Microsoft’s new IE “Ribbon” debunked : ‘nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.’ (via Nelson)
(tags: design hci microsoft ui statistics user-hostile ribbon windows)
Month: August 2011
The Daily Mail’s frequent copyright abuse finally catches up with them : This is how you do it — bravo to Alice Taylor, who got them fair and square as they did their usual trick of lifting copyrighted content without permission
(tags: copyright journalism photography daily-mail via:torrentfreak)Real-World Scala: Dependency Injection (DI) : I think I prefer the structural-typing approach, TBH
(tags: scala patterns programming oo coding dependency-injection)
Bog Body: Committing to Open Source : Oisin Hurley on viable strategies for a commercial software company to handle participation in open source. Shame I’ve never found anywhere to viably put these into action, but they sound accurate
(tags: open-source oisin-hurley oss corporate work)
Fastest sort of fixed length 6 int array – Stack Overflow : huh, I’d never heard of sorting networks before
(tags: sorting-networks c algorithms sorting optimization sort stack-overflow)
‘What Idiot Wrote The Patent That Might Invalidate Software Patents? Oh, Wait, That Was Me’ | Techdirt : ‘So I was thinking – great they invalidated software patents, lets see what crappy patent written by an idiot they picked to do it – then I realized the idiot in question was me :-) Not sure how I feel about this. John – inventor of the patent in question.’
(tags: patents swpats reform usa software-development coding funny techdirt)
good taxonomy of memcached use cases : via Jeff Barr’s announcement of the Elasticache launch. from 2008, but a better taxonomy than I’ve seen elsewhere
(tags: memcached caching mysql performance scalability via:jeffbarr)Bootstrap, from Twitter : ‘a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites’; ‘includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.’ Very, very nice, AL2 licensed (via Mick Twomey)
(tags: via:micktwomey twitter ui css design html styling web-apps layout)echolibre & Orchestra : ‘In particular, we want to thank the Irish and Dublin web communities. I’ve met other web communities in Europe and in the USA, and I can say, hand on heart, they don’t have a patch on you guys.’ awww ;) Congrats, guys
(tags: echolibre php web startups ireland paas orchestra.io engine-yard)
Building with Legos : Netflix tech blog on how they deploy their services. Notably, they avoid the Puppet/Chef approach, citing these reasons: ‘One is that it eliminates a number of dependencies in the production environment: a master control server, package repository and client scripts on the servers, network permissions to talk to all of these. Another is that it guarantees that what we test in the test environment is the EXACT same thing that is deployed in production; there is very little chance of configuration or other creep/bit rot. Finally, it means that there is no way for people to change or install things in the production environment (this may seem like a really harsh restriction, but if you can build a new AMI fast enough it doesn’t really make a difference).’
(tags: devops cloud aws netflix puppet chef deployment)Bog body found in Co Laois could be that of sacrificed king : ‘All of the other bog bodies were found on significant boundaries. The idea is that because the goddess is the land, by inserting bodies and other items relating to their inauguration as king along the boundaries, it gives form to the goddess.’ things were pretty damn gory back then
(tags: ireland history laois bog-bodies bog human-sacrifice)
nifty Cydia iPhone signal-strength app : very nifty. pity my phone’s not jailbroken, or I’d be trying this out
(tags: jailbreaking cydia iphone signal-strength 3g wireless mapping)Pavo Real : amazingly detailed peacock print by Argentinian artist Azul de Corso; very nice
(tags: prints toget peacock azul-de-corso art)