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Inside baseball web 2.0 smackdown: behold web 2.1 and the server side blink tag. It's funny 'cause it's true. This stuff is hard to scale.
- jim 7-01-2008 12:01 am [link] [add a comment]

So I don't forget: PHP and jquery upload progress bar. Why the PHP team didn't change the way uploads are handled in PHP 5 is completely beyond me. As a file uploads it gets written to /tmp, but your script which is to handle the file has no way of knowing which file in /tmp is yours. This would be simple to fix. I wonder how many developers started looking at Ruby on Rails just for this one feature? (I know, that would be a crazy reason to switch languages, but I'll bet it happened.) Anyway, seems like third parties have now made it pretty easy to add this to PHP (you used to have patch the source and then recompile.)
- jim 6-29-2008 7:01 pm [link] [add a comment]

Western Digital's newish VelociRaptor SATA hard drive speed tests when configured in a 3 drive RAID-5.

The burst speed recorded was robust 598MB/sec, according to HD Tach, which is about on par with what we've seen from WD's Raptor WD1500 line in this configuration. However, average read performance is through the roof, with a 209.4MB/sec land speed record set for what we've seen in our labs and about a 33% performance gain over what we've seen with Raptor WD1500 drives in RAID 5 on the Areca controller. Finally, random access clocks in at a snappy 7.2ms.
Damn!
- jim 6-29-2008 6:46 pm [link] [3 comments]

I don't like the sound of this:

ICANN, the organization that oversees internet addresses, will soon allow anyone to apply for his very own generic top-level domain (gTLD). In other words, you'll soon have the power to put almost anything at the end of your url, eschewing existing top-level domains such as ".com" or ".edu."

ICANN estimates it will begin taking applications in April or May of next year. The fee for each application will be "in the low six figures in American dollars," and the first customized gTLDs will likely arrive in the fourth quarter of 2009.
But I guess it's an opportunity for someone clever. You just need to think of a character combination that will let people make cool sounding URLs (sort of like how del.icio.us made clever use of .us.) Off the top of my head I think .tion would be a good one. Dave?
- jim 6-27-2008 3:41 pm [link] [7 comments]

The new Diner Journal Blog was launched today. It had been on blogger until now. I guess this is the first blog running on geneva (v1.2).
- jim 6-25-2008 10:48 pm [link] [3 comments]

Is Gmail imap acting up for anyone else today? I think this must be google's least reliable, least well thought out service (I don't mean gmail itself, just the imap part.)
- jim 6-25-2008 10:27 pm [link] [add a comment]

Slashdot article on wikipedia's shoe string budget server infrastructure got this funny comment:

How hard can it be to increase the budget or add more servers?

Just go to the Wikipedia page with those numbers and change them. You don't even need to have an account.

- jim 6-24-2008 7:33 pm [link] [add a comment]

Apparently Amtrak is doing some work on a bridge between NYC and Boston, so it's my first time on the Bolt Bus. $17 one way (take that Accela!) Free WiFi. AC in every seat. Pretty nice.
- jim 6-24-2008 4:13 pm [link] [6 comments]

SproutCore is Cocoa for the web:

As Apple's public schedule for WWDC explained, "SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications.
Roughly Drafted has an in depth look at SproutCore in the context of its' closed source competitors: Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Very interesting. I can't wait to check out the MobileMe web apps that Apple is rolling out using this sort of technology.
- jim 6-16-2008 7:18 pm [link] [2 comments]

Obsfucated TCP:

is a backwards-compatible modification to the TCP protocol which adds opportunistic encryption. It's designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.

TLS is the solution to protecting sensitive information. However, there's room for a low setup cost protocol to protect the bulk of traffic which isn't currently encrypted. It can't stop a focused attack, but it can assuage untargeted, dragnet sniffing of backbones and spoofing of RST packets.

- jim 6-11-2008 10:12 pm [link] [add a comment]

New iPhones are $199 and $299 (8 GB and 16GB.) 3G cellular (much faster) and GPS and longer battery life (we'll see about that.) Not much else different on the hardware front. Very nice software update though. They are really doing it right. (Maybe I'll post more on this if I get the time.) And their on line (web, email, remote backup) service .mac has been renamed 'MobileMe' and runs on the me.com domain (I'm meh on the name but that's a pretty nice domain - must have cost a few bucks.) The syncing is very tight between the iPhones and MobileMe. Contacts, email, even pictures are synced immediately over the air so your home machines and iPhone (and your shared calendars on your partners iPhone) all stay in sync all the time. $99/year is not cheap, but I think it's going to be so slick that you'll basically have to buy it. Good thing the phones are so cheap now - I guess that's the trade off.

Due on July 11. I'll be there.
- jim 6-09-2008 10:38 pm [link] [12 comments]

IEEE Spectrum magazine has a huge round up of thinking on the singularity.
- jim 6-03-2008 5:24 pm [link] [1 ref] [2 comments]

Free Wi-Fi for AT&T users at Starbucks. Well, sort of mostly almost free. You have to sign up for a Starbucks card and have used it at least once in the last 30 days (just adding money to the card counts as "using" it.) And you have to make an account with AT&T where you agree for them to send you 4 emails a year, plus look at your Starbucks card puchasing data. In exchange you get 2 hours of Wi-Fi a day, limited to a single session (you can't leave and them come back, but I'm not sure if there is any safe guard against creating multiple Starbucks and AT&T accounts in order to get multiple sessions.)

This is a pretty good deal in my opinion, especially for an infrequent traveler like me (where having some sort of 3G modem for my laptop makes no economic sense.) Starbucks do have a great advantage of ubiquity.
- jim 6-03-2008 4:12 pm [link] [add a comment]

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