Brent Sordyl’s Blog

Your mobile phone or navigation device alerts you as you approach police speed traps.

Forrester issued a report that estimated, on average, 78 percent of Twitter’s audience is male, 31 years old and draws an annual income of $78,000.

This solution works with all existing SWF content, across all versions of the SWF file format.

By using Scalr, you can create a server farm that uses prebuilt AMIs for load balancing, web servers, and databases. You also can customize a generic AMI, which you can use to host your actual application.

Twitter needs to spend considerable cash on stabilizing the site and making sure that it’ll survive when people want to Tweet back and forth during a Steve Jobs keynote and handle the stress during daily use

Google will acheive very little with their new indexing algorithms, and they must know so, I cannot belive that the Google engineers are not aware of these issues. It’s also surprising how few in the Flash blogosphere that are aware of the problems.

Shneiderman’s “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design” are a guide to good interaction design.

Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. As nebulous as cloud computing seems, the data still resides on servers around the world, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws.

The Thrift framework enables applications and components to speak with each other no matter what language they are in. Currently Thrift supports C++, Java, Python, Ruby and PHP but may potentially expand to other languages as well.

Apache announced this week the first release of Apache Sling, an open-source Web framework intended to make Java development fun again. An embedded Apache Felix OSGi framework provide a dynamic runtime environment.

IBM is about to give its Rational software development platform a social networking injection. The company’s new hub for collaborative development, Rational Team Concert, is due by the end of this month.

This means that it is now possible for Flex/Flash apps to communicate with RabbitMQ using the ActionScript 3 STOMP client. The following is a simple demonstration

We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Xerox have created a driver which plugs straight into Windows, and searches for printers close to your physical location. For the life of me, I can’t work out how it does it, but it does it well.

CacheFly’s Global Network delivers your content ensuring that your website, streaming media and downloads exceed expectations.

The Panther Express Content Delivery Network (CDN) is rapid, reliable and affordable. Our proprietary technology and extensive experience guarantee that your customers worldwide get the content they want, rapidly and reliably.

World Class Content Delivery Network (CDN)
EdgeCast’s superior, patent-pending technology and global footprint provides a world-class network that outperforms other leading CDNs.

One of the first things Pedro and I have been working on here at
Heroku is getting the API to work better with Windows, and provide
the same seamless experience you’re used to from Unix/Linux/OS X. We have a new & improved client gem available

Chicago real estate consumers can buy or sell homes using Redfin’s online service and local agents. Redfin offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee and an average commission refund of $10,000.

“We were amazed the domain name was still free and snapped it up for Comrie, who is a big fan of the Narnia books,” The people from CS Lewis missed it, and now they want it. They are trying to bully us into handing over our little boy’s present.

Web utility del.icio.us to Firefox merges your bookmarks from social bookmarking web site del.icio.us—tags and all—with your existing Firefox 3 bookmarks.

Unlimited GlassFish and MySQL pricing starts at $65,000* for an unlimited number of servers across your entire organization.

so an Instant Messaging interface was designed to send a instruction to a robot, and it’s relatively simple to get setup.

Reader Chris Burke painted a useful and good-looking magnetic whiteboard in his office—cleverly, in the shape of a speech bubble.

Pseudo Programs, an Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.

VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to buy semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company.

The GigaSpaces XAP (eXtreme Application Platform) is now available as an Amazon EC2 AMI

Watch movies, music and photos on TV

Before you can toss out the textbook and replace it with technology tools, you’ll need to understand how your students — whatever their age — respond to and work with technology.

S3 accepts uploads via specially-crafted and pre-authorized HTML POST forms. You can include these forms in any web page to allow your web site visitors to send you files using nothing more than a standard web browser.

a new iPhone Location-Based Social Network which will be launching in Summer ‘08.

ActionScript 3 Workshop Slides

SubdomainFu aims to provide a simple, generic toolset for dealing with subdomains in Rails applications. SubdomainFu simply provides a foundation upon which any subdomain-keyed system can easily be built.

MySQL instances range from 200 to 300 gigabytes. In addition to Squid, Wikipedia uses Memcached and the Linux Virtual Server load balancer. Wikipedia also uses database sharding to set up master-slave relationships between databases.

