You're Doing It Wrong - ACM Queue
You're Doing It Wrong Think you've mastered the art of server performance? Think again.

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline | Electronic Frontier Foundation
To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Amazon.com: Contech Electronics CRO101 Scarecrow Motion-Activated Sprinkler: Patio, Lawn & Garden
When you listed your product on Amazon, be aware of user generated content, especially product images. This product got some really great use-cases added.

Improving download behaviors in web browsers ? Alexander Limi
The confusing and inconsistent state of downloading files using a web browser has long been a pet peeve of mine. The current situation is pretty much a mess in every web browser. Issues with file systems in general notwithstanding, even doing simple downloads to a centrally defined folder can be confusing, even frustrating.

Employers: Look to gaming to motivate staff - Training & Development - Business - News - iTnews.com.au
Clearly defined goals and fair, incremental rewards are two game design techniques that could motivate the 'gamer generation' in the workforce, according to a US academic.

Edge 313
David Gelernter: Time to start taking the internet seriously

Linguistic profiling: The sound of your voice may determine if you get that apartment or not | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis
Speakers with German accents ? even if they stumble into grammatical errors ? are considered brilliant, John Baughs research has shown. The listeners may not even be able to name the accent as German-American. Baugh expects that the brainy stereotype comes from comics and cartoons mimicking Albert Einstein's German-American accent and from a duck ? Walt Disney's Germanic scientist Ludwig Von Drake.

The Brads ? a comic about web design » The Brads ? Why DRM Doesn?t Work
How to Download an Audio Book from the Cleveland Public Library

Forrester: The new Era of Social Innovation
In this era, innovation will be driven by empowered customers and employees and IT and Marketing will need to join forces and collaborate as never before. The CIO and the CMO, IT and Marketing, will jointly power this new era of Social Innovation by bringing together their extensive domain expertise to create a Social Innovation Network.

LukeW | "Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%
Wroblewski: A narrative style in form design increases the conversion rate by 25 to 40%, testings showed. See the examples.

Computer Science for Fun - cs4fn: What is Computational Thinking?
Computational Thinking - a way of thinking that is critical in the 21st Century

How Internet Explorer 8 document mode affects JavaScript | NCZOnline
In Microsoft?s attempt to make Internet Explorer 8 more standards-compliant, the same issues that arose around CSS also arose around JavaScript. They could fix the deviations in JScript, but if the browser were running in IE5 or IE7 document modes, there could be problems as these fixes might be incompatible with the code targeting those browsers. Microsoft chose to create versioned features of the JScript engine for Internet Explorer 8. For IE5 and IE7 document modes, the JScript engine acts as it did in the actual Internet Explorer 7, complete with all deviations from ECMAScript 3. When in IE8 document mode, the deviations are gone and you get the full power of the JScript engine.

Found Functions
Nikki Graziano is a photographer and mathematician at R.I.T. in Rochester, New York. See his photographs of mathematical functions found in nature.

Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond
Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond Analysts Share Best Practices for Embracing Social Networking at Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2010, 9-11 March in Baltimore and 15-16 September in London

Plurk: Instant conversations using Comet - amix.dk
Using node.js for a highly scalable instant messaging system.

The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart - Odds of Airborne Attacks - Gizmodo
The odds of airborne terror - lightning strikes claim twenty time more victims.

Worldwide cost of IT failure: $6.2 trillion | IT Project Failures | ZDNet.com
Most IT failure research seeks to determine the percentage of projects that run over-budget, are late, or do not deliver expected results. While those numbers are important, they do not convey a concrete sense of the overall cost impact created by failed IT.

0x1fff: 35 Google open-source projects that you probably don't know
Google is one of the biggest companies supporting OpenSource movement, they released more than 500 open source projects(most of them are samples showing how to use their API).

Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer - Great For Win7 Upgrades
Ninite installs apps with default settings and says "no" to browser toolbars and other junk. Ninite checks your PC's language and 64-bit support to install the latest, best version of each app. Ninite runs on Windows XP/Vista/7 and works in the background 100% hands-free. All Ninite does is install the apps you choose. Not even Ninite is installed.

