randomwalks/dj

"The latest version supports an event driven plugin architecture, which opens up a world of decentralized publishing possibilities, breaking away from the traditionally closed route of the CMS. The relationship between this and the bio cellular themes may not be immediately obvious, but it's important."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 6, 2006 10:57 PM

This map (via gmapsmania) is a great example of mashup journalism. It's not a tool, it's a story about an issue that's important to a community.

Originally posted by Rick Burnes from Mashalist, on March 6, 2006 10:56 PM

Originally from Off the Hoof, on March 6, 2006 10:56 PM

Publish and Prosper | Blogging for Your Business

DL Byron, one of the co-founders of the Blog Business Summit, has used this site as an example at the Summit.

Now, he and his co-organizers are wrapping up a book for Peachpit Press laying out what they've learned building blogs with and for Boeing, Clip-n-Seal, and Connexion, and from hosting their conferences.

If you're looking for more hands-on advice on starting and running a business blog, there's a pre-publication deal where you can get the book for 35% off with free shipping by ordering through the web and using the promotion code: PP-234P-LKMS.

Originally from Tour de France 2006, on March 6, 2006 07:04 PM

Originally from gimme! coffee, on March 6, 2006 06:03 PM

Courtesy of Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York
Detail of "PTG.32 APUS," or "Painting No. 32, Art Project United States," a collective "portrait" of 24 military personnel in Iraq.

via NYTimes:
Close Reading
Military Maneuvers With Computer and Color
By HILARIE M. SHEETS
Published: March 5, 2006

From the day when Eric Chan and Heather Schatz switched seats in a figure drawing class as undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, and finished each others' compositions, they have engaged in a back and forth that underpins all of their art. Producing work under the name ChanSchatz since graduating in 1990, the two artists (who are husband and wife) have since expanded their collaboration to include an ever-widening pool of guests as they explore how different ideas and groups of people intersect in contemporary life.

ChanSchatz invites friends, artists, students, local merchants and, most recently, members of the American military based in Iraq, to choose from colors, text phrases and forms culled from the artists' vast drawing archive. Their selections become the springboard for large-scale silk-screen works that are abstract yet still reflect the participants.

Next weekend, "PTG.32 APUS" (short for "Painting No. 32, Art Project United States"), a collective "portrait" of 24 military men and women, from an Army private to a Marine Corps captain, goes on view in "Here and There," an exhibition of ChanSchatz's work at Massimo Audiello in Chelsea.

The starting point for the artists was a realization that while the troops' presence in Iraq was woven into daily American culture, they did not personally know any of the soldiers. The artists connected with military personnel through groups like the Freedom Calls, a foundation that keeps members of the military in touch with family through communication stations in Iraq.

Using an interactive Web page featuring 12 phrases, 28 color combinations and 32 motifs by the artists that they refer to as characters, participants selected elements they liked. To represent each individual, ChanSchatz used that person's chosen motif and colors; the selected phrase of text governed how each element acted within the work. The artists were struck by how receptive the troops were to collaborating, given that the New York art world could seem as distant to them as the war seemed to the artists.

More than half the troops chose the phrase "globally linked," which directed how ChanSchatz organized a 14-foot-long panoramic composition. The work reads as a vista, with a push between the two dark areas at either end and a bright, explosive expanse in between. It's hard to tell which terrain is getting the upper hand. [read on...]

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on March 6, 2006 06:03 PM

If you were listening to our show on Saturday night you heard us break what I'm calling the KRSgate story, as reports came into our chatroom about KRS One having some sort of meltdown at Stanford University, threatening to physically assault Adisa Banjoko and just generally acting a fool and turning everyone in the room against him. I held back...

Originally posted by jsmooth995 from hiphopmusic.com, on March 6, 2006 06:02 PM

"We also believe that based on this photo alone, the Nintendo remote control games console will be A HUGE SUCCESS WITH TILDA SWINTON."

Originally posted by markpasc from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 01:42 PM

Originally posted by sudama from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 01:42 PM

Nice guide to setting up a good Ubuntu desktop.

Originally posted by finn from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 01:42 PM

A look into the future of adidas sneaker technology. Check out the wishbone suspension in a shoe.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 6, 2006 01:42 PM

Along with last night's Academy Awards comes a lot of big parties attended by all kinds of celebrities with varying cultural relevance, surgical enhancement, and visible indicators of drug abuse. See if you can guess who this tragic-looking figure arriving...

