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.
Steve Souders: Front-end or Back-end Optimizations?
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 focusing on these front-end best practices. If your back-end time is 30 to 50 percent or more, then you should really start on looking at your back-end architecture.
And in case you are running a media company, you should also check the part of the interview focused on the degradation of performance due to non-optimized ad servers.
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 news: we have some really promising technologies to help make it less hard. Bad news: none of them are mainstream. But I’m betting that will change.
— Tim Bray
Testing Hardware
The only piece of hardware testing software I’ve used back in the days is the Nokia monitor test suite. Now, Google has open sourced ☞ Stressful Application Test:
Stressful Application Test (or stressapptest, its unix name) tries to maximize randomized traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing hardware devices in a computer.
Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to use it before buying any new servers?
JavaScript Notable News
dynaTrace Ajax ☞
John Resig (of jQuery fame) reviews an AJAX tracing tool for Internet Explorer:
dynaTrace provides some information that I’ve never seen before - in any tool on any browser.
JavaScript Framework Matrix ☞
An overview of the following JavaScript frameworks and their functions: jQuery, MooTools, The Dojo Toolkit, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, ExtJS, Adobe Spry, BBC Glow, Yahoo! UI Library
Learning Advanced JavaScript ☞
An advanced JavaScript tutorial authored by John Resig.
Google Closure: JavaScript library ☞
About the ☞ pros and ☞ cons of the ☞ new Google released JavaScript library.
Google Closure Useful Links
Notable: Collaborative Feedback for Websites
An interesting tool for providing feedback about websites (design, content, etc.). The team behind Notable is also maintaining an interesting ☞ blog. You probably have already seen around the internet other forms of capturing feedback about the site, but most of the time those are just forms or forums integrations, while Notable seems to offer more advanced options.
It is interesting to note how Notable team have started to promote their product. They have picked major websites and used Notable to provide feedback on their design:
You can find a more extensive review of Notable ☞ here.
Another tool I’ve mentioned in the past is LaunchSet which is helping you to manage the whole beta/alpha/private access and data for your new website/startup.
Data Mining Toolkits
I just discovered two data mining toolkits:
Massive Online Analysis (MOA) ☞
Massive On-line Analysis is an environment for massive data mining.
MOA is a framework for data stream mining. Includes tools for evaluation and a collection of machine learning algorithms. Related to the WEKA project, also written in Java, while scaling to more demanding problems.
bixo ☞
Bixo is an open source web mining toolkit that runs as a series of Cascading pipes on top of Hadoop. By building a customized Cascading pipe assembly, you can quickly create specialized web mining applications that are optimized for a particular use case.
Resources
What Software Do You Run on Your Mac?
I didn’t know about the ☞ i use this website until now. i use this seems to be a Digg for software. For the same purpose of discovering new great software I was visiting from time to time the ☞ wakoopa website which builds a recommendation list based on what software you are using.
How-to: get music, videos, and photos off your iPod or iPhone (OS X)
I was looking for such a step by step tutorial for quite a while (well, I haven’t researched it too much either).
E-Readers Reviewed
O’Reilly has been publishing a series of articles on the currently available e-readers:
- Sony readers:
- Getting to know the Sony Readers: ☞ part 1, ☞ part 2 and ☞ part 3
- ☞ Using the Sony PRS-505
- ☞ Using the Sony PRS-700
- Barnes&Noble’s Nook: ☞ part 1 and ☞ part 2
I hope the series will continue with other e-readers as I have found a ☞ Wikipedia page on e-readers listing quite a few such devices.
I own a Sony PRS-505 for almost 2 years now and until recently (when a firmware update was released) the experience of reading PDFs on it hasn’t been so great. Recently I also had the opportunity to played with the new Sony e-readers, but I must confess I haven’t been impressed at all (they looked to be as sluggish as my older one). I am also using a couple of great iPhone apps for reading PDFs on my iPhone.
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.
