Which part was the mistake? Buying it or what he did with it after?
Murdoch On Myspace: “I Made A Huge Mistake.” | TechCrunch.
Murdoch On Myspace: “I Made A Huge Mistake.” | TechCrunch
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First Impressions using Google+
I just got my Google Plus invite yesterday and started playing around today with Google’s latest foray into social networking. First impressions: easy to use, great clean interface, but not yet seeing anything that would really have Facebook shaking at the knees…
Anyone like a Google+ Invite let me know in comments – I’ll give out as many as I can.
Update: I’ve just realized that for current gmail users, the “Find and Invite” tab under Google+ circles practically gives you an instant social graph within Plus, without the need to import contacts and invite them etc.
A Better Data Merge User Interface
I’ve been thinking for a while about what would make for a great UI to merge 2 records together. For instance, let’s say you have 2 contacts in your contact list, and both are really one and the same. This happens quite a lot for me using Gmail’s contacts as Gmail automatically creates contacts based on people you correspond with, and since quite often friends have more than 1 email address that they use, I end up with “duplicate” contacts in my list.
Gmail unfortunately gives you no easy way to merge these records, and that got me thinking about the best way to handle something like this from a UI point of view, not necessarily just for Gmail (which of course I can’t change!) but for any system in general.
Best Jquery Date Pickers and Time Pickers
Jquery is my all-around favorite Javascript library for developing websites with rich UIs (among many other assorted goodies offered by Jquery). In this post, I share my favorite date and time picker Jquery plugins.
Not strictly speaking a plugin, Datepicker comes out of the box as part of the Jquery UI add-on library, and is a tried and true rich UI date picking widget, with lots of config options. If you need something that “just works” quickly and gets the basic (date picking) job done fast, look no further than this one.
A Better Way To Display “Time ago” Using Jquery
For a side project that I was working on recently, we wanted to display dates for content using the “time ago” format as opposed to showing a literal date/time, for instance “Posted 10 minutes ago” or “Posted 2 days ago”, etc.
This is quite simple to implement server side with a function such as this that takes a date and returns a nicely worded string in the form of “X mins/hours/days/weeks/months ago”. However for this project we needed to do heavy page caching, rendering the page in PHP first and then caching the full HTML for 30 minutes, long enough that the time ago format would quickly show outdated numbers.
To the rescue… Continue reading
In the aftermath of Intermedia’s extended outage, an important lesson to be learned for SAS providers
As a current (and reasonably long time) customer of SAS Exchange hosting provider Intermedia.com, we at OleOle were naturally affected to some extent by Intermedia’s extended system outage on March 5th, 2010. For pretty much the entire morning on that day, we, along with thousands of their other customers, had zero email capability, no sending, no receiving, zilch.
To make matters worse, during a large part of this outage, Intermedia’s own website was unavailable, so affected customers could not even go onto the Intermedia website to check for status updates or open support tickets. Needless to say, their PBX was being bombarded by thousands of irate customers as well, so getting someone on the line for an update wasn’t that easy either. Twitter ended up being the best source of updates, first from other customers who tweeted what info they could glean, and then later from Intermedia’s own Twitter account when they managed to get more caught up and started giving out some official updates.
Surprise! Not all Amazon EC2 compute units are created equal
A very interesting discovery made by our sys admin not so long ago: While Amazon EC2 sells its hosting services on the notion of leasing virtualized servers with a guaranteed amount of standard compute units, memory and disk space, it turns out that in fact, not all EC2 compute units are created equal. In other words, imagine you boot up 2 separate virtual servers (or instances as they are known in EC2 speak) and these are both EC2 Extra Large instances. Each instance comes with 8 EC2 compute units – which is essentially supposed to be the amount of raw CPU processing power available to you where the larger the number of compute units, the more processing power your (server) instance should be giving you.
Now one would expect that since you are paying the same amount of money to Amazon for each server instance created of this same type and size, that you should be getting the same performance out of each one. Sadly, that is a very wrong assumption, as our sys admin found out.
The 25 Best Technology Quotes
Recently came across this ranked listed of the 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History.
My favorite “oops, I wish I never said that” quote is Michael Dell’s “shut it down and give the money back to shareholders” advice to Apple. Of course, this was circa 1997 when Apple was in quite dire straits. But still…
Getting Memcached working on Windows Vista with Symfony
I finally found a solution to a long standing issue that had been driving me crazy: getting memcached to work with the PHP development framework Symfony on my Windows Vista based development machine. For whatever reason, it just has not worked for me from day 1 since moving to Vista (from XP) and setting up Symfony within WAMP (Apache, Mysql, PHP). The maddening thing is that memcached has worked fine with other non-symfony PHP based web apps in my Vista set up – it’s just the apps that are Symfony based that have not worked with memcached.
On to the solution: A modified version of memcached found here:
http://code.jellycan.com/memcached/
I’m not sure why this works, but the important thing is it does!
Something I haven’t seen in a while – the blue screen of death!
Having been using Windows Vista for about 1.5 years now, I had thought the dreaded Windows Blue Screen of Death (aka. BSOD) was really and truly a thing of the past. So it was funny (but not really in a funny ha ha kind of way) to be greeted this morning when I sat down at my desk with this charming little message:
A Blue Screen by any other name would still smell as sweet...
A case of old habits die hard?