Nirmal Patel ported Readability to Python (source here). It powers his ridiculously sweet Hack et al, a full-content RSS view of articles pointed to by Hacker News. Yesterday, we got word from Keyvan Minoukadeh that he's ported Readability to PHP.

If anyone else has built their own flavor of Readability, be sure to let us know by emailing us or pinging us on Twitter at @arc90.

Joined Arc90 in: May 2006

Most people don't know that: I'm colorblind.

If some of Chris LoSacco's co-workers are still trying to figure out why he only keeps a stack of Starbucks napkins on his desk, he has a valid explanation.

"I like things to be minimal," he said. "In college, my desk was very organized; I only had a Post-it dispenser. My roommate would throw a single Post-it into the garbage just to get to me."

Keeping things simple is a running theme in Chris' work life, stemming back to his first encounter with Arc90. He first heard of Arc90 during his senior year at New York University. The Downingtown, PA native decided to attend the school's job fair, but he did his research first.

"I got the list of the companies that were going to be at the job fair," he recalled. "I went through the list to figure out who I wanted to talk to. Out of 100 companies, there were two that were remotely worth talking to."

After searching the Web for Arc90 and its founder, Chris discovered Information Objects, Rich Ziade's paper about interaction design and how software should model the real world. Chris realized that Arc90 was a company worth talking to.

"The things that I was interested in and what Arc90 is all about were exactly the same," he said.

At the job fair, Chris had the opportunity to talk with Rich and discussed Alan Cooper's Inmates Are Running the Asylum, a book that both respected. He left a lasting impression with the people he met.

"Chris was a full-blown technologist who was interested in design and usability," Rich recalled. "He didn't give his resume to everybody. He knew what he wanted to do and where he wanted to work. That's great advice for anybody looking for a job."

Chris was hired as an Interactive Designer in the spring of 2006. He wasn't confined to the role and used the flexibility within the company to contribute to various projects.

"I wasn't tasked to write code but I did," he said. "Everybody was doing everything and there was the opportunity to pitch in wherever you could help."

Chris and Rama Poola, another graduate of NYU's Computer Science program, started at Arc90 around the same time. The company had just relocated to its Third Avenue office and the new hires used the extra space to their advantage.

"There was the junk room with a white board," Chris recalled. "Rama and I would have an idea about something and we would IM each other 'Junk room?' and start sharing. A lot of good stuff came out of the impromptu sessions."

Technology had been part of Chris' life since childhood. He was raised around computers- his dad works for a company that builds software for nursing homes-and started tinkering with the Web at an early age.

"I was growing up just as the Internet was taking off," the 25-year-old said. "I remember dial-up connections and when Web pages were just text. I was making my own sites at 14 just to play with the technology."

But the Internet wasn't Chris' only passion. He attended NYU to focus on acting and majored in Drama. Once there, he realized he couldn't see himself leaving New York; during his junior year, Chris added Computer Science as a double major to secure his future in the city.

"I knew I wanted to stay in New York and I wanted to be able to pay for that," he said. "There was a strong possibility that I would become an actor and work hard but you can't pick and choose your work. I didn't want the 'I'll take anything' lifestyle."

After graduation, Chris acted in student films; he intended to keep movie shoots in his schedule until he realized that technology held an important role in his life.

"I was figuring I could do it on nights and weekends," he said. "When I became more involved at Arc90, it naturally became that this was more of my life."

Chris is the mastermind behind SVN Notifier, an Apple Dashboard widget for collaborative version control. He envisioned the tool for the Arc90 lab after finding flaws with other Subversion software.

"It's useful because it stays out of your way until it has something meaningful to say," Chris commented. "I wanted to be notified when other people working on the same stuff as me made a change to something. SVN Notifier seemed like an easy, unobtrusive way to do that."

In the fall of 2007, when he was 24-years-old, Chris was promoted to the partner position at Arc90. The title came with more responsibilities, but some things stayed the same.

"Everybody asked if I was going to get a new business card," he noted. "I still don't have one!"

The new role also changed his perspective about work and interactions at Arc90.

"There is a different approach of looking at it," Chris said. "It becomes a longer view, such as how does this fit into the picture of where we're going in a year or four years. I started to think about the things I was doing and the things I was enabling the people around me to do-how they were beneficial to the company and not just to me."