“The collapse of the record business has been good for us, if anything. It’s leveled the playing field in a way where we can keep slugging it out and finding our fans,” he said while toweling himself off after the set.

Learn about the re-launch of Major League Baseball’s website on Silverlight. With the website’s back-end written in Java and much of the user interface built with JSP, MLB.com is not your typical candidate for adopting Microsoft.

At Target stores, you’ll be able to see the Pulse smartpen first hand. The Pulse smartpen, dot paper, and accessories will be available in the Electronics department at Target stores nationwide and through Target.com beginning July 13.

Ruby on Rails scales, LinkedIn has been quietly running a RoR application on Facebook that is beating down around 1 billion page view per month.

Palo Alto is home to about 60 startups, including Facebook but more importantly, MC Hammer’s DanceJam.

For Eee PC users, installing new applications is one of the confusing things they have to do. What makes it worse is that Easy Mode, even after a successful installation, doesn’t provide easy access to the installed application.

Perhaps as a result, traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online.

There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here.

How to Man in the Middle: There are simply far too many ways to act as a man in the middle to a web browser. These include maskerading as any access point requested by a system or simply an ISP attempting to monetize the network.

An open platform for microblogging and broadcasting with followers has clearly taken hold. Twitter’s twist on messaging will go through an evolution that eventually leads to a common standard and stable infrastructure.

You write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite’s specialized database. The data can then be visualized through graphite’s web interfaces.

The scheme would provide low-cost mini-laptops to children, allowing them to log on to a school network to do their homework, as well as letting parents track their child’s academic progress as the government works towards online reporting systems.

* #10 - Not Invented Here Syndrome
* #7 - Incorrect Granularity of Services
* #6 - SOA does not solve complexity automatically
* #5 - Big Design Upfront
* #4 - Incorrectly applied Canonical Data Model

MySQL 6.0.5-alpha, a new version of the MySQL database system including the Falcon transactional storage engine, has been released. The main page for MySQL 6.0 release is at: http://www.mysql.com/mysql60/

It consists of a bytecode postprocessor (a “weaver”), a run time library with buffered mailboxes and a user-level scheduler and a type system that puts certain constraints on pointer aliasing within messages to ensure interference-freedom between thre

Start listening to the music you like, Jogli has it all
More than 12 million albums, More than half billion songs

Marketing has five elements:
Data
Stories
Products (services)
Interactions
Connection

JavaScript library for generating sparklines in the canvas element.

What’s Snackr? It’s an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.

Open standard based user authentication protocol oAuth has now been implemented across all Google Data APIs, quickly offering this young standard for easy mashups more market validation than it’s ever had before.

“The question is, is it about selling your soul? You can’t leave,” referring to Google’s App Engine and cloud-computing platform. “We should give people real assurances that the cloud is a good place to be.”

So how does it work? You log in to Zappos, order your shoes, and a signal is sent via Wi-Fi to the orange bots. Once the message is received, a pod will automatically whip around the warehouse, navigate to the correct pod, pick up your order

Hulu has quickly become the #9 most popular video site, while at times selling out ad inventory at stratospheric rates — $60 to $70 CPMs (cost per thousand viewers).

Pricing before Product - Plan Distribution First:
Is your pricing scalable? Many companies will sell direct-to-consumer by necessity in early stages, only to realize that their margins can’t accommodate resellers and distributors when they come knocking

REST is a way of interacting with resources on the web via a plain ol’ URL. It stands for REpresentational State Transfer, a description that’s far more confusing than what REST actually is.

This article briefly explains how to configure OpenSSH (version 4 or higher) to share connections to the same host (for faster connecting), as well as some of the problems (with workarounds) you may encounter using shared connections.

StringSearch provides implementations of the Boyer-Moore and the Shift-Or (bit-parallel) algorithms. These algorithms are easily five to ten times faster than the naïve implementation found in java.lang.String.

here are 35 different ways you can still catch your favorite shows and web videos without paying for cable or satellite TV

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts

These charts display real-time health status and the last twenty four hours of health history for key Amazon Web Services. Click a Service in the left panel for detailed service health status, metrics, and more history. More information on CloudStatus.

