- Dodgers Trolley Begins Tomorrow
Yay! This will make going to a game much easier from downtown.
- How Dopplr learns
Dopplr does some interesting things with the data they are given. It helps them narrow down where and when people are traveling. Utilizing the input given from a user is a great way of creating more intelligence within your system.
- Failing Fast at Pixar
Peter Merholz interviews Michael B. Johnson from Pixar and there are some nuggets in there that need to be shared.
The important take-home point, though, is that Pixar loves their films so much, we make them twice :-). Compared to the final product, the first time we make it is sketchy and rough - but the most important thing is that it’s still a film. To be clear - our prototype exists in the same medium as our final product. This allows us to judge it by the same standards that the final film will be judged.
I think this is an important lesson for a User Experience Designer to understand - paper prototypes and ethnographic research are great, but if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product. My group (which does lots of ethnographic research and Photoshop/OmniGraffle prototypes) firmly believes in this, and practices it daily.
Actually, it more than makes up for the cost. We know we’ll fail a lot; if you don’t fail you’re not doing anything new :-).
We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. “Fail fast,” that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.
- Drizzle
Drizzle, a slimmed down MySQL, looks very, very interesting. [ via ]
Stored Procedures, Views, Triggers, Query Cache, and Prepared Statements are gone for now. The field types have been simplified and there is an open debate about the SHOW commands (I am falling into the camp that think they may just belong in the client application but not in the server).
Will any of this go back in? It is hard to say. The goal right now is to target a certain class of applications/developers and see if this is useful. As an example:
1) Web based apps.
2) Cloud components.
3) Databases without business logic (aka stored procedures).
4) Multi-Core architecture.
- Telegraph.co.uk redesign
Some interesting ideas in the redesign of the Telegraph’s site.
The best to me is the understanding of the article as homepage.
It’s a logical progression that boosts views and keeps the user engaged for longer, and is part of what the team behind the Telegraph redesign refer to as ‘the concept of the article as the homepage’.
This shows an awareness that the homepage is no longer the main point of entry - around half of the site’s traffic comes through aggregators. Putting as much effort into the design and accessibiilty of every page of your site, as most publications put into their homepage, could well be a winning strategy for both traffic and engagement.
In the age of Googe, people aren’t going to your homepage directly and then drilling down. Instead, they search, they find the link and go from there. If you don’t have anything compelling on the article page that would give them more places to go, you’ll lose them. But if you do, you might gain additional visits and longer user engagement with the site.
- New York Times and LinkedIn
I’m intrigued by this new partnership between the New York Times and LinkedIn.
LinkedIn will power the NYTimes.com customized headline feature with the five latest Times articles relevant to LinkedIn members based on non-personally identifiable attributes. For example, LinkedIn members who work in the energy sector will have the option to get relevant, targeted Times stories that cover the energy business.
The interesting thing is the personalization aspect. There is shared data between the two which allows specific headlines to be shown. I do think that personalization could be a great way for newspapers to bubble new and interesting content to users. Something like that would bring people back again and again.
- Pressflip and Sour Grapes
It takes an amazing amount of courage to start a company. I think it takes even more courage to do so after you’ve written takedown after takedown of other start-ups but that’s what Ted Dziuba is doing. It started as Persai but now it’s Pressflip.
Of course, when you try something new, people are just looking for ways to tear you down. This isn’t to say that Pressflip will be the greatest thing ever but at least he’s trying something.
- Kottke Updates
Jason Kottke had the right idea when Twitter was down today. Also, check the impressive API.
- Cloud Architectures
The Amazon Web Services Blog points to a new white paper one of their engineers has written, dealing with Cloud Architectures. It’s a really good overview of the cloud that Amazon offers and it gets into the architecture decisions when building something for the cloud.
Cloud Architectures address key difficulties surrounding large-scale data processing. In traditional data processing it is difficult to get as many machines as an application needs. Second, it is difficult to get the machines when one needs them. Third, it is difficult to distribute and co-ordinate a large-scale job on different machines, run processes on them, and provision another machine to recover if one machine fails. Fourth, it is difficult to auto-scale up and down based on dynamic workloads. Fifth, it is difficult to get rid of all those machines when the job is done. Cloud Architectures solve such difficulties.
Applications built on Cloud Architectures run in-the-cloud where the physical location of the infrastructure is determined by the provider. They take advantage of simple APIs of Internet-accessible services that scale on-demand, that are industrial-strength, where the complex reliability and scalability logic of the underlying services remains implemented and hidden inside-the-cloud. The usage of resources in Cloud Architectures is as needed, sometimes ephemeral or seasonal, thereby providing the highest utilization and optimum bang for the buck.
Definitely check the tips for building cloud applications since they are very relevant no matter if you are deploying on Amazon or your own system.
- Claremont Insider
I just found out that there’s a blog focusing on Claremont, the city I grew up in and where my parents still live. Who knew? [ via ]