During his time at Arc90, particularly since becoming a partner, Chris has learned that discussion is an important problem-solving tool.

"Disagreement and being critical of ideas is a good thing," Chris said. "There are very few people who will try to force things down people's throats 'just because.' There is a mutual respect that just because you don't agree on something there can be a healthy process to come up with the best idea."

Arc90 is looking for you!

We're looking to hire a summer intern who goes beyond possessing the technical skills. At Arc90, we have a design-driven approach to development and a focus on prototyping first; we believe that software is always better when you can interact with it.

We also like to brainstorm. You should be prepared for meetings where you put on your thinking cap, imagine the user experience and then defend your viewpoint to others.

Your work load might include client or internal product work. We will always encourage your contributions to the Arc90 Lab.

The basics:

• The internship runs from the beginning of June until the end of August. We are also looking to fill this role for a long term.

• It's a paid internship-you can either save money for books for the Fall semester or contribute to your beer fund.

• You will have access to the fully-stocked kitchen where you can make as many peanut butter and banana sandwiches as your heart desires.

• We don't have a dress code. If you wear a suit, we will probably make fun of you.

• There is an eclectic mixture of people at Arc90. Some of your future co-workers are motorcycle enthusiasts, foodies, musicians, and video game developers. You can root for the Mets or the Yankees-somebody will be there to defend you.

If you're not won over yet, you can read about the experiences of a former Arc90 intern.

Now does this sound like the kind of place where you would want to work?

Send your resume and portfolio to contact@arc90.com.

Of course, one of the most popular uses of Twitter is to share a link to a Web page. To that end, we wanted a tool that provided a dead simple way to share a link out via Twitter while surfing the Web.

So we got to thinking: "Wouldn't it be cool to tweet a page in just a few clicks? Also, wouldn't it be cool to see what others are saying about the page on Twitter?" After the success of Readability, we figured we'd dust off our mad bookmarklet skillz (Firefox extensions are nice, but we wanted everybody to join the fun) and take a crack at coming up with something cool.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and you've got TBUZZ:

We've been using TBUZZ within Arc90 for a few days now and it's a lot of fun. We've found it's the easiest way to tweet about a link you've come across. It's also a really cool way to chat with others about the page you're staring at - through Twitter. It's sort of like dropping a comment thread onto every Web page in existence.

You can install TBUZZ in just a few seconds by visiting:

http://tbuzz.arc90.com

If you've got any feedback, thoughts (or glowing reviews) of TBUZZ, be sure to include them in the comments below.

My aversion to e-books aside, I've recently added a digital element to my reading. I'm nearly through Gettysburg - A Testing of Courage, and during the course of reading it have constructed a full mental image of the battle. The landscape and geography in and around Gettysburg, of course, is a major character in the narrative. After reading about Culp's and Cemetery Hills, Big and Little Round Top, I just had to see them. Some searching, viewing of maps and in particular a browsing around of the flickr tag "gettysburg" and I had some amazing 'real' images to supplement those of my mind's eye.

Have you been supplementing your reading, particularly of non-fiction, with the web? I'm not sure why it took me so long to bring these two [favorite] activities together, perhaps it's been my strong separation of analog and digital reading. I think I'll soften that stance a bit.

Note: the above image is of Little Round Top, one of the most important places in America's history. Thanks to Candice for giving me permission to use this image.

But in case you don't, here's a few choice quotes:

Paul Baran - inventor of packet switching (breaking up data into packets to reassemble on the other side):

I get credit for a lot of things I didn't do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know? Technology reaches a certain ripeness and the pieces are available and the need is there and the economics look good - it's going to get invented by somebody.

On the decision by the Government to give the building of the hardware Interface Message Processors to Bolt, Beranek & Newman:

In a congratulatory telegram to the company, Senator Edward M. Kennedy referred to I.M.P.'s as "interfaith" message processors.

Leonard Kleinrock - member of the ARPANET Team, on the Internet coming on-line:

September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn't even have a camera or a tape recorder or a written record of that event. I mean, who noticed? Nobody did. Nineteen sixty-nine was quite a year. Man on the moon. Woodstock. Mets won the World Series. Charles Manson starts killing these people here in Los Angeles. And the Internet was born. Well, the first four everybody knew about. Nobody knew about the Internet.