Ten principles that contribute to a Googley user experience

The presence of a continuous build system plays a key role in the construction phase of agile software development. The continuous build system enforces test driven approach and facilitates rapid application development.

If you run an email service and wish to resolve OpenIDs on behalf of your members, we have designed Emailtoid to always defer to email providers first, and then to fallback to our local resolution service if the email provider does not support email-to-

To watch it in motion is confusing. How, you ask yourself, can so many packages make their way through such a complex system without countless mistakes and without needing to slow the belts down to switch the boxes or envelopes from one belt to another.

sell your old cell or ipod

Tata has opened a new office near Cincinnati that is expected to create up to 1,000 jobs.

Ruby and Rails books, two years later (photo)

RightScale, which specializes in cloud computing management for the Amazon Web Services platform today announced support for MySQL Enterprise.

openSIS enables the tracking of numerous student demographic attributes in a permanent record and across enrollments. Use our custom categories and fields that allow you to easily create any number of custom fields to capture your specific data needs.

The challenge in explaining cloud computing is that there is more than one answer to the what is it question

reQall* is the best memory tool to integrate your memory with your life, putting more of the things you need to know and remember into one place. Wherever life takes you, reQall is there. iPhone supported

Nokia have today announced that they will be acquiring the remaining 52% of Symbian they don’t own and will be releasing the complete Symbian platform under the Eclipse open source license

CallLogger automatically logs all of your calls to the BlackBerry calendar with the call number and length. It also adds the notes you take during the call to the calendar notes field.

This website hosts an online utility named “hunter” that uses an item’s UPC or ISBN to search for the minimum price as listed on various websites.

Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.

the social decision-making tool to help research and make decisions online!

Here’s what is new at Toluu:

* View the most popular posts from a blog
* Who else has subscribed to the blog within the Toluu world
* What other blogs those same subscribers have subscribed to recently

Episode 4: Scaling Large Web Sites with Joe Stump, Lead Architect at DIGG : Deep Fried Bytes Technology Podcast

Google, Mowser and Skweezer are mobile transcoders that take any URL you throw at it and strip away the graphics for faster browsing. I prefer to use Google’s version since it also gives me the option to browse the feed.

Dedicated RSS Feed Search Engine
Search 1.7 million RSS feeds
The most comprehensive RSS feed search on the web

Tweetmarks can keep track of all the links you share in Twitter, or just the ones you retweet or categorize. Then when you’re looking for a link, just come to Tweetmarks and you’ll be sure to find it in an instant! using del.icio.us to organize links

OpenCarPrice.com lets consumers peek into critical sales data that previously has only been available to car dealers.

I see them as general buffer overflow defects, signed integer problems, and path traversal problems. The real defect is that you can hand a simple string to a Rails application and it’ll run your Ruby. I guess we’ll find out after the Ruby guys kill m

TimesPeople is a social network for Times readers. But it’s not a social network like Facebook or MySpace — you won’t have Times friends, and it won’t get you Times dates. Instead, you’ll assemble a network of Times readers.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.

In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail

But the potential of the system is obvious - a future where the computing experience is less monitor/keyboard/mouse and more like an architect’s desk, with user input primarily directly on the screen and via voice commands

Famous MySQL expert Peter Zaitsev talks about a selected aspect of MySQL performance optimization. Peter is well known through his Mysql Performance Blog. The talk center around Scaling Out and Query Optimization.

I compared using Amazon S3 as a CDN to other low cost alternatives. What was clear was that S3 performed badly when compared to the true CDNs. Not such a surprising outcome; S3 was not designed to be a CDN.

When you really commit yourself to breaking the problem down into manageable pieces, it does create more testable and reusable code. I already knew that, but when you starting using IoC, it really starts to drive that point across.

The “Adobe AIR Administrators Guide” provides details on how to deploy Adobe AIR in enterprises and tuning of other runtime settings.

Hudson is an open source CI server that is by far the easiest one to configure. Second to ease of use is Hudson’s impressive plug-in framework, which makes it easy to add features.

shows amazon books on a shelf