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Greenfoot rocks!

James Gosling — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:59:47 +0000

I've been talking about BlueJ and Greenfoot for years. They're tools for teaching people to program who have never programmed before. BlueJ is a special-purpose IDE that's all about teaching. Greenfoot is a collection of scenarios layered on BlueJ that provide the framework for assignments based on simulations and games. They each have books (bluej and greenfoot) that are designed for classroom or independent use.

It's summer and one of the items on my to-do list has been to teach my youngest daughter how to program. I was planning to spend some time in the evenings with her. But before I could get started, my wife handed her a copy of the greenfoot book and my daughter started reading. While I was off at work she downloaded and installed the IDE and started using the book the way it was intended: reading it cover-to-cover doing the exercises as they came along. I've helped her a couple of times when she got stuck, but mostly she's just plowed ahead on her own and is having a great time. The exercises are all very visual and engaging. Greenfoot makes it fun to learn programming. It starts out with very logo-ish exercises (moving a wombat around via method calls to find food), then automating the characters so that they can find their own food, and progressing to a variety of video games. The scenarios really absorb kids.

Thanks to everyone on the GreenFoot team!! You've made a difference in at least one young girl's life.

martinfowler: @nzkoz @glv I was told that anger is a sign of frustration, as is crying. So when I see someone angry I imagine them crying - often helps

(author unknown) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:42:52 +0000

Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:11:09 +0000

In this three-part series I will explore the ways that the Venture Capital industry has changed over the past 5 years that I would argue are a direct result of changes in the software industry, not the other way around. Specifically, Amazon has changed our entire industry in profound ways often not attributed strongly enough to them.

I believe the changes to the industry will be lasting rather than temporal change. Venture capital is in the process of its own creative destruction with new market entrants and new models of innovation at the precise moment that our industry itself is contracting.

I will argue that when the dust settles, although we will have fewer firms, each type well end up more focused on traditional stage segments that cater to the core competencies of that firm. The trend of funding anything from the first $25k to funding $50 million at a billion+ valuation is unlikely to last as the skills and style to be effective at all stages are diverse enough to warrant focus.

I will argue that LPs who invest in VC funds will also need to adjust a bit as well.

Rewind
When I built my first company starting in 1999 it cost $2.5 million in infrastructure just to get started and another $2.5 million in team costs to code, launch, manage, market & sell our software. So it’s unsurprising that typical “A rounds” of venture capital were $5-10 million. We had to buy Oracle database licenses, UNIX servers, a Sun Solaris operating system, web servers, load balancers, EMC storage, disk mirrors for redundancy and had to commit to a year-long hosting agreement at places such as Exodus.

Open-Source Software & Horizontal Computing
The first major change in our industry was imperceptible to us as an industry. It was driven by the introduction of open-source software, most notably what was called the LAMP stack. Linux (instead of UNIX), Apache (web server software), MySQL (instead of Oracle) and PHP. Of course there were variants – we preferred PostGres to MySQL and many people used other programming languages than PHP.

Open source became a movement – a mentality. Suddenly infrastructure software was nearly free. We paid 10% of the normal costs for the software and that money was for software support. A 90% disruption in cost spawns innovation – believe me.

We also benefitted economically from a move to “horizontal computing.” What this meant was that rather than buying really expensive UNIX servers (and multiple machines in order to handle redundancy) we could buy cheap, replaceable servers for compute resources.

As our needs grew we could just add more cheap boxes and as boxes failed we could just chuck them out. We had to learn how to be better at “load balancing & replication” – meaning how we managed data across all the boxes since they weren’t centralized on one box.

These two trends had a major impact on the computing industry from 2000-2005 but the effects weren’t yet felt by the VC industry.

The Emergence of “Open Cloud” Infrastructure
The biggest change in the software industry beyond open-source was “open cloud.”

When we talk about cloud computing we have to be careful to differentiate between open cloud (services the are provided solely to for the economic purpose of building a cloud business) and the “platform cloud” where certain service providers offer cloud services wrapped around their core product. These are very different.

Platform cloud players like Salesforce.com provide compute resources so that third parties can build applications that integrate with its core product. That’s awesome for users of Salesforce.com or companies that want to cater to them but less awesome for pure startups that want independence and are really just looking for cloud infrastructure. Facebook is a “platform cloud” provider, too. That makes both of these amazing companies great channels for startups.

True that Salesforce.com in particular has made interesting moves toward open-cloud services by purchasing Heroku and also launching Database.com. It seems if anybody wants to move more toward open it will be Salesforce.

But for now when you want to build an independent, high-growth, VC-backed startup you need to build your overall company on a truly open cloud.

Enter Amazon.

They came from a different perspective. They have the mass retailer mentality of “stack ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap.” They started by offering cloud storage (S3) on a super cheap, pay-as-you consume basis. Every startup I knew in 2005 (when I started my second company) was using this. Why would we commit hundreds of thousands to EMC before we knew whether we had a big business?

They then launched processing capabilities (EC2) and we startups suddenly didn’t need to buy production servers. Then they launched a simple database, management tools and so on. Amazon will surely keep moving up the stack. My bet is that they fold A9 (their search tool) into AWS and offer search-as-a-service, too.

It sure would put pressure on Google if they had Facebook competing on one side of them for share of users’ time and Amazon flanking them on the other side by providing search to every website out there that might threaten AdSense and even Google’s core search business. Who knows?

If you want a deeper understanding of the layers of the cloud , how it is emerging and some of the exciting new players you can read it here.

Amazon changed our industry. This is mind boggling. That little online book company. Not Google. Not Microsoft. Not IBM, HP, Accenture, Cisco, Salesforce.com or anybody else. Amazon. 100% of the credit. And 9 years after they launched AWS there are still no credible competitors.

I find this strange. And maddening.

That said, Amazon – through AWS – even without strong competition is as wonderful an experience as Amazon the eCommerce retailer feels to you as an online shopper. Jeff Bezos simply deserves to be held up with Steve Jobs as two of the most important people driving innovation in computing today.

