Javascript related content in techbrowser = 286 links and tags in total

Php related links contained in techbrowser = 122 links and tags in total

Python related links contained in techbrowser = 112 links and tags in total

Ruby related links contained in techbrowser = 105 links and tags in total

latest: techbrowser has an extention to chrome upgrade too, as well as that new words/tags are taken into account once entered and remembered for further additions of urls and their tags parsing.

So here is a quick usage guide.

[searching]
1) open up techbrowser search interface
2) click tab and start typing search tags. (for example “javascript database mongodb”)

[adding via search interface ]
1) open up techbrowser interface
2) paste in any url (for example “http://nosql-database.org/” )
3) type in any additional tags
4) save and voala

[adding via add interface]
0) install the chrome (only) extension from techbrowser
1) click on the circle-black “+” button
2) type in any additional tags
3) save

PS. I was hoping that this kind of project goes fast & furious… Sadly the reality seems different but I’m happy that most of the interesting stuff is still along the way

Introduction

The problem

The diagnosis

cause

• Inability of automatic self-upgrade
• Not been able to adapt upon changing environment requirements
• Failure to ‘follow’ carefully designed plan/roadmap

effect

• Google’s GO has an auto-fix tool for core language API changes and backwards compatibility (I wish nodejs had this from point 0.0.1)
• There is a very big trend within the current ‘modern’ & ‘popular’ languages which implies to the fact that they start to provide script-able and on-the-fly functionals support, thus giving a chance for modeling a solution which would be able to adapt, not only execute. For example anonymous functions.
• improved and standardized automatic code generation and code reflection (ruby & rails, python & django, & etc) – it is intriguing to see how software produces software, isn’t ?

The solution

In addition to design, we also deal with code, lot’s of it. Our code lives inside version control system, which records projects life with minute details. This life can be nicely visualized with a good tool, such as Gource, to give a different perspective about projects.

“The videos produced by Gource really illustrate how much work goes into projects over time, with each developer ‘shooting a laser’ at each file created / changed / deleted. Files in the same folder are clustered together, lines in-between these clusters link them together depending on the folder structure.” (from nooshu, simple pointers how to create your own videos).

Here is a collection of some different technologies we’ve used over the year 2010 in various projects and their visualized life inside version control system. Scroll to the end to watch all in one go (not for the faint of heart).

PHP / Drupal

PHP / HTML/ JavaScript

PHP / Kohana

PHP / SocialEngine

Flex

Haxe

Bash

Java / Grails

Java / Springmvc

Python / Django

Nodejs

PhoneGap

Titanium

Collection of all videos in one

Since there is lot of collective effort put into trying to keep up-to-date in the digital world, we thought someone else might be interested in these random bits as well. This post is put together manually from past weeks links and their short comments. Our Skype link post are already automatically indexed to database, so we might bring this feed available automatically if there is any interest.

#dev Database performance and scalability:
http://www.codefutures.com/database-sharding/

#dev New image format for the web:
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html

#flash What’s wrong with Flash creative community:
http://npacemo.com/wordpress/2010/10/03/whats-wrong-with-the-creative-community-of-flash/

#design Login forms:
http://creativefan.com/139-brilliantly-designed-login-sign-up-web-forms/

#teamwork strange this project is in the same time open source and paid , ie here is its source:
http://github.com/teambox/teambox

#css #html only buttons:
http://dvia.com/bm1/

#android #tech Android basics:
http://java.dzone.com/articles/android-101-basics

#dev python cross platform tips & tricks:
http://us.pycon.org/media/2010/talkdata/PyCon2010/038/paper.html

#dev architecture
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dLfQMJsmsaI/TGrYMOa9EmI/AAAAAAAAAHA/LCc_6gPzhos/s1600/webfiling-img2-sm.png

#dev python quick bootstrap up to REST-like server & client
http://obi.wizartworx.com/uncategorized/howto-bootstrap-to-python-google-app-engine-web-services-under-1h/

#dev #js Jpegs with alpha channels
http://blog.jackadam.net/2010/alpha-jpegs/

#iphone #ipad Ambient music generator for iPhone & iPad:
watch?v=gcvRdBzV0Fo

#dev #js #3d #WebGL JavaScript 3D without any plugins:
http://www.ambiera.com/copperlicht/index.html

#dev #python #frameworks & more
http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks

#cloud #gaming
http://www.onlive.com/service/cloudgaming

#dev #js
http://code.google.com/closure/library/

#dev #js #RIA #app ~ 4380K reduced to only 73K
http://blog.bolinfest.com/2010/10/creating-100k-loc-application-in.htm

#dev #webGL
http://fhtr.org/

#dev #code #fast – a must read for everyone willing to code faster for web.
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/9-ways-to-instantly-code-faster/

#benchmark
http://whichloadsfaster.com/

#socialmedia interesting social media management tool
http://www.socialtalk.com/

#dev javascript library which allow to embed font in html ..cool:)
http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

