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Category: General Tech
More on Simple Task Management
Michelle Pauli at the Guardian:
It is also a fine line between indecision and obsessing over tools for the fun of it. Cross that line and you get into what is known on the web as productivity porn. GTD is big online, with entire forums devoted to the minutiae of how to implement it, from the right kind of notebook (Moleskines are popular), to the best way to tweak Googlemail to make it more GTD-friendly. Is this merely procrastinating about productivity? Merlin Mann, creator of productivity blog 43Folders, and author of Inbox Zero, believes so.
AOL Installs 50TB of SSD
Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian:
When it came to managing most of AOL’s 6 petabytes of data, a Fibre Channel SAN sufficed. But for its most critical relational database, AOL found that the SAN was too constrained and caused its IT shop to fail to live up to its service level agreements with business units more than 50% of the time.
After investigating what may have been causing I/O bottlenecks, AOL found the problem was back-end storage. To fix the problem, AOL decided to build a 50TB storage-area network (SAN) from solid-state technology.
The Physics of Canabalt
Adam Saltsman on Canabalt’s physics:
Like we talked about earlier, the screen is 480 pixels wide by 160 pixels tall. The fastest possible speed for the player is 800 pixels per second, which in game scale translates to something like 80 meters per second, or 286 kilometers per hour! That’s pretty fast. But with a 480 pixel wide view, with the player on the extreme left, the player still has more than half a second (480/800) to react to whatever the game throws at them. This is a pretty good window, the limits of human reflexes for unexpected events is somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.3 seconds I think? According to hardcore Street Fighter players anyways. So even at it’s most intense, Canabalt is, technically, playable by humans.
Internet Explorer Still Sucks at CSS
Robert Biggs at CSS3 Wizardry:
Microsoft has been bombarding the media with claims about how much better IE9 is than all the other browsers, more HTML5 and CSS3 compliant than any other browser that ever existing and ever will. It’s the only browser that passes all the tests they made up. And, Microsoft has finally implemented the CSS3 selectors that were implemented by other browsers back in, what? 2003? Because Microsoft has updated IE to support CSS3 selectors and rounded corners, they want us to believe that somehow IE9 magically supports the whole slew of CSS3 visual styling. I’m afraid it doesn’t. As a matter of fact, IE9′s support for CSS3 visual styling is so poor that the results are shocking. Firefox, Chrome and Safari can render graphically rich interfaces using the sophisticated features of CSS3. IE9 does, well, rounded corners. That’s why I’m saying: IE9 is the IE6 of CSS3. Repeat that a few times until it sinks in because if you do Web development, you’re going to have to deal with it.
‘The Simplenote of Productivity Apps’
Speaking of Mac Stories… Federico Viticci:
Maybe you don’t need OmniFocus, and you don’t need Things. You don’t care about whatever David Allen has to say and seriously – the Emergent Task Planner? You just want to enter tasks and have them always available, right? I got you. You’re that kind of user who don’t care about features and UX innovations as long as what needs to be accomplished during the day is driven by a simple software that doesn’t get in the way and doesn’t require you to read a manual.
That Text on the Instapaper Icon
I love this attention to detail, and I love the article that text comes from even more.
Notational Velocity Fork Gets Loads of Goodies
Jailbreak Drama
Earlier today, a beta version of an iOS 4.1 jailbreak was released, just before the official iPhone Dev Team release was due. While a little unusual to see an exploit by another group so close to an announced release, it seems that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than what’s on the surface.
According to iPhone Dev Team member Joshua Hill, Geohot’s new Limera1n jailbreak uses an ill-advised, unstable exploit to get into iOS. By showcasing an exploit other than the iPhone Dev Team’s exploit, Geohot is giving Apple two bugs to squash, not just one, making future jailbreaks more difficult.
‘Hipstamatic Addicts’
Because the iPhone allows all of us to be amazing photographers now. And something needs to happen about that.
This feeling has been eating away at me for some time now because I feel like a cheat when I shoot something amazing with my phone. Take my last two shots, which I’m very proud of. They cause me a lot of self loathing. Look at how amazing my photo of the Urban Lights sculpture at LACMA is. It’s a total lie. I understand framing, I understand the rule of thirds. I don’t understand how to work with light, especially not dusk, which was when this photo was taken. My Photoshop skills are rudimentary. Yet I created an Amazing Photograph because my phone has Lo-Mob on it. Fuck you, me.
Xmarks Back from the Brink?
Thank you Xmarks users. You told the world it was simply unacceptable for our service to shut down and it worked. Thanks to your passion, Xmarks now has multiple offers from companies ready and willing to take over the service and keep making browser sync better and better!
This is not a signed, sealed done deal yet. But with multiple offers on the table we’re pretty confident that Xmarks will continue on with no service interruption. Our style of transparent blog updates has worked so well in this process we want to continue that approach and share this news with you. Some may accuse us of masterminding this whole process; I wish we were that clever! Instead we give the credit to our user base, who spoke up in a way that caught the attention of bloggers and journalists around the world and, in turn, generated new options for the service to live on.
Mobile Web Apps in a Multi-Platform World
Way back in the dark ages before the App Store, the only way to add functionality to an iPhone was through Safari. In iPhone OS update 1.1.3, Apple added webclips, an easy way to launch into a web app from the iPhone’s homepage. While these were not full-featured apps, it wasn’t a bad compromise. While they didn’t offer much in terms of integration 1 with the rest of the OS, they did allow users to more easily pop in and out of websites designed specifically for iPhone use. Twitter clients abounded, as did to-do apps and news apps.