Spawning of Micro VCs
The biggest media attention in our industry went to the so-called “super angels” during the 2009/10 timeframe and while I don’t believe there is such thing as a super angel I believe that much media attention was deserved.

The earliest people that I spoke to who understood the changes in our industry were True Ventures & First Round Capital. They built industrial-scale funds dedicated to backing early-stage startups with $500k rather than $5 million. They knew the venture math that if only 50 companies / year are sold North of $100 million the entry price for their investments mattered. These funds were active back in 2006 when I was raising money for my second company. As were individuals like Jeff Clavier with SoftTech VC who was also way ahead of the market in spotting this trend.

More recently great funds like IA Ventures, Floodgate, Rincon Ventures, Founder Collective, Freestyle Capital and others have raised money to focus on early-stage investing as a strategy. And many more individuals that I respect are switching from investing as individuals to fund structures to invest in this category like Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures), John Frankel (ff Venture Capital), Manu Kumar (K9 Ventures), Chris Sacca (lowercase capital), Dave McClure (500 Startups) and many more.

I have called the creation of Micro VC as the most important change in our industry and I believe it. These people understand that the nature of startups have changed. They have increased the number of investments, they understand that outdated board meeting formats are too slow & unresponsive, they have designed founder-friendly term sheets that can be executed cheaply and they are allowing for a massive increase in the rate of new startup innovation. At least in the consumer & business web.

The larger ones also do more to hold CEO summits, create recruiting databases, set up email distribution lists, create pools of stock options that can be shared across companies, etc.

I still think it was Amazon that created this category not the other way around. Where open-source computing gave us a 90% reduction in our software, Amazon gave us a 90% reduction in our total operating costs. Amazon allowed 22-year-old tech developers to launch companies without even raising capital. Amazon sped up the pace of innovation because in addition to not having to raise capital to start I also didn’t need to wait for hosting to be set up, servers to arrive, software to be provisioned.

Amazon.

I know I’m going on-and-on. I’m not a shareholder. I’m just in awe of what they’ve enabled and baffled that the media doesn’t give this more focus.

In the next post I explore how the changes initiated by Amazon and then propagated by Micro VCs has led to a blurring of the lines in which stages VCs & later-stage investment firms traditionally invest and why this is driving up valuations in private companies beyond common sense.

Lessons in a 21st Century Tech Career: Failing Fast, 20% Time and Project Mobility

James Whittaker — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:05:00 +0000

By James Whittaker

If your name is Larry Page, stop reading this now.

Let me first admit that as I write this I am sitting in a company lounge reminiscent of a gathering room in a luxury hotel with my belly full of free gourmet food waiting for a meeting with the lighthearted title "Beer and Demos" to start.

Let me secondly admit that none of this matters. It's all very nice, and I hope it continues in perpetuity, but it doesn't matter. Engineers don't need to be spoiled rotten to be happy. The spoiling of engineers has little to do with the essence of a 21st century tech career.

Now, what exactly does matter? What is the essence of a 21st century tech career that keeps employees loyal and engaged with productivity that would shame the most seasoned agile-ist? I don't yet have the complete story, but here are three important ingredients:

Failing Fast. Nothing destroys morale more than a death march. Projects going nowhere should do so with the utmost haste. The ability of a company to implode pet projects quickly correlates directly to a great place to work. Engineers working on these project gain not only valuable engineering experience, they experience first-hand the company's perception of what is important (and, in the case of their project, what is not important). It's a built-in lesson on company priorities and it ensures good engineers don't get monopolized by purposeless projects. You gotta like a company willing to experiment. You have to love a company willing to laugh at itself when the experiments don't pan out.

20% Time. Any company worth working for has any number of projects that are worth working on. It's frustrating for many super-sharding engineers to see cool work going on down the hall or in the next building and not being part of it. A day job that takes all day is tiresome. Enter 20% time, a concept meant to send a strong message to all engineers: you always have a spare day. Use it wisely.

Project Mobility. Staying fresh by changing projects is part of mobility. Continuous cycling of fresh ideas from new project members to existing projects is another part. The downside here is obviously projects with a steep learning curve but I scoff in the general direction of this idea. Whose fault is it when a wicked smart engineer can't learn the system fast enough to be useful in some (even a small) context? Only the weakest organization with the poorest documentation can use that excuse. The only good reason for keeping people on a project is because they have no desire to leave.

These three concepts are better than all the lounges and free food any company can provide. Here's an example, a real example, of how it worked recently for an employee I'll call Paul (because that happens to be his name!).

Paul joined Google a little over a year ago and spent two months on a project that was then cancelled. He learned enough to be useful anywhere but was new enough that he really didn't have great context on what project he wanted next. Solution: I assigned him to a project that was a good skill set match.

Less than a year later, his new project ships. He played an important role in making this happen but in that time he also realized that the role was leaning toward feature development and he was more interested in a pure test development role. However, he was steeped in post-ship duties and working on the next release. A cycle that, happily, can be broken pretty easily here.

Another project had a test developer opening that suited Paul perfectly. He immediately signed up for 20% on this new project and spent his 80% ramping down in his old project. At some point these percentages will trade places and he'll spend 20% of his time training his replacement on the old project. This is a friction-less process. His manager cannot deny him his day to do as he pleases and now he can spend his time getting off the critical path of his old project and onto the critical path of his new project.

Mobility means a constant stream of openings on projects inside Google. It also creates a population of engineering talent with an array of project experiences and a breadth of expertise to fill those positions. 20% time is a mechanism for moving onto and off of projects without formal permissions, interviews and other make-work processes engineers deplore.