Vint Cerf - co-designers of the TCP protocol on the invention of @ to identify people on a network:

A guy named Ray Tomlinson, at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, figured out a way to cause a file to be transferred from one machine through the Net to another machine and left in a particular location for someone to pick up. He said, I need some symbol that separates the name of the recipient from the machine that the guy's files are on. And so he looked around for what symbols on the keyboard were not already in use, and found the "@" sign. It was a tremendous invention.

Marc Andreessen on creating the first browser:

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time, that was an original idea. When we were working on Mosaic during Christmas break between 1992 and 1993, I went out at like four in the morning to a 7-Eleven to get something to eat, and there was the first issue of Wired on the shelf. I bought it. In it there's all this science-fiction stuff. The Internet's not mentioned. Even in Wired.

Jeff Bezos on early Amazon:

When we launched, we launched with over a million titles. There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly.

...and so on - the Morris Worm, The Browser Wars, the first e-mail used in a legal case (Jon Poindexter in Iran Contra) - read it. This history is compelling and important.]]> http://blog.arc90.com/2009/05/history_lesson.php http://blog.arc90.com/2009/05/history_lesson.php Thoughts tim@arc90.com (Tim Meaney) Wed, 06 May 2009 09:42:23 -0500 Title: Developer

Joined Arc90 in: April 2008

Most people don't know that: I'm self-taught and didn't go to college.

In early 2008, Doug Burns was living and job hunting in Washington D.C. After seeing an Arc90 job posting on 37signals, he made his way to the company's site and encountered a familiar name. Developer Javier Julio had posted an announcement to the Arc90 blog for cfDrinks, an event organized by Adam Lehman, the ColdFusion Product Manager.  Lehman also happened to be one of Doug's former co-workers.

The blog post increased Doug's interest in Arc90 since it showed that the employees were adamant about incorporating technology into their personal lives.

"I read through the blog posts on the website and I could tell that the people at Arc90 were really passionate about technology," Doug said. "It goes beyond just a job; it's something they do for enjoyment. That's how I have always felt about it and I was excited about the opportunity to work with people who felt the same way."

A few months later, Doug, his wife Courtney and their dog, Sascha, packed up a U-Haul and drove it from Washington D.C.'s DuPont Circle to Brooklyn. Doug grew up in Washingtonville, NY and was excited to move closer to his roots.

"I've always wanted to live in New York City," Doug noted. "I lived up and down the East Coast and I love living in a city. New York is as big as you can get in the United States."

Doug's initial interest in computers sparked when he was still in high school and upgraded from the family's Commodore 64 to his own Mac LC III.

"In 1992, Macs weren't what they are today," Doug said. "I really loved the original Mac OS. When Apple decided to abandon it for NeXTSTEP, I have to admit I was a little worried. Obviously, my worries were completely unfounded since they took a great thing and made it much, much better."

Doug's formal introduction to the world of technology, however, came while he lived in Tampa.  He worked at a print shop and had the opportunity to expand his design skills.

"The Web was starting to get big and the company had a website," he recalled. "I started designing the site using PHP and built an E-commerce system."

The flexibility of the position allowed Doug to add to his skill sets.

"I transitioned that whole time, from design to development," he said. "I loved it because the problem solving aspect is addictive. There is always a thrill of seeing the thing you made."

Doug experienced the exhilaration firsthand while working on an automated engraving technique.

"The print shop made engraved pencils," he said. "They used to hire people to come in and type the names onto the pencils. It was amazing the first time I saw this machine, with its arm coming down to engrave the pencils. The code that I wrote was actually causing some physical action to happen."

On the other hand, the technological advances had some unanticipated side effects.

"When we automated the pencil engraving via the Web, 30 people lost their jobs," he recalled.

From the print shop in Tampa, Doug relocated to Washington, D.C. He worked at the U.S. Department of State for seven years as an internal consultant before starting his own business.  In 2007, Doug founded Travelworks Technologies, a Web travel reservation system which allowed users to build a trip while talking to an international reservation system. He created the prototype and also funded the project.

"Travelworks Technologies became too much; having to do everything was overwhelming," Doug said. "I was doing development, marketing, sales, and system's administration. I am a perfectionist so everything had to be perfect and there was no one to help me control myself."

He also found that running a company was lonely at times; he eventually closed Travelworks Technologies and returned to the job market.

"I missed talking to other people about work stuff," he said.

