Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Alex Iskold – Semantic Search: The Myth and Reality: „Probably the most striking revelation about the semantic search space is User Interface. First, to go on the tangent, Powerset got it right by realizing that semantics needs to be surfaced in the UI. After a user searches Powerset, a contextual gadget, aware of the semantics…

Robert D. Currier at linux.com – FusionCharts Free: Cross-platform charts that rock: „If you’ve struggled with GNUplot, JPgraph or other charting applications, FusionCharts Free is a breath of fresh air. Have you dreamed of finding a charting and graphing application that is simple to install, easy to configure, and drop-dead gorgeous? Stop dreaming and download…

Gojko Adzic – Put the web server on a diet and increase scalability: „HTTP sessions are often used to store frequently accessed user-specific information, but that is wrong. It is error-prone from the consistency perspective, but it also significantly inhibits scalability. […] I strongly suggest using a proper caching mechanism instead of session objects for…

Gojko Adzic – Delivering useful software: „If an iteration produces software that can really be used every day, then ship it and make the clients use it. It is definitely useful to get feedback early, but having something go live, even if it causes rework or throwing away parts of software later, is much much…

Jamis Buck at Signal vs. Noise – Standing versus Sitting: „So I propped my keyboard and mouse up on a few encyclopedias and gave it a go. The first week was rough on my feet and legs, which ached constantly. I kept a bar stool handy for resting periodically on, but I really tried to…

Christopher Jones – PHP Connection Pooling Whitepaper with Benchmark Available: „The whitepaper [PDF] talks about the changes in the PHP OCI8 1.3 extension, explains some of the concepts behind DRCP and FAN, and gives best practices and tuning tips. It includes a new PHP benchmark which shows up to 20,000 connections being handled by Oracle…

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – Hire family people: „When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll…

Paul Graham – Be Good: „There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you’re forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that’s actually very valuable information.“

„“Seek” adds faceted browsing features to Mozilla Thunderbird and lets you search through your email more effectively.“

Gojko Adzic – The waterfall trap for “agile” projects: „Because increments are done in detail, a lot of effort is wasted when a piece needs rework (and the initial releases are almost certain to fall into this category). Iterative development offers a chance to see the picture from the start, and guide the development towards…