Let's face it, most benefits are transient. I enjoy a good meal for the time it is in front of me. I enjoy great medical when I am sick. I appreciate luxury when I have time for it. Even my paycheck comes with such monotonous regularity that it is an expectation that brings little joy apart from the brief moment my bank balance takes that joyful upward tick. But if I am unhappy the rest of the day, none of those islands of pampering mean squat. Empower me as an engineer during the much larger blocks of my time when I am doing engineering. Feed my creativity. Remove the barriers that prevent me from working on the things I want to work on.

Do these things and you have me. Do these things and you make my entire work day better. This is the essence of a 21st century tech career: make the hours I spend working better. Anything more is so dot com.

Ok, Larry you can start reading again.

Everyone's an Idiot Some of the Time

Brian Guthrie — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:02:16 +0000

Don’t worry, it’s not permanent. Source: flickr.

During high school I was a huge Dilbert fan, which is funny, because I had yet to see the inside of a cubicle. (I have since seen many.) At the height of its popularity, Scott Adams wrote a full-length book, The Dilbert Principle, which dove a little bit deeper into his particular brand of IT workplace humor. Although sadly not regarded as a business-literature classic today, Adams included an anecdote that has stuck with me, and I wanted to share it here, if only so I know where to find it. It’s about being an idiot:

I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The other day I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn’t work after I changed the battery. The repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well-practiced motion. This took much of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product. But the repairman seemed quite amused. And so did every other customer in the lobby.

On that day, in that situation, I was a complete idiot. Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.

What I like about this quote is that it treats idiocy as a transient state, something that comes and goes, rather than the all-or-nothing label—“that person is an idiot”—that we often apply to others. It’s also a reminder to be humble: we’re all stupid sometimes.

Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon makes a similar observation about the difference between the term that we use in English to describe a person who is tied to a particular habit or drug—we call them “addicts”—and the German term for soldiers who had become addicted to Morphine during World War II, morphiumsüchtig (morphine-seeking, or -seeky). The latter is an adjective that describes one aspect of a person; the former is a noun that replaces them.

Note that none of this applies when dealing with a genuine total moron.

UPDATE: A couple of commenters have pointed out that the morphiumsüchtig comparison may not make much sense. I’m including the Stephenson passage, from which I’ve cribbed much of the above commentary, in its original context, on the off chance that it illuminates more about his intent.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

The case against iteration based re-estimation

Adrian — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Many agile practitioners recommend re-estimating stories at the beginning of each iteration. I disagree with this practice.

For one thing, I believe it's a waste of time. Any value that you might get (which I doubt - see below) from the practice is lost on the time spent.

It's worse than that though. By re-estimating the iteration's stories, you are almost always estimating with a greater level of detail than what you had originally. With this increased level of detail, in my experience, estimates tend to grow.

Why is this a big deal?

Let's try an example.

I come in to my iteration planning meeting with 30 points worth of stories from the backlog. The team commits to those stories, but in re-estimating, the 30 points inflates to 40. In fact, this always seems to happen, as the team gets a little nervous about hitting their historical velocity and they know management is paying attention. Let's assume the team gets them all done. This increases the observed velocity by a third (40 points is a third more than 30). Now, let's say I have 120 more points left in the product backlog to get to the minimal marketable feature set for release. How many more iterations are left?

If you said 3 more iterations (i.e. 40 points per iteration gets you to 120), you are ignoring your team's tendency to inflate estimates. Assuming your estimate inflation rate is consistent (a third), you really don't have 120 points remaining, you have 160 points, or 4 more iterations remaining. Or, calculated another way, if you consider only the initial estimates to calculate your velocity (30), then you can determine that you have 4 iterations of 30 remaining. In both cases, you end up correctly predicting 4 more iterations. Then again - if you use the initial estimates, what value did your re-estimation from 30 to 40 provide you ? I say none.

If you regularly re-estimate at iteration planning meetings, make a note of the original vs. the updated estimates. See if they grow. Consider what impact this is having on the accuracy of your release planning.

OK, I can hear you now. "My team's estimates don't inflate ... some go up; some go down". I haven't seen this, but let's say you do. Let's revisit the example from above with this assumption. You go into the iteration planning meeting with 30 points and walk out with 29. Your velocity is not materially impacted. You are still on track with 3 remaining iterations (roughly). So the question is this: what value did that re-estimation provide? I say none.

When *do* you re-estimate then?

I believe in updating estimates when information arises from experience that pertains to some shared aspect of a subset of stories. For example, let's say that your retrospectives have shown that every time you have a story that hits a certain database, it ends up being much more effort than expected. In a case like this, it makes sense to revist those database stories to ensure that this knowledge is incorporated into those estimates. I call this aspect-oriented re-estimation (adapted from the term "aspect-oriented programming").

Internet users per time zone (chart)

Pingdom — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:55:57 +0000

We know that there are approximately two billion Internet users in the world, but how are they distributed? More specifically, how are they spread over the world’s time zones? The world population isn’t spread evenly, and neither is the Internet population.

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

To learn more in detail what we did (methodology, etc.), check out the “How we did it” section below.

Notes about the infographic: The time zones shown also include any “uneven” time zones, e.g. UTC+5½ is included in the UTC+5 group. That’s why we call them “time zone brackets.” It’s also worth noting that the grid we added on top of the map is simply there to help you orient yourself a bit in relation to the chart at the bottom, it won’t show you exactly which countries belong to certain time zones (the real world is messier). The yellow diagram at the bottom, however, is exact. For a map of the full time zone mess, here is a great one. And if you’re wondering, UTC and GMT is basically the same thing.

Some things we learned from this survey

Two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa.
The largest time zone bracket is UTC+8 (503 million Internet users). The biggest contributor by far is China (all of China uses the same time zone, so that’s 420 million Internet users), followed by the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The second-largest time zone bracket is UTC+1 (357 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are Germany, Italy, France, Nigeria, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands.
The third-largest time zone bracket is UTC-5 (161 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are the United States (the east coast), Colombia and Canada.
Seven time zone brackets contain more than 100 million Internet users: UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+1, UTC+2, UTC+5, UTC+8 and UTC+9.

