Google Adds “Unicorns Horns” to Their Calculator
Written by henshaw | Posted on December 18th, 2007
Collin Winter, an old Sitening employee and now Google engineer, alerted me to how excruciatingly cute they are in Googleville. Apparently, in a night of programming madness, they added the ability to include number of horns on a unicorn into any equation. Don’t believe me? See for yourself. Sample Equation
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) Announces Limited Beta for New Database Service – SimpleDB
Written by Scott Holdren | Posted on December 14th, 2007
The Amazon Web Services team just announced SimpleDB – the long anticipated database service to complement S3, EC2, and SQS. Now there will be an alternative to managing your own SQL cluster within EC2. Here’s what they had to say: Dear AWS Developers, This is a short note to let a subset of our most …
Matt Cutts Offers Insight Into Site Building
Written by Lee Smith-Bryan | Posted on December 10th, 2007
Michael Dorausch transcribed the audio from a video recorded at PubCon 2007 that featured Matt Cutts discussing the best methods for building a website. In the dialogue between Matt and Guy Kawasaki, Matt suggested his three step process for creating a really good site and getting a ton of traffic. Matt’s 3-Step-Process Make a Compelling …
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Gmail and IMAP – Why You Should Care
Written by Scott Holdren | Posted on October 24th, 2007
IMAP and POP are both popular methods for retrieving email from a server so you can access it on your desktop. Both protocols date back to the 1980′s, and both are supported by most desktop email applications. Unfortunately, unless you manage your own mail server, IMAP support on the server has been a little harder …
Syncing Gmail Actions With IMAP
Written by henshaw | Posted on October 23rd, 2007
Now that Gmail supports IMAP, a question that many avid Gmail users will be asking is, “How do Gmail specific actions translate over to IMAP?” For example, Gmail was always thought to be incompatible with email systems like IMAP, because they used different features, like labels and stars. However, in reality, it ends up that …
Christmas Comes Early
Written by Jon Henshaw | Posted on October 23rd, 2007
Occasionally the stars align and our favorite tech companies grant wishes. Today was one of those days. Not only did Apple finally fix the Leopard dock (and by fix I mean make it not butt-ugly), but Google just dropped a Gmail bombshell – IMAP support. I’ve kept a fifty dollar bill handy for the last …
Flexiscale, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Nirvanix Comparison
Written by Scott Holdren | Posted on October 3rd, 2007
FlexiScale is a new UK based on-demand computing service, similar to Nirvanix and the EC2/S3/SQS components of Amazon Web Services. While they all provide basic computing and storage through a pay-as-you-go pricing model, each company has targeted their pricing and service offerings towards different users. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a complete set of very …
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Notes from OSCON 2007
Written by Scott Holdren | Posted on July 26th, 2007
Today was the first official day of the conference, though lots of folks came early for the tutorials on Monday and Tuesday. Everything I’ve attended has at least been mildly interesting, and in some cases truly inspiring. Here are some important ideas that I wrote down but haven’t quite digested: “Diagnosis has weak process.” – …
PHP Programming Contest
Written by Jon Henshaw | Posted on June 25th, 2007
Nick Halstead is running a PHP contest on his blog and offering a free copy of Zend Studio to the winner. It’s a wonderfully simple challenge that doesn’t require arcane PHP knowledge or experience with any particular framework. Instead, you’re forced to rely on your own problem solving skills. Entries will be judged based on …
Live Blogging with Amazon S3
Written by Scott Holdren | Posted on June 12th, 2007
Yesterday’s live blogging of the WWDC keynote was a big success. Within the span of about 2 hours we received 20k visitors. Tyler did a great job of posting text and photo updates as they happened, thanks to his Verizon Wireless V740 ExpressCard. Our main objective was to test the viability of using S3 as …