Originally posted by Amy from Amy's Robot, on March 6, 2006 12:34 PM

I bet a lot of your are thinking about building your own web app. But how do you get started if you have no idea what it’s going to cost you? How can you budget for the unknown?

I recently did a talk at The Future of Web Apps in London (one of our Carson Workshops events), focusing specifically on this issue. The feedback I received was very positive, so I’ve decided to share it with you all.

You can also listen to the MP3 and grab the notes, but for those of you who don’t have time to listen to the 45 minute talk, I’m going to summarise here.

What does it actually cost?

When we built DropSend, it was our first enterprise level web app and I had no way to predict how much it would cost to build. Frustratingly, no one would share their figures with me either. So we had to learn the hard way. Yuck.

In order to help you avoid this pain, I’m going to walk you through, step-by-step, the costs involved in building an enterprise web app, on a budget. I’m going to be 100% honest about what we spent so you’ll have a good idea of what kind of budget you’ll need to set.

What’s the big deal?

Why is it only recently that small companies (Carson Systems is only two full time employees and a set of 3 part-time freelancers) are able to build large scale web apps? Here’s why:

1. Broadband is widespread so your potential audience is larger
2. Average people are comfortable with web apps (Gmail, Online banking, etc)
3. Hardware is dirt cheap
4. Open source platforms are virtually free

Definition of the terms

As I’m talking about "Building enterprise web apps on a budget", I need to define two things:

1. "Enterprise" - This is debatable, but I’d define it as a mass market product for 1,000+ users
2. "On a budget" - Under £30,000

I’ve heard some comments about my £30K figure not being "on a budget". Please keep in mind that this article is aimed at small companies, not freelancers. Most small companies will be able to allocate £30K, over a period of time. It may be possible to bring an enterprise web app to market for less than this, but it will probably be lacking in quality.

DropSend - Enterprise and on a budget

I’d better know what I’m talking about, if I’m offering advice, right?! Well, all of this advice is based on us building DropSend, a truly enterprise level web app that was built on a budget: Here’s a bit about it:

• Used for sending and storing large files that you can’t email
• 13,083 worldwide users (March 6, 2006) and growing
• 6 servers at 365 Main
• Desktop apps which use our API
• Built using PHP, AJAX, MySQL and Linux

The most important thing

Before you get started, the most important thing is to make sure your idea is financially viable. How can you do this?

1. Use common sense. Would you actually get out your credit card and pay for it?
2. Be cautious about your projections and then cut by a further 45%. Are you still in business?
3. Don’t rely on being acquired. It’s unwise to base your financial future on something you have zero control over. (In other words, it’s stupid.)

What we actually spent

• Branding and UI design: £5,000 - We worked with Ryan Shelton on this. He’s amazing.
  
• Development: £8,500 - We worked with Plum Digital Media, who are crazy talented developers.
  
• Mac and PC desktop apps: £2,750
  
• XHTML and CSS: £1,600
  
• Misc hardware: £500
  
• Hosting and maintenance: £900 per month - We work with BitPusher for all of our hardware infrastructure and maintenance. I can’t recommend them enough. They helped us define the hardware architecture, procure the boxes, install, and set everything up. Now that we’re up and running, they do all our hardware maintenance.
  
• Legal fees: £2,630
  
• Accounting: £500
  
• Linux specialist to setup the dev box: £500
  
• Misc: £1,950
  
• Trademark: £250
  
• Merchant Account: £200
  
• Payment Processor: £500 - We use Secure Trading - they’re fab!
  
• Total: £25,780 (Approx $45,000 USD)

Yikes. £25,780?

If you’re a small company and £26K sounds like a lot of money, don’t despair. You will be able to spread these costs out over many months. If you don’t have that kind of cash right now, don’t feel bad. It took us almost a year to get the financial stability and save the cash for DropSend.