A closer look at the United States

If you’re curious about the distribution of Internet users in the United States (we thought you might be), here it is:

EST (UTC-5): 112.4 million
CST (UTC-6): 78.7 million
MST (UTC-7): 12.9 million
PST (UTC-8): 33.7 million

In addition to that, Alaska (UTC-9) and Hawaii (UTC-10) together make up roughly 1.4 million Internet users.

The division is based on how the US population is distributed across the nation, so it will only be an estimate (Internet penetration won’t be uniform across the country). But it should be pretty close.

How we did it, the gritty details

Putting this data together was a bit tricky, but we went about it as meticulously as we could. Essentially we have just combined the number of Internet users per country with the time zone(s) used by each country, but it’s deceptively simple.

In those cases where countries span several time zones (for example Canada, USA, Russia, Australia and Indonesia), we did our best to divide the contribution they made to each time zone based on the population distribution inside the country. In some cases these statistics were already available, in some other cases we had to estimate.

In addition to this, time zones really are a bit of a mess, with many countries adding or subtracting half hours and even quarter hours instead of full hours. To make the data more presentable, we’ve grouped all time zones into one-hour brackets. For example, UTC+5½ (used in India) went into the UTC+5 bracket. If we hadn’t done this, the chart would have been pretty much useless.

There are some island nations in the Pacific Ocean that use the time zones UTC+13 and UTC+14, amassing a few thousand Internet users in total. We didn’t include that data in this chart.

To not go insane we focused on standard time zones. We completely ignored daylight savings time and all the quirks that come with it.

Data sources: Wikipedia was a great help for time zone information and also provided us with the public domain map you see in the background of the infographic. Internet user numbers per country came from Internet World Stats. Population divided by time zone: for USA and Canada from Newtimezones.com (PDF), for Australia from Yahoo Answers, for Russia partly from Worldatlas.com.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

A Googler — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the European Public Policy Blog and Public Policy Blog)

Update June 14, 7:40pm: After we published this post, the Kazakhstan authorities issued new guidance stating that the order no longer applies to previously registered domains. In practice this means we can re-launch google.kz. While we’re pleased that we can once again offer our users in Kazakhstan customized search results, we encourage the Government of Kazakhstan to rescind this requirement for all future .kz domains as well.

The genius of the Internet has always been its open infrastructure, which allows anyone with a connection to communicate with anyone else on the network. It’s not limited by national boundaries, and it facilitates free expression, commerce and innovation in ways that we could never have imagined even 20 or 30 years ago.

Some governments, however, are attempting to create borders on the web without full consideration of the consequences their actions may have on their own citizens and the economy. Last month, the Kazakhstan Network Information Centre notified us of an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names, such as google.kz, to operate on physical servers within the borders of that country. This requirement means that Google would have to route all searches on google.kz to servers located inside Kazakhstan. (Currently, when users search on any of our domains, our systems automatically handle those requests the fastest way possible, regardless of national boundaries.)

We find ourselves in a difficult situation: creating borders on the web raises important questions for us not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression. If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet. So we have decided to redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh. Unfortunately, this means that Kazakhstani users will experience a reduction in search quality as results will no longer be customized for Kazakhstan.

Measures that force Internet companies to choose between taking actions that harm the open web, or reducing the quality of their services, hurt users. We encourage governments and other stakeholders to work together to preserve an open Internet, which empowers local users, boosts local economies and encourages innovation around the globe.

Posted by Bill Coughran, SVP, Research & Systems Infrastructure

dariuskumana: RT @jasonrudolph: Google finds it economically infeasible to support IE 6 & 7. You have less money than Google. Apply transitive law her ...

(author unknown) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:43:00 +0000

Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

A Googler — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:00:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)

Today we’re announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. With schema.org, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages.

Search engines have been working independently to support structured markup for a few years now. We introduced rich snippets to Google search in 2009 to help people find better summaries of reviews and people, and since that time we’ve expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including recipes and events. We’ve been thrilled to see content creators across the web—from stubhub.com to allrecipes.com—add markup to their pages, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than 10 times as often as when we started two years ago.

We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006. With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.

In addition to consolidating the schemas for the categories we already support, schema.org also introduces schemas for more than a hundred new categories, including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. As webmasters add this markup to their sites, search engines can develop richer search experiences. With webmaster feedback, we’ll be able to regularly publish new schemas for sites to use and, in turn, expand the list of queries with rich results. For webmasters who have already added microformats or RDFa currently supported by rich snippets, their sites will still appear with rich snippets on Google. You can learn more on our Webmaster Central Blog, Help Center and on schema.org.

Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.

While this collaborative initiative is new, we draw heavily from the decades of work in the database and knowledge representation communities, from projects such as Jim Gray’s SDSS Skyserver, Cyc and from ongoing efforts such as dbpedia.org and linked data. We feel privileged to build upon this great work.

We look forward to seeing structured markup continue to grow on the web, powering richer search results and new kinds of applications.

Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow

Donald Smith: Understanding the various JDKs

DonaldOJDK — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:55:12 +0000

Steve Jobs told Nike to 'get rid of the crap'

team@macworld.co.uk (Ben Camm-Jones) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:38:00 +0000

Bliki: HalfSizeComposition

(author unknown) — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:33:00 +0000

A common problem in people's presentation decks is that they make text and diagrams so small that only the people in the front of the room can properly see them. Here's one simple thing I do to reduce the chances of that happening to me - when I'm composing my presentation I set the view size to 50%. If I can't read it easily at 50%, then the audience will struggle too.

Stefan Norberg RT @edent: What British people say, what they mean, & what other people hear http://yfrog.com/gy5gxvxj - painfully true!

(author unknown) — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:12:10 +0000

Fancier graphics, safer downloads, and more privacy controls

Google Chrome Blog — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Today’s beta channel release includes a number of additions, as well as one subtraction!