Windows Server Division WebLog
Windows Server and Windows Azure come together in a new STB organization: the Server & Cloud Division Microsoft is announcing today the formation of a new organization within the Server & Tools Business that combines the Windows Server & Solutions group and the Windows Azure group, into a single organization called the Server & Cloud Division (SCD).

Geeks to Music Industry: APIs Can Set You Free | Epicenter | Wired.com
Some say three characters, MP3, destroyed the music industry. Another three letters, API, can save it, according to software developers showing off their wares at the SF MusicTech Summit.

Black&White? ? Getting to the customer ? why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong
There is something wrong with User Centered Design processes. What is wrong is that it doesn?t deliver on the promise to increase and create better products, that valuable resources are being used and that it is more what one could call a placebo for the uncertainty.

google-mobwrite - Project Hosting on Google Code
MobWrite converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system.

Memories of a paywall pioneer | Media | guardian.co.uk
Scott Rosenberg, former managing editor of US website Salon.com, on the effects of its 2001 paywall experiment

CommonJS effort sets JavaScript on path for world domination
This has been a big year for JavaScript. New, fast engines have tested their legs. Libraries have matured. With the ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the language is growing. However, the language remains largely in exile, to only be used in Web browsers. This year has marked a resurgence of efforts to make JavaScript useful outside the browser. This was patently obvious at this year's first European JavaScript conference, jsconf.eu.

Japan prepares robots to take over the kitchen [Montrealgazette]
Montrealgazette -- Various prototype robo-chefs showed off their cooking skills at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo this week, flipping "okonomiyaki" Japanese pancakes, serving sushi and slicing vegetables.

"Too Damn Fast" - speakTECH's perspective on social media strategy - Knobs, Tubes & Dials - speakTECH Labs
A summary on a lot of speakTECHs findings, experience and insight in a white paper titled "Too Damn Fast - How to match the blistering evolution of social media with effective internal & external social technology strategies." [DOWNLOAD]

8 Lessons From the Creativity and Technology Conference - Advertising Age - Digital
LONDON (AdAge.com) -- Some 300 attendees gathered at the Saatchi Gallery last week for Ad Age sibling Creativity's technology conference, Creativity and Technology, were treated to musings on bleeding-edge digital communication from Europe's top talent in advertising, technology and design. Speakers ranged from agency creatives and technologists to writers such as Adam Greenfield, author of "Everyware" and head of design direction at Nokia.

Going evented with Node.js - Naked JavaScript
Node.js is an evented I/O framework built on top of Google's V8 JavaScript engine. It's goal is to provide an incredibly powerful I/O system through which you can build highly efficient and s calable applications without any knowledge of "advanced topics" such as threading, processes, etc.. It does this by using an event-based programming model similar to Python's Twisted framework or Ruby's EventMachine.

You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance | November 2009 | Communications of the ACM
Long considered an afterthought, software maintenance is easiest and most effective when built into a system from the ground up.

The Über-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010 - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org
Using social media tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs and corporate social networks, Über-Connected organizations are connecting employees globally and are fostering mass collaboration. As a result, these companies are seeing improvements in communication, cross-functional collaboration and creative approaches to problem solving. More companies are discovering that an über-connected workplace is not just about implementing a new set of tools ? it is also about embracing a cultural shift to create an open environment where employees are encouraged to share, innovate and collaborate virtually.

Writing great documentation: you need an editor
If you do have the opportunity to work with a good editor it?s pretty fantastic and I recommend it highly. One of the best parts of writing a book was learning by being edited. However, most documentation efforts don?t have the luxury of a real editor. Thus, some advice if you, too, find yourself roped into that role:

The Go Programming Language
Go is a general-purpose language designed with systems programming in mind. It is strongly typed and garbage-collected and has explicit support for concurrent programming. Programs are constructed from packages, whose properties allow efficient management of dependencies. The existing implementations use a traditional compile/link model to generate executable binaries.

