
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Free Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd... →
Good application architectures are supposed to transcend their platform, so you might find this book useful. It is also available for free in PDF format.
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UStream iPhone App: Does It Really Work?
I don’t seem to get it to work (not even over WiFi). Not to mention the search…
I am wondering if at least the new launched Android version works.
Read more articles about working iPhone apps from the iPhone apps reviews series.
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Can Ads Help In-Flight Wi-Fi Take Off? →
No. I mean not immediately. What would help in-flight WiFi take off would be plugs. If your laptop has a couple of hours of battery lifetime and your smartphone is not very far from that, the first thing you’ll need in order to enjoy WiFi is electricity. Then everything will come…
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Tokyo Tyrant Through The Eyes of MySQL Experts
After writing about MonetDB and InfoBright, the MySQL Performance guys are now taking a look at ☞ Tokyo Tyrant, the network interface of the NOSQL Tokyo Cabinet solution.
Their observations span 3 articles (☞ part 1, ☞ part 2 and ☞ part 3) and cover subjects like data durability (the D in ACID), read and write performance.
And if I mentioned Tokyo Cabinet, I should point you to a presentation...
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The Web Will Be So Fast
New initiatives like ☞ SPDY (Google) and ☞ Resource Packages are focusing on making the web much faster by addressing some of the problems of the ☞ HTTP protocol
SPDY is looking at addressing the following problems in HTTP:
single request per connection
exclusively client-initiated requests
uncompressed request and response headers
redundant headers
optional data compression (the weight is...
November 2009
46 posts
4 tags
16apps: iPhone App Recommendations Based on What... →
Sounds a bit stupid isn’t it?