First, we’ve made Chrome’s graphics snazzier. We’ve finished implementing support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which allows web developers to apply slick 3D effects to web page content using CSS.

Second, we’ve taken Safe Browsing a step further. In addition to protecting you against malware and phishing websites, Chrome now warns you before downloading some types of malicious files. As mentioned on the Chromium blog in April, Chrome uses the same fancy algorithms for checking downloads as it does for checking websites, so Google can help protect you without ever needing to know the URLs you visit or the files you download.

Third, you now have more control over your online privacy. Many websites store information on your computer using forms of local data storage such as Flash Local Shared Objects (LSOs). In the past, you could only delete Flash LSOs using an online settings application on Adobe’s website, but we’ve worked closely with Adobe to allow you to delete Flash LSOs directly from Chrome’s settings. You can learn more in our post on the Chromium blog.

Fourth, we’ve improved screen reader support in Chrome. Many people who are blind or visually impaired use a screen reader, a special type of software that describes the contents of the screen using synthesized speech or braille. It’s a very important technology for people who would otherwise be unable to use a computer, so we’ve added preliminary support for many popular screen readers including JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver.

Finally, the subtraction: In this beta release, we’ve removed the Google Gears plug-in, as promised on the Google Gears blog in March. We’re excited about the potential of HTML5 to enable powerful web applications, and we hope that Google Gears rests in peace.

Posted by Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer

Android: momentum, mobile and more at Google I/O

A Googler — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Google Code Blog)

This morning at Google I/O, the Android team shared some updates. It’s hard to believe a little more than two and a half years ago, we were just one device, launching in one country, on one carrier. Thanks to the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and carriers, the platform has grown exponentially. There are now:

100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

Mobile—one OS everywhere
Over the past two and a half years, we’ve shipped eight releases of Android and there are now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes. This morning we talked about our next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.

We also launched Music Beta by Google, a new service that lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud for streaming to your computer and Android devices. With the new service, your music and playlists are automatically kept in sync, so if you create a new playlist on your phone, it’s instantly available on your computer or tablet. You can use a feature called Instant Mix to create a playlist of songs that go well together. You can even listen to music when you’re offline: we automatically store your most recently played music on your Android device and you can choose to make specific albums or playlists available when you’re not connected. The service is launching in beta today to U.S. users and is available by invitation.

We’ve also added Movies for rent to Android Market. You can choose to rent from thousands of movies starting at $1.99 and have them available across your Android devices—rent a movie on your home computer, and it’ll be available for viewing on your tablet or phone. You can rent from Android Market on the web today, and we’ll be rolling out an update to Verizon XOOM customers beginning today. We’ll start rolling out the update to Android 2.2 and above devices in the coming weeks.

The Android ecosystem has been moving really fast over the last two and a half years and rapid iteration on new and highly-requested features has been a driving force behind Android’s success. But of course that innovation only matters if it reaches consumers. So today we’re announcing that a founding team of industry leaders, including many from the Open Handset Alliance, are working together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release, and also for how long they will continue to be updated. The founding partners are Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T, and we welcome others to join us. To start, we're jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows...and that's just the beginning. Stay tuned for more details.

More—extending the platform beyond mobile
From the beginning, Android was designed to extend beyond the mobile phone. With that in mind, we’ve developed Android Open Accessory to help developers start building new hardware accessories that will work across all Android devices. We previewed an initiative called Android@Home, which allows Android apps to discover, connect and communicate with appliances and devices in your home. We also showed a preview of Project Tungsten, an Android device for Music Beta to give you more control over music playback within the Android@Home network.

You can watch the entire Android keynote from Google I/O on our Google Developer YouTube Channel shortly. On behalf of the team, we want to thank the entire Android community of developers, OEMs and carriers who are pushing the platform into new areas and building great experiences for consumers. Without you, the Android platform wouldn’t have grown so large in the past two and a half years. We look forward to seeing where you take it next.

Update May 11: The video from the keynote is now available:

Posted by Hugo Barra, Product Management Director, Android

A world of curiosity: a peek at searches around the globe

A Googler — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Every day, people come to Google Search to ask questions. Through Google, questions become answers, and answers lead to the next set of questions. These people come from around the world and all walks of life, speaking hundreds of different languages, typing in search queries every single day. Today we’re sharing the Search Globe, a new visual display representing one day of Google searches around the world—visualizing the curiosity of people around the globe.

This visualization was developed and designed by the Google Data Arts Team using WebGL, a new technology for modern browsers that uses your computer’s hardware to generate fast, 3D graphics. As a result, you need a WebGL-enabled browser, like Google Chrome, to see the Globe. You can learn more about the technology behind the Globe on the Google Code Blog.

The Search Globe visualizes searches from one day, and shows the language of the majority of queries in an area in different colors. You’ll see a bright landscape of queries across Europe, and parts of Asia for instance, but unfortunately we see many fewer searches from parts of the world lacking Internet access—and often electricity as well—like Africa. We hope that as the Internet continues to become more accessible over time and people continue to ask questions, we’ll see this globe shine brightly everywhere.

We’ve also open sourced this platform so that developers can build their own globes using their own data, and we look forward to seeing other globes orbiting around the web.

Update 12:45PM: If you'd like to embed the Search Globe on your own site, here's the embed code:

<iframe src="http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search/embed" height="500" width="500"></iframe>

Enjoy!

Posted by Valdean Klump, Google Data Arts Team

Read this now

James Gosling — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:16:05 +0000

James Altucher wrote a great blog entry: The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur. Read it, even if you don't think of yourself as an entrepreneur.

Going Beyond Curly Braces

(author unknown) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:54:00 +0000

On my long flight down to Australia recently I dug into a copy of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. I spent less than seven hours on it, but found it a worthwhile read. He takes a lightening tour through seven languages. It’s not enough to go into much depth on any them, but it is enough to get a rough feel what’s interesting about them. I’d particularly recommend it if you are just starting to explore beyond the curly-brace languages that dominate so much of current programming.