At Arc90, Doug has numerous outlets for conversations about programming languages or the latest social networking trends.

"I've never worked with people who are completely on the same wave length as I am but it's that way here," he said. "Anywhere else, I would be a superstar. At Arc90, everybody is a superstar and they understand what you're talking about. As far as quality and ideas, they are starting at a much higher level here, especially when people are collaborating."

One of Doug's most memorable experiences at Arc90 was watching Readability take off.

"After Rich's initial blog post, Readability was all over the Internet in a few hours and the buzz continued for weeks," Doug said. "It kind of reminded me of the Dot-com era UPS ad where immediately after a new online store went online, orders started piling in. These things happen often on the Internet, but this was the first time that I was on this side of it."

Today, we're happy to announce an important update to Readability. At the top left corner, you'll find three buttons that make the Readability experience even better. You can now reload a page, print a page and send a page's link to others in just a couple of clicks.

One note about privacy and security. We will not be keeping logs of your sent emails and corresponding notes and we will never share your emails with anyone. You can view the source code behind this release (tagged 0.4.1) in Google Code. Readability is an open source project.

To install this update, all you have to do is.nothing! Just keep using Readability the way you always have. We hope you find this update as useful as we do.

It's not "Wow, that looks great". It's not "What a slick interface". It's not even "Users probably love this" (which is a different way of saying, mostly, "That's a pretty UI"). I'd much rather hear "What a great idea for an app" or "I could see myself using this every day" or "How am I working without this?". That means the UI is doing its job: getting out of the way of content and utility.

If you're designing to make something look good, you're probably going down the wrong path. Focus on providing something that's going to make someone's life a little better after they use it. That's a compliment you want.

So what are you waiting for? Go make something better:

www.thebetterproject.org

French anyone?

This week I open the new Wired Magazine and there's a perfectly relevant and current example of this trend - the Allen Institute of Brain Science and their quest to map out the genetic make-up of the brain. I wish I had come across his a week earlier - it's complete reinforcement of our thesis:

To achieve this, the Allen Institute reimagined the scientific process. There was no grand hypothesis, or even a semblance of theory. The researchers just wanted the data, and, given the amount needed, it quickly became apparent that the work couldn't be done by hand. So, shortly after the institute was founded in 2003, Jones and his team started thinking about how to industrialize the experimental process. While modern science remains, for the most part, a field of artisans - scientists performing their own experiments at their own benches - the atlas required a high-throughput model, in which everything would be done on an efficient assembly line. Thanks to a team of new laboratory robots, what would have taken a thousand technicians several years can now be accomplished in less than 20 months. The institute can produce more than a terabyte of data per day. (In comparison, the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome can fit in a text file that's only 3 gigabytes.) And the project is just getting started.

The scientists at the Allen Institute are producing all of this data to enable easy access to the structural brain, specifically to catalog which genes are expressed in which of the brain's regions. But in a larger sense, they're producing the data first without a specific purpose in mind - thinking that by making this data available and accessible, they are opening the possibility for future discovery:

They remain excited by the idea of working on the frontier of science, by the possibility that their maps will allow others to make sense of this still inscrutable landscape. In other words, they are waiting for the future, for some scientist to invent an elegant theory that explains their enigmatic data.

One of the focus points of our talk was Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk, where he expresses his frustration with the current Web - a delivery platform for human-readable documents - and implores all of us to make our raw data available (now!). He wants us all to stop hugging and beautifying our data and rather make it available for others to gain value from now.

Sounds a lot like Jonah Lehrer describing the scientists working at the Allen Institute, when he says "we don't even know what we don't know."

It's a very insightful post about how the web has evolved over the past ten years, and about XML and HTML. But I was intrigued by the fact that both of these thoughtful technologists cited the same line:

"HTML is not an output format. HTML is The Format."

de hÓra included one more sentence: "Not The Eternal Format, but damn if it isn't The Format Of The Now." and he suggested in the comments: "The Format Of The Long Now."

This is great stuff, and it spurred a thought of my own: if HTML is The Format Of The Now, or even The Long Now, then perhaps HTTP, its counterpart, is The Protocol Of The Now. Maybe even The Long Now.

This thought is intriguing to me, because I'm in the business of building HTTP applications. And I believe that it's important that people using HTTP understand its underlying architectural style, REST. I find REST and the debate and discussion around it fascinating. To see people grappling with its ideas, and trying to integrate it into their own mental model of how software works, is really quite... fascinating.