15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee | The Oatmeal
Ok, addiction is one thing, but you got to be informed and really know your poison. Here's the short version about coffee.

IT snake oil: Six tech cure-alls that went bunk | Applications - InfoWorld
In the land of IT, the one thing you can count on is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.

SOA Manifesto
Service orientation is a paradigm that frames what you do. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a type of architecture that results from applying service orientation.

Cell Size and Scale
An impressive interactive animation to compare sizes of cells, viruses, down to a single carbon atom.

Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects
There is a place to share digital designs that can be made into real, physical objects: the Thingiverse.

9 usability mistakes even the big boys make.
Making your application easy to use, can make or break the success of the app. It can lower barrier to entry on signup, lower the bounce rate on your site, and increase conversions - all with the smallest of tweaks. Here are a collection of common UI pet hates of mine - and potential things to check with an application on launch.

HubbleSite - Picture Album: Entire Collection
Hubblesite: very high resolution images from the hubble space telescope. Wallpaper-heaven!

An Engineer's Guide to Bandwidth (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)
Web app developers spend most of our time not thinking about how data is actually transmitted through the bowels of the network stack. Abstractions at the application layer let us pretend that networks read and write whole messages as smooth streams of bytes. Generally this is a good thing. But knowing what's going underneath is crucial to performance tuning and application design. The character of our users' internet connections is changing and some of the rules of thumb we rely on may need to be revised.

N Examples of Why Time Estimates are Always Wrong (Software Engineering Tips)
An undisclosed author put together a list of very experience driven reasons of why time estimates are always wrong. Some of these verge on the comical, but unfortunately all come from the real world.

Courier: First Details of Microsoft's Secret Tablet - Microsoft courier tablet - Gizmodo
Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Scanning Dead Salmon in fMRI Machine Highlights Risk of Red Herrings | Wired Science | Wired.com
Neuroscientist Craig Bennett purchased a whole Atlantic salmon, took it to a lab at Dartmouth, and put it into an fMRI machine used to study the brain. The beautiful fish was to be the lab?s test object as they worked out some new methods... And if I were a ridiculous researcher, I?d say, ?A dead salmon perceiving humans can tell their emotional state.??

The 5 Big Myths Of Social Media
The following is a selection of some of the myths that are heard most often, as well as some thoughts on why they are simply myths and what your brand can do to get past them.

Shane Atchison / ClickZ - Why You Should Get Started on Social Media
You know you need to be on the thing called Social Media. And you know many of your customers are already there. So how do you craft a social presence on the Web without coming across as shallow or trolling for marketing opportunities?

Social Media Expert: No Experience Necessary
The number of those calling themselves social media experts -and offering webinars, seminars, tips, pointers, programs, and sure-fire success- is staggering and perplexing. For companies looking for help in navigating the social media waters, it is hard to tell whose advice is best. As we've seen, the advice and strategies of those who are considered esteemed experts can be just as inadequate as the disesteemed novices.

[worrydream] -- Alligator Eggs!
A game, that represents the untyped lambda calculus. A hungry alligator is a lambda abstraction, an old alligator is parentheses, and eggs are variables. The eating rule corresponds to beta-reduction. The color rule corresponds to (over-cautious) alpha-conversion. The old age rule says that if a pair of parentheses contains a single term, the parentheses can be removed.

Random Thoughts: Cymothoa exigua: Alien!
This parasite attaches itself at the base of the tongue of the Spotted rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, with the claws on its front three pairs of legs, and extracts blood.

[komplexity.com] - A call for more scientific truth in product warning labels
As scientists and concerned citizens, we applaud the recent trend towards legislation which requires the prominent placing of warnings on products that present hazards to the general public. Yet we must also offer the cautionary thought that such warnings, however well-intentioned, merely scratch the surface of what is really necessary in this important area. This is especially true in light of the findings of 20th century physics.