One thing I particularly appreciate about pragprog books is that you get access to electronic versions in multiple formats. This book worked very well on the Kindle, despite the small screen.

Getting started with VMware CloudFoundry, MongoDB and Rails

(author unknown) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Greenfoot rocks!

James Gosling — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:59:47 +0000

Thanks to everyone on the GreenFoot team!! You've made a difference in at least one young girl's life.

martinfowler: @nzkoz @glv I was told that anger is a sign of frustration, as is crying. So when I see someone angry I imagine them crying - often helps

(author unknown) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:42:52 +0000

Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:11:09 +0000

I will argue that LPs who invest in VC funds will also need to adjust a bit as well.

These two trends had a major impact on the computing industry from 2000-2005 but the effects weren’t yet felt by the VC industry.

The Emergence of “Open Cloud” Infrastructure
The biggest change in the software industry beyond open-source was “open cloud.”

But for now when you want to build an independent, high-growth, VC-backed startup you need to build your overall company on a truly open cloud.

Enter Amazon.

If you want a deeper understanding of the layers of the cloud , how it is emerging and some of the exciting new players you can read it here.

I find this strange. And maddening.

The larger ones also do more to hold CEO summits, create recruiting databases, set up email distribution lists, create pools of stock options that can be shared across companies, etc.

Amazon.

I know I’m going on-and-on. I’m not a shareholder. I’m just in awe of what they’ve enabled and baffled that the media doesn’t give this more focus.

Lessons in a 21st Century Tech Career: Failing Fast, 20% Time and Project Mobility

James Whittaker — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:05:00 +0000

Everyone's an Idiot Some of the Time

Brian Guthrie — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:02:16 +0000

Don’t worry, it’s not permanent. Source: flickr.

I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The other day I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn’t work after I changed the battery. The repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well-practiced motion. This took much of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product. But the repairman seemed quite amused. And so did every other customer in the lobby.

On that day, in that situation, I was a complete idiot. Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.

Note that none of this applies when dealing with a genuine total moron.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

The case against iteration based re-estimation

Adrian — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Internet users per time zone (chart)

Pingdom — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:55:57 +0000

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

To learn more in detail what we did (methodology, etc.), check out the “How we did it” section below.

Some things we learned from this survey

Two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa.
The largest time zone bracket is UTC+8 (503 million Internet users). The biggest contributor by far is China (all of China uses the same time zone, so that’s 420 million Internet users), followed by the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The second-largest time zone bracket is UTC+1 (357 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are Germany, Italy, France, Nigeria, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands.
The third-largest time zone bracket is UTC-5 (161 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are the United States (the east coast), Colombia and Canada.
Seven time zone brackets contain more than 100 million Internet users: UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+1, UTC+2, UTC+5, UTC+8 and UTC+9.

A closer look at the United States

If you’re curious about the distribution of Internet users in the United States (we thought you might be), here it is:

EST (UTC-5): 112.4 million
CST (UTC-6): 78.7 million
MST (UTC-7): 12.9 million
PST (UTC-8): 33.7 million

In addition to that, Alaska (UTC-9) and Hawaii (UTC-10) together make up roughly 1.4 million Internet users.

How we did it, the gritty details

There are some island nations in the Pacific Ocean that use the time zones UTC+13 and UTC+14, amassing a few thousand Internet users in total. We didn’t include that data in this chart.

To not go insane we focused on standard time zones. We completely ignored daylight savings time and all the quirks that come with it.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

A Googler — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

dariuskumana: RT @jasonrudolph: Google finds it economically infeasible to support IE 6 & 7. You have less money than Google. Apply transitive law her ...

(author unknown) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:43:00 +0000

Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

A Googler — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.

Donald Smith: Understanding the various JDKs

DonaldOJDK — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:55:12 +0000

Steve Jobs told Nike to 'get rid of the crap'

team@macworld.co.uk (Ben Camm-Jones) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:38:00 +0000

Bliki: HalfSizeComposition

(author unknown) — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Stefan Norberg RT @edent: What British people say, what they mean, & what other people hear http://yfrog.com/gy5gxvxj - painfully true!

(author unknown) — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:12:10 +0000

Fancier graphics, safer downloads, and more privacy controls

Google Chrome Blog — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Android: momentum, mobile and more at Google I/O

A Googler — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

A world of curiosity: a peek at searches around the globe

A Googler — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Read this now

James Gosling — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:16:05 +0000

James Altucher wrote a great blog entry: The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur. Read it, even if you don't think of yourself as an entrepreneur.

Going Beyond Curly Braces

(author unknown) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:54:00 +0000

One thing I particularly appreciate about pragprog books is that you get access to electronic versions in multiple formats. This book worked very well on the Kindle, despite the small screen.

Getting started with VMware CloudFoundry, MongoDB and Rails

(author unknown) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Greenfoot rocks!

James Gosling — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:59:47 +0000

Thanks to everyone on the GreenFoot team!! You've made a difference in at least one young girl's life.

martinfowler: @nzkoz @glv I was told that anger is a sign of frustration, as is crying. So when I see someone angry I imagine them crying - often helps

(author unknown) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:42:52 +0000

Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:11:09 +0000

I will argue that LPs who invest in VC funds will also need to adjust a bit as well.

These two trends had a major impact on the computing industry from 2000-2005 but the effects weren’t yet felt by the VC industry.

The Emergence of “Open Cloud” Infrastructure
The biggest change in the software industry beyond open-source was “open cloud.”

But for now when you want to build an independent, high-growth, VC-backed startup you need to build your overall company on a truly open cloud.

Enter Amazon.

If you want a deeper understanding of the layers of the cloud , how it is emerging and some of the exciting new players you can read it here.

I find this strange. And maddening.

The larger ones also do more to hold CEO summits, create recruiting databases, set up email distribution lists, create pools of stock options that can be shared across companies, etc.

Amazon.

