// 01.Mar.2009

The Cute Cat Theory

Activists are going to use your tools if your tools are any good - watch them, pay attention to them, protect them and learn from them. They’ll make our tools better, and they’re one of the reasons to make social software in the first place.

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// 01.Mar.2009

Abused Typefaces

Typography is an art that can be deliberately misused.

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// 25.Jan.2009

Differential Synchronization

Keeping two or more copies of the same document synchronized with each other in real-time is a complex challenge. This paper describes the differential synchronization algorithm. Differential synchronization offers scalability, fault-tolerance, and responsive collaborative editing across an unreliable network.

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// 10.Jan.2009

They Write the Right Stuff

What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved.

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// 24.Dec.2008

How to Launch a New Product

Jason Calacanis explains how they launched Mahalo Answers, including tips or running your own PR (Jason used to be a reporter so he’s played both sides of that fence). [via]

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// 14.Dec.2008

Every Man Needs Adventure

Wake up. Head to work. Work. Head Home. Dinner. Sleep. Repeat. Is this as good as it gets?

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// 02.Nov.2008

The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace

“I think being shy basically means self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worried about whether you like me.” [via]

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// 11.Oct.2008

On Tough Times

Through the miracle of credit, civilization actually gets to run on the illusion that there are several times more money available than we all actually have. This has worked mostly pretty well for several hundred years now. But as of this week, it’s all locked up, and even the good outcomes envisage a contraction of the credit universe and thus the necessity to get along on less money.

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// 21.Sep.2008

The Sorry State of Browser Rendering

I’ve made some (more) tweaks to the design of this website over the past few days. They’re mostly little things and, unless you visit the site often, you probably wouldn’t notice them unless I were to point them out. In fact, in comparing the design today with the template I relaunched with on the 28th June, 2008, it’s amazing to see just how much the design has changed — while still sharing a common overall aesthetic. But then this is how web-design should be isn’t it? A website evolves with small, subtle, incremental changes, yet retains its “brand” by remaining true to its original design.

While I was applying the revisions I started thinking about web-design. I considered the current state of the art, how far we’ve come (I started building websites right back in the beginning when IBrowse on the Commodore Amiga really was cutting edge), standards compliance and the W3C, etc.

The catalyst for these thoughts was my adoption of a simple little CSS3 property known as border-radius, which is used to produce the RoundRects that, depending on which browser you’re using, may or may not be visible to you when you visit this website. If you’re using a Gecko or WebKit based browser, then you’ll see this website exactly as I intended - complete with RoundRects. With other browsers you’ll only see an approximation of the design I intended.
Continue Reading…

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// 18.Aug.2008

Explaining REST to Damien Katz

“The Web has a particular architecture and it makes sense that if you are deploying a service or API on the Web then it should take advantage of this architecture instead of fighting against it. There are millions of deployed clients, servers and intermediaries that support REST and it makes sense to be compatible with their expectations.” [via]

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