PUBLIC MARKS from greut with tag blog

“Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service.”

For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP! The job’s a game!

My grand-father was saying: life is a game

Our software is as brittle as 15-20 years ago. Reusable objects and framework superstructures have failed. UML has failed. Even design pattern have failed as they turned out to be more idiomatic than universal. What’s left are lightweight programming languages which let us glue things together. Some are user friendly and don’t suck badly. That’s still the best we have.

Lua, are you there?

Building an XMPP-enabled Fire Eagle application is very similar to building a traditional web-based application. In fact, the XMPP componentry is intended to complement an existing application, simplifying it and imbuing it with real-time capabilities.

Piece of cake, not really. Nice usage of oAuth-over-XMPP though

Decisions vs. Choices

The difference between choices and decisions is subtle , some of it has to do with the quality of your ingredients and some of it has to do with compromise at the wrong stage of development. Is the process all that matters? A process that is used to constantly create new possible options and choose from those instead of making Frankenstein out of the options given? The design process will constantly emphasize the goal in the iteration of options leading to a choice. I don’t think that definition clear, but it’s the best we came up with.

hackers and painters

Ever wish you had your own UI-lab, but can’t build one with all the expensive cameras, big boxes and one-way-mirrors in your house right now?

It's a very small Silverback written in Python

Sμblog (pronounced sub-log) is is my attempt to combine ideas about microblogging, messaging and the sematic web into a practical tool ready for everyday work.

XMPP to RDF microblogging tool, quite nice and well documented.

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU LIKE IT

Yes it doesn’t matter. Some of my most effective and successful designs from an analytics/statistics standpoint are not ones that I particularly like. That is because I am not the user, and I think and interpret visuals differently than psychology scholars (or any other given user base)

follow the link to the experiment made by Drupal, nice idea very nice.

Le Web 2.0 a fonctionné sur le thème du « It's all about you » qui se résumait en fait à « It's all about your data for our advertisement incomes. »

très très justement décrit. Tant de considérer les services 2.0 comme périphériques et plus centraux et d'avoir un serveur perso par la même.

Developers hate three things, above all else, in increasing order of painfulness…

1. Working on stuff that is easy
2. Working on stuff that is tangential
3. Working on stuff that no one will use

no comment

People with dyslexia: often prefer not to have “tooltips” popping up, as they can be a serious distraction to the process of reading the text. If they have moved to a standards compliant browser to get away from the ALT attribute popping up in Internet Explorer, imagine how delighted they might be to find a site that has more TITLE “tooltips” than a leopard has spots.

a more and more seen bad practice, using TITLE instead of ALT.

The bigger point is that none of us are doing enough to challenge the assignment. Every day, I spend at least an hour of my time looking at my work and what I've chosen to do next and wonder, "is this big enough?"

how big can you think?

a script that integrates status notices from my twitter and identi.ca feeds, and then creates an HTML "lifestream" snippet.

a SPARQL-based scripting language.

Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up

it sounds all right to me too.

Comet doesn’t have to be a hack. Currently, as we saw last time, Comet relies on undocumented loopholes and workarounds, each one with some drawbacks. We can make Comet work effectively in every browser, using streaming transports on subdomains of the same second-level domain, or using script tag long polling across domains. But this leaves Comet developers implementing (and more frustratingly, debugging) several transports across several browsers. Traps are numerous and easy to stumble into.

event-source is the future of all Comet things.

[…] the recorded sessions from last year’s Commercial Users of Functional Programming are now up in conveniently viewable form on Google Video.

Erlang, F#, ...

Not a line I draw ends up on an end‑user screen. Not a word I write is compiled into code. Not a sentence I say instructs users. I draw, write and talk to enable the specialists I work with to excel at what they do and realise inspiring software for my clients.

I’m not a graphic designer, I am an interaction architect.

En attendant, lorsque je lis tous ces blogs et twits en manque de sexe, de câlins, de crapuleux, de pelles, d’aventures, d’excitation et d’affection, je me dis qu’il y a de quoi organiser une orgie douce et mémorable.

et moi et moi et moi...

With the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s scalability problems, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to write a Twitter clone in Erlang?

Last weekend was cold and rainy here in Palo Alto, so I sat down and hacked one, and thus Twoorl was born. It took me one full day plus a couple of evenings. The codebase is about 1700 lines (including comments).

Twitter is dead, long live to Twoorl. The code is open source.

After some recent optimizations, the Dojo Cometd implementation of the Bayeux protocol running on the Jetty web server can now handle up to 20,000 simultaneous users per server while maintaining sub-second latency.

impressive numbers. Does the Twisted one can beat that?

The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career is improve your ability to communicate.

with a MacIntosh presentation, they didn't really change over the years.

Both Norman and Hansson agree on one thing: user involvement alone is not enough. Designer vision, expertise and discipline is a vital part of successful innovation.

even if they disagree on who you're designing things for.

You can make your clock applet prettier by changing two lines with gconf-editor.

nice tips for you GNOME-lovers. And for sure, a rule to follow - do not hardcode anything users may want to change, customize.