I know I’m going on-and-on. I’m not a shareholder. I’m just in awe of what they’ve enabled and baffled that the media doesn’t give this more focus.

Lessons in a 21st Century Tech Career: Failing Fast, 20% Time and Project Mobility

James Whittaker — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:05:00 +0000

Everyone's an Idiot Some of the Time

Brian Guthrie — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:02:16 +0000

Don’t worry, it’s not permanent. Source: flickr.

I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The other day I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn’t work after I changed the battery. The repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well-practiced motion. This took much of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product. But the repairman seemed quite amused. And so did every other customer in the lobby.

On that day, in that situation, I was a complete idiot. Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.

Note that none of this applies when dealing with a genuine total moron.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

The case against iteration based re-estimation

Adrian — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Internet users per time zone (chart)

Pingdom — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:55:57 +0000

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

To learn more in detail what we did (methodology, etc.), check out the “How we did it” section below.

Some things we learned from this survey

Two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa.
The largest time zone bracket is UTC+8 (503 million Internet users). The biggest contributor by far is China (all of China uses the same time zone, so that’s 420 million Internet users), followed by the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The second-largest time zone bracket is UTC+1 (357 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are Germany, Italy, France, Nigeria, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands.
The third-largest time zone bracket is UTC-5 (161 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are the United States (the east coast), Colombia and Canada.
Seven time zone brackets contain more than 100 million Internet users: UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+1, UTC+2, UTC+5, UTC+8 and UTC+9.

A closer look at the United States

If you’re curious about the distribution of Internet users in the United States (we thought you might be), here it is:

EST (UTC-5): 112.4 million
CST (UTC-6): 78.7 million
MST (UTC-7): 12.9 million
PST (UTC-8): 33.7 million

In addition to that, Alaska (UTC-9) and Hawaii (UTC-10) together make up roughly 1.4 million Internet users.

How we did it, the gritty details

There are some island nations in the Pacific Ocean that use the time zones UTC+13 and UTC+14, amassing a few thousand Internet users in total. We didn’t include that data in this chart.

To not go insane we focused on standard time zones. We completely ignored daylight savings time and all the quirks that come with it.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

A Googler — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

dariuskumana: RT @jasonrudolph: Google finds it economically infeasible to support IE 6 & 7. You have less money than Google. Apply transitive law her ...

(author unknown) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:43:00 +0000

Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

A Googler — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.

Donald Smith: Understanding the various JDKs

DonaldOJDK — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:55:12 +0000

Steve Jobs told Nike to 'get rid of the crap'

team@macworld.co.uk (Ben Camm-Jones) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:38:00 +0000

Bliki: HalfSizeComposition

(author unknown) — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Stefan Norberg RT @edent: What British people say, what they mean, & what other people hear http://yfrog.com/gy5gxvxj - painfully true!

(author unknown) — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:12:10 +0000

Fancier graphics, safer downloads, and more privacy controls

Google Chrome Blog — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Android: momentum, mobile and more at Google I/O

A Googler — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

A world of curiosity: a peek at searches around the globe

A Googler — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Read this now

James Gosling — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:16:05 +0000

James Altucher wrote a great blog entry: The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur. Read it, even if you don't think of yourself as an entrepreneur.

Going Beyond Curly Braces

(author unknown) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:54:00 +0000

One thing I particularly appreciate about pragprog books is that you get access to electronic versions in multiple formats. This book worked very well on the Kindle, despite the small screen.

Getting started with VMware CloudFoundry, MongoDB and Rails

(author unknown) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Greenfoot rocks!

James Gosling — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:59:47 +0000

Thanks to everyone on the GreenFoot team!! You've made a difference in at least one young girl's life.

martinfowler: @nzkoz @glv I was told that anger is a sign of frustration, as is crying. So when I see someone angry I imagine them crying - often helps

(author unknown) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:42:52 +0000

Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:11:09 +0000

I will argue that LPs who invest in VC funds will also need to adjust a bit as well.

These two trends had a major impact on the computing industry from 2000-2005 but the effects weren’t yet felt by the VC industry.

The Emergence of “Open Cloud” Infrastructure
The biggest change in the software industry beyond open-source was “open cloud.”

But for now when you want to build an independent, high-growth, VC-backed startup you need to build your overall company on a truly open cloud.

Enter Amazon.

If you want a deeper understanding of the layers of the cloud , how it is emerging and some of the exciting new players you can read it here.

I find this strange. And maddening.

The larger ones also do more to hold CEO summits, create recruiting databases, set up email distribution lists, create pools of stock options that can be shared across companies, etc.

Amazon.

I know I’m going on-and-on. I’m not a shareholder. I’m just in awe of what they’ve enabled and baffled that the media doesn’t give this more focus.

Lessons in a 21st Century Tech Career: Failing Fast, 20% Time and Project Mobility

James Whittaker — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:05:00 +0000

Everyone's an Idiot Some of the Time

Brian Guthrie — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:02:16 +0000

Don’t worry, it’s not permanent. Source: flickr.

I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The other day I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn’t work after I changed the battery. The repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well-practiced motion. This took much of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product. But the repairman seemed quite amused. And so did every other customer in the lobby.

On that day, in that situation, I was a complete idiot. Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.

Note that none of this applies when dealing with a genuine total moron.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

The case against iteration based re-estimation

Adrian — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Internet users per time zone (chart)

Pingdom — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:55:57 +0000

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

To learn more in detail what we did (methodology, etc.), check out the “How we did it” section below.

Some things we learned from this survey

Two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa.
The largest time zone bracket is UTC+8 (503 million Internet users). The biggest contributor by far is China (all of China uses the same time zone, so that’s 420 million Internet users), followed by the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The second-largest time zone bracket is UTC+1 (357 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are Germany, Italy, France, Nigeria, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands.
The third-largest time zone bracket is UTC-5 (161 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are the United States (the east coast), Colombia and Canada.
Seven time zone brackets contain more than 100 million Internet users: UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+1, UTC+2, UTC+5, UTC+8 and UTC+9.