I think HTTP really might be The Protocol of the Long Now, and I look forward to seeing whether things actually turn out that way.

Note: answers are written against Restlet 1.1.

Q: How do I access URL query parameters?

There are two answers:

A1, for specific expected query parameters

The easiest way to work with query parameters which your application expects and which have a specific name is to tell your Routes about them.

Typically, you create a Router in an Application, and then add Routes to it using attach(String uriPattern, Class<? extends Resource> targetClass) . Calling this method returns a newly created Route which represents your mapping of a path to a class.

To have the Route extract a parameter from the URL for each request, call extractQuery(String attribute, String parameter, boolean first), like so:

router.attach("collection", MyCollectionResource.class)
        .extractQuery("page", "page", true)
        .extractQuery("perPage", "perPage", true);

Once that's all set, when you're writing your Resource and want to access that parameter, Restlet automatically puts it in the Map returned by Request.getAttributes().

So you can access your parameter like so:

getRequest().getAttributes().get('page');

Keep in mind that if the parameter isn't specified for a given request, the result of the get() call will be null. Also, if you pass the value false as the last parameter to extractQuery(), the result may be a List.

A2, for arbitrary query parameters

Of course, sometimes you need to just access an arbitrary query parameter on the fly, or check whether one was specified or not. This is easily done anywhere in a Resource, using getQuery(), like so:

String fooParam = getQuery().getFirstValue('foo');

It can seem odd at first that getQuery() returns a "Form", but the Form class turns out to be a good fit for this use case, and a very helpful class. For example, it has the useful method getValuesMap() to get a Map containing all of its values.

Q: How do I access request headers?

A1, for standard HTTP headers

Restlet is intended to be a comprehensive Java API for building and calling RESTful applications — and not necessarily RESTful web applications. Therefore, Restlet provides classes and methods which represent all the commonly used RESTful paradigms, semantically.

So, to access the values of most standard HTTP headers, you call the appropriate method of the Request class.

A quick reference:

(This table is not exhaustive, it's an example to illustrate how Restlet works.)

The Restlet wiki contains the page Mapping HTTP semantics, which exhaustively maps HTTP semantics to Restlet. Note that it targets Restlet 1.2.

A2, for custom HTTP headers

Of course, a client can send any header as a custom header, and you may need to check if any have been sent, and get their values. For this reason, Restlet puts all request headers into a Form, which is accessible via a special key in the request attributes.

For example:

Form requestHeaders = (Form) getRequest().getAttributes().get('org.restlet.http.headers');
String myAwesomenessHeader = requestHeaders.getFirstValue('X-Awesomeness');

Q: How do I set response headers?

Response headers works the same as request headers: class methods for standard headers, and a special key in Response attributes for custom headers.

A1, for standard HTTP headers

(This table is not exhaustive, it's an example to illustrate how Restlet works.)

Some headers are derived from the response representation:

(This table is not exhaustive, it's an example to illustrate how Restlet works.)

A2, for custom HTTP headers

Form responseHeaders = (Form) getResponse().getAttributes().get('org.restlet.http.headers');

if (responseHeaders == null)
{
    responseHeaders = new Form();
    getResponse().getAttributes().put('org.restlet.http.headers', responseHeaders);    
}

responseHeaders.add('X-Awesomeness', 'true');

Updated on March 23, 2009 to use Form.add() instead of Form.createEntry(), which doesn't seem to produce the desired effect.

Updated on March 23, 2009 to use Resource.getQuery() instead of getRequest().getResourceRef().getQueryAsForm(); added a note about the relevant version of Restlet; added a link to a wiki page mapping HTTP to Restlet. Thanks Jérôme!

Here's the original:

The content of the original is compelling, but the Powerpoint-style presentation leaves a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, 5,000,000 views is 5,000,000 views. Now here's the same content presented in a whole different way:

The second video obviously took a lot more work, but the result is so much more interesting and engrossing. The use of visuals to convey the sheer mass and scale of the numbers helps the viewer better appreciate what's being said. In hindsight, the first video looks like a wireframe of the second. Data and statistics are great, but data and statistics taken through a narrative with thoughtful design can be captivating.

Let's also not forget that the second video is way more fun too watch. Edutainment anyone?