#devs how to tell what you want to software developer:
http://www.itworld.com/development/122237/how-to-tell-a-software-developer-what-you-want

#dev there are some really nice solutions indeed. try YAML for example (which is 2 years old). + online apps become more and more sofisticated, which brings more value to the google’s chromium OS
http://smashinghub.com/40-useful-online-applications-for-web-designers-and-developers.htm

#dev html5 mobile app framework (using phonegap)
http://joapp.com/

#dev design in browser (interesting approach indeed)
http://csswizardry.com/2010/10/designing-in-the-browser-leads-to-better-quality-builds/

#dev 15 top php frameworks
http://www.admixweb.com/2010/10/06/15-best-ever-php-frameworks/

#mobile Things are definetely moving from apps to browser with mobile platfroms. Something to keep in mind …
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/38916/70-per-cent-of-European-users-prefer-the-mobile-web-to-apps

Links harvested and commented by Boris, Dora, Julian, Simeon, Svetlio & Timo. Majority of the links harvested between 6pm and 1am.

Nodejs is a javascript event driven framework & runtime designed with one simple goal:

to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs

That being said, it is a good fit for our usage of rapid application development, something we do more and more. One of the main reasons to be used in development (and production) systems is that it enables developers to build high performance script based services and true web applications.

On the other hand nodejs gives option to implement web service without using the “old fashioned” approach of maintaining sessions, request-response flows and others which can be found in general service implementations using php, java & etc. Writing nodejs service which needs to process in background large amount of data is trivial as adding interval in javascript:

Having the service running all the time (not only when request comes in) gives extremely powerful solution for implementation of various system service units like image processing, video encoding and others. Even though nodejs is a new approach of implementing old solutions there is already very strong community behind it (which indeed advances & fills nodejs gaps with lightning speed): http://github.com/ry/node/wiki/modules

Number of applications based on nodejs grows daily:
http://github.com/ry/node/wiki

What I see as nodejs positives:

• Fast rapid web service development (it is javascript though)
• Light fast performance and easy horizontal scaling – all what is needed is nginx
  
  
• Strong community with a lot of already made modules ready for prototype mockups

But as everything else nodejs has some negatives also:

• It is still a very young solution, however what is implemented in node works just fine. Problem is that there are things which are still in development like MySQL drivers. This point is not only a negative, but need to be mentioned just to lower the number of surprises which nodejs may pop out. There are a lot of stable alternatives which can cover the missing stable MySQL driver at single strike like CouchDB, Redis & MongoDB.
• Requires a shift to the thinking when one need to implemented web service using only not blocking event driven development

In conclusion, nodejs proves to be a best fit for implementation of production ready web services out of the rails of standard web development. And sooner or later nodejs can become one of the world’s most used backend solutions. For sure, we will be using it more and more. Any other tech-heads out there who are using it produce solutions faster than before?

Due to way Facebook features are more and more embedded outside of Facebook, and because Facebook itself changes so fast, I’ve noticed that it is not always so easy to grasp what Facebook applications actually are and do. I hope this simplified image helps a little while understanding and especially explaining to others what its all about.

Attached in the end as OmniGraffle file for anyone to use as you please. If you come up with a better version, I encourage you to leave a note here and share with others.

facebook-application-anatomy.graffle

No plan survives first contact with customers (also read the comments, lot’s of valuable stuff in there). “The problem was that two weeks after they got out of the building talking to potential customers and users, they realized that at least 1/2 of their key assumptions in their wonderfully well crafted plan were wrong.”

And here are couple other good links:

The Best Entrepreneurs Know How To Fail Fast

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap“The only barrier to failing fast and failing cheap is your ego. You must be willing to fail, fail, and fail again if you are going to win in today’s competitive marketplace. Remember, even if you’re falling flat on your face, at least you’re still moving forward.

Failure success and neither (Seth Godin)

Before continuing any further, its good to look at an opposite opinion as well. Here is a good article by Mark Suster calling the fail fast meme the latest “emperors new clothes”. Why the fail fast mantra needs to fail. This is a nice provocative article that gets most things right, but the idea of the “fail fast” little wrong in my opinion. One of the key points of this article that I fully agree with though, is this: “You want to talk about the ultimate “fail fast” – how about if you fail before you’ve spent any money building product because you validate there isn’t a big enough market or you can’t make money?” Couldn’t agree more with that.

What is important to note, is that failing fast is not same as giving up. Startup company should not be filled with philosophers that try to think how world might be, but with doers that can get things “out there” to see for real and reflect on their own assumptions all the time. Ie. it encourages humility. We do, we learn. We try, we fail. We get up, and try differently.

And this is what we should be doing as opposed to concepting untill we bleed, specifying untill we get the caffeine jitters and implementing untill we dream wacky dreams of software modules that do trivial tasks.

And related to that, another good article: Startup Lessons Learned: Validating an idea, case study

So we need to (CASE 1):
1. Understand what is required to make the business work
2. Test as many of those assumptions as possible
3. Expose the idea to real market test — will they buy?
4. Fail
5. Improve and try again