A closer look at the United States

If you’re curious about the distribution of Internet users in the United States (we thought you might be), here it is:

EST (UTC-5): 112.4 million
CST (UTC-6): 78.7 million
MST (UTC-7): 12.9 million
PST (UTC-8): 33.7 million

In addition to that, Alaska (UTC-9) and Hawaii (UTC-10) together make up roughly 1.4 million Internet users.

How we did it, the gritty details

There are some island nations in the Pacific Ocean that use the time zones UTC+13 and UTC+14, amassing a few thousand Internet users in total. We didn’t include that data in this chart.

To not go insane we focused on standard time zones. We completely ignored daylight savings time and all the quirks that come with it.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

A Googler — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

dariuskumana: RT @jasonrudolph: Google finds it economically infeasible to support IE 6 & 7. You have less money than Google. Apply transitive law her ...

(author unknown) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:43:00 +0000

Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

A Googler — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.

Donald Smith: Understanding the various JDKs

DonaldOJDK — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:55:12 +0000

Steve Jobs told Nike to 'get rid of the crap'

team@macworld.co.uk (Ben Camm-Jones) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:38:00 +0000

Bliki: HalfSizeComposition

(author unknown) — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Stefan Norberg RT @edent: What British people say, what they mean, & what other people hear http://yfrog.com/gy5gxvxj - painfully true!

(author unknown) — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:12:10 +0000

Fancier graphics, safer downloads, and more privacy controls

Google Chrome Blog — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Android: momentum, mobile and more at Google I/O

A Googler — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:00:00 +0000

100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

A world of curiosity: a peek at searches around the globe

A Googler — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Read this now

James Gosling — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:16:05 +0000

James Altucher wrote a great blog entry: The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur. Read it, even if you don't think of yourself as an entrepreneur.

Going Beyond Curly Braces

(author unknown) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:54:00 +0000

One thing I particularly appreciate about pragprog books is that you get access to electronic versions in multiple formats. This book worked very well on the Kindle, despite the small screen.

Getting started with VMware CloudFoundry, MongoDB and Rails

(author unknown) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:58:00 +0000

Greenfoot rocks!

James Gosling — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:59:47 +0000

Thanks to everyone on the GreenFoot team!! You've made a difference in at least one young girl's life.

martinfowler: @nzkoz @glv I was told that anger is a sign of frustration, as is crying. So when I see someone angry I imagine them crying - often helps

(author unknown) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:42:52 +0000

Understanding Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries

Mark Suster — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:11:09 +0000

I will argue that LPs who invest in VC funds will also need to adjust a bit as well.

These two trends had a major impact on the computing industry from 2000-2005 but the effects weren’t yet felt by the VC industry.

The Emergence of “Open Cloud” Infrastructure
The biggest change in the software industry beyond open-source was “open cloud.”

But for now when you want to build an independent, high-growth, VC-backed startup you need to build your overall company on a truly open cloud.

Enter Amazon.

If you want a deeper understanding of the layers of the cloud , how it is emerging and some of the exciting new players you can read it here.

I find this strange. And maddening.

The larger ones also do more to hold CEO summits, create recruiting databases, set up email distribution lists, create pools of stock options that can be shared across companies, etc.

Amazon.

I know I’m going on-and-on. I’m not a shareholder. I’m just in awe of what they’ve enabled and baffled that the media doesn’t give this more focus.

Lessons in a 21st Century Tech Career: Failing Fast, 20% Time and Project Mobility

James Whittaker — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:05:00 +0000

Everyone's an Idiot Some of the Time

Brian Guthrie — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 02:02:16 +0000

Don’t worry, it’s not permanent. Source: flickr.

I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The other day I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn’t work after I changed the battery. The repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well-practiced motion. This took much of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product. But the repairman seemed quite amused. And so did every other customer in the lobby.

On that day, in that situation, I was a complete idiot. Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noticing the change or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.

Note that none of this applies when dealing with a genuine total moron.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time—even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.”

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

The case against iteration based re-estimation

Adrian — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:22:00 +0000

Internet users per time zone (chart)

Pingdom — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:55:57 +0000

We couldn’t find this information anywhere, so we collected the data ourselves and did the necessary calculations to be able to put together this chart. We hope you will find it useful.

To learn more in detail what we did (methodology, etc.), check out the “How we did it” section below.

Some things we learned from this survey

Two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa.
The largest time zone bracket is UTC+8 (503 million Internet users). The biggest contributor by far is China (all of China uses the same time zone, so that’s 420 million Internet users), followed by the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan.
The second-largest time zone bracket is UTC+1 (357 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are Germany, Italy, France, Nigeria, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands.
The third-largest time zone bracket is UTC-5 (161 million Internet users). The biggest contributors are the United States (the east coast), Colombia and Canada.
Seven time zone brackets contain more than 100 million Internet users: UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+1, UTC+2, UTC+5, UTC+8 and UTC+9.

A closer look at the United States

If you’re curious about the distribution of Internet users in the United States (we thought you might be), here it is:

EST (UTC-5): 112.4 million
CST (UTC-6): 78.7 million
MST (UTC-7): 12.9 million
PST (UTC-8): 33.7 million

In addition to that, Alaska (UTC-9) and Hawaii (UTC-10) together make up roughly 1.4 million Internet users.

How we did it, the gritty details

There are some island nations in the Pacific Ocean that use the time zones UTC+13 and UTC+14, amassing a few thousand Internet users in total. We didn’t include that data in this chart.

To not go insane we focused on standard time zones. We completely ignored daylight savings time and all the quirks that come with it.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Changes to the open Internet in Kazakhstan

A Googler — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

dariuskumana: RT @jasonrudolph: Google finds it economically infeasible to support IE 6 & 7. You have less money than Google. Apply transitive law her ...

(author unknown) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 06:43:00 +0000