How to build your team on a budget

One of the most expensive parts to building a web app is the team. Here are some of our tips for keeping your costs down:

1. Don’t go for rock stars - go for quiet talent. They’re cheaper, more fun to work with, and they’ll actually listen to you.
2. If someone is too expensive, but you really want to work with them, offer them 2 - 5% of the product equity in exchange for a cheaper price.
3. Ask your friends to recommend people they trust. If you pick a bad apple, it will cost you time and money.
4. Outsource. We tried India initially, and it proved to be a disaster. I think this was because I had never managed a project long-distance before. If you already feel comfortable with this, it can save you tons of money.

Scalability on a budget

One of the trickiest parts of building an enterprise web app on a budget, is scaling. How can you start with a little bit of hardware/capacity/CPU/backup and scale infinitely?

Here’s what I’d recommend: Don’t start worrying about that until you have to. If you throw a bunch of money at the problem and your app fails, you might as well have burned the cash at the race track.

For DropSend, we almost bought a bunch of IBM Blades and hooked them up to SAN storage. I’m SO glad we didn’t go this route.

So here are three basic tips regarding scalability on a budget:

1. Buy just enough hardware to launch
2. Build your app so it easily scales. DropSend is a great example of this. When we need more diskspace, we just add a line to the config file, plug in another box, re-deploy, and BAM, we’ve got more diskspace.
3. Plan for scaling, but don’t obsess

Next time …

In Part 2 of this article, I’ll be covering:

1. Tips for staying on budget
2. The importance of pessimism
3. Budgets for legal costs
4. How to save money with free tools
5. How to do marketing for free
6. Why venture capital doesn’t usually make sense for web apps

Thanks for reading. I hope we’ve saved you some of the pain and suffering we went through when we built DropSend. On a side note, I’ve just finished 37signals new book Getting Real, and it’s got some more excellent ideas on how to build on a budget.

As always, feel free to agree or disagree below. See you next time!

Originally from Signal vs. Noise, on March 6, 2006 12:34 PM

From one of our favorite websites, Fecal Face, comes a link to METABIOTICS which showcases the art of Alexandre Orion in Brazil. The most interesting thing is that his art is no t the stencils themselves, but rather the photographs that he shoots of people as they pass them by. Good stuff indeed

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 6, 2006 10:33 AM

Mike, Erika and I will be attending SXSWi this year. If you'd like to have a beer with us in Austin, e-mail me your mailing address and we'll send you one of our wooden nickels, good for one free beer.

E-mail addresses to katie[at]muledesign[dot]com.

Originally from Off the Hoof, on March 6, 2006 10:31 AM

Digits, cities, originally uploaded by Ti.mo.

Gave my talk this morning at Lift06. Felt horrible from the stage - rushed through interesting stuff and dwelt on the wrong things. Luckily people still wanted to talk afterwards and got a lot of what I was trying to say about play and mobility.

Whether they thought it was right is another thing of course.

Personal highlight was being heckled by Bruce Sterling, after forgetting Olafur Eliasson’s name.

Timo took a picture a slide that I put in at the last minute, which looking back on it, basically sums up and communicates everything I’m interested in, or ever been interested in or think is important at the moment - my own personal aleph.

So I guess I’m done!

Originally posted by Matt from Blackbeltjones/Work, on March 6, 2006 10:28 AM

click here and here for enoweb
;

Originally from Happy Famous Artists , on March 6, 2006 10:27 AM

Here's a quick transcript of the meeting with my new boss.

Me: Great to meet you. Hey, what'd you do before this Google thing came along?

Her, paraphrased: Just some work on various projects...

• (item 1)
• (item 2)
• I invented servlets...
• (item 3)

Me: Cool, that's- Holy- Snuh?

Here's a short (and woefully incomplete) list of things that co-workers have invented or had a major hand in inventing outside of their Google work:

• Python
• Java Collections API
• Servlets
• awk
• lex
• GIMP
• UTF-8
• Plan 9
• Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• RDF and RSS (really!)
• Open Directory Project
• Macintosh Operating System
• TCP/IP

this one's my favorite:

• The Internet

There's more at the papers written by Googlers page.

Originally from massless, on March 6, 2006 10:27 AM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 10:25 AM

Two passages on math from The Nothing That Is, by Robert Kaplan. First, on the yearning for generalization: [W]e always...

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on March 6, 2006 10:12 AM

"He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. . ." [Wikipedia, in reference...

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on March 6, 2006 10:12 AM

The most realistic re-rendering of Google Earth city/buildings data yet comes from Zetterstrom, posted to the SourceForge forums:

this is very very cool; I am hoping that we get some more really nice looking cityscape stuff. All these nice re-renderings only give more more incentive to add texture-capture to OGLE so that the same can be done for video game characters.

Originally from OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs, on March 6, 2006 10:11 AM

finally, data visualization for the masses: 'clear & easy-to-read' GDA (Guideline Daily Amount) bar charts that help people estimate the approximate amount of calories & key nutrients required for a balanced diet, & show how much any McDonald's menu item or (super-sized) meal contributes to that.
[mcdonaldsmenu.info]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, on March 6, 2006 10:10 AM

any article that mentions "Data Analysis Cosby" is a good one  

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on March 6, 2006 10:10 AM

I've been studying PowerPoint; I've shared some of my notes here before. Now from Howard, links to a new kind of presentation:

Integrated Flickr slideshows, Creative Commons remixes of images found on Flickr, with a slideshow or outline that makes the topic accessible to the web audience. Considering that many people at most technology conferences attend lectures with laptops in their laps, if you're not making a big play for a show-stopping handwaver of a lecture, you might as well understand the audience will be be attending the present and future of your published outline online.

Here's a good sample Online Outline, which was turned into a Flickr Slideshow. Increasing outreach - appropriate for their topic "Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools."

Saturday March 11 I'm giving a talk at South by Southwest; part of their "Screenburn" celebration of video games. More details to follow - now I will continue work on my slides.

Originally from just in teractive, on March 6, 2006 10:10 AM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 10:09 AM

Here are the slides for today’s Ajax Tutorial at ETech. The demos are available in a separate tarball.

I’ll publish my slides for the Comet talk sometime on Wed.

Originally posted by alex from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency, on March 6, 2006 10:07 AM

Don't blame the keeper for missing a spinning soccer ball, or a baseball hitter missing a swerving pitch - our brains just can't deal with them.

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 6, 2006 10:02 AM

An experimental container aboard the disintegrating shuttle endured temperatures in excess of 175°C, yet one type of bacteria thrived

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 6, 2006 10:01 AM

This is an unbelievably exhaustive list. Most of the villains are surprisingly enough, either atheists or agnostics.

The emphasis of this page is on fictional characters who originated as comic book characters. Of course real-life people such as Pope John Paul II, St. Francis of Assisi, and Mother Teresa have been depicted in comic books (Marvel published one-shot comics about these prominent Catholics), but such people are not listed here. This page focuses on fictional comic book characters -- mostly from Marvel and DC -- who are adherents of real-world (not purely fictional) religions.

We want this page to be as accurate as possible, backed up by objective, published information and not based on conjecture. We do not want this listing to be slanted toward any particular denominational or religious viewpoint. It is intended to accurately report the composition of comic book character religiosity.

(via Linkfilter)

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on March 6, 2006 09:58 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 09:53 AM

T-Mobile USA has announced a new offer for its cell phone subscribers - free WiFi access at T-Mobile hotspots on weekends. [via http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=2137&source=HOME\ "While T-Mobile lists this offer as being for a limited time only, the company has not announced an end date for free WiFi weekends. ... T-Mobile USA has over 6500 WiFi hotspots across the nation, including many located at places such as Starbucks coffeehouse, Borders Books, and FedEx Kinko's office centers."

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 6, 2006 09:46 AM

Professional authors are turning out strategy guides for video games that can sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 6, 2006 09:44 AM

A new technology called audio spotlight functions a little like a flashlight; only those in its "sound envelope" hear its message.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 6, 2006 09:44 AM

Whitney Biennial 2006, through May 28 in NYC. NY Times review. Momus describes his first day as a performance artist at the Biennial.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 6, 2006 09:36 AM

What to learn how to be a doctor? Check out these surgery videos on Google Video.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 6, 2006 09:36 AM

Real Estate special at the NYtimes Sunday Magazine. Après Le Deluge, Moi. Club Med for the $$$ set Mortgage-Interest Deduction?...

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 6, 2006 09:35 AM

The pied-à-terre, once the province of moguls, now lures middle-aged suburbanites to New York.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 6, 2006 09:34 AM

In a stunning twist, the motion picture academy turned its back on "Brokeback Mountain," awarding the Oscar for best picture to "Crash."

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 6, 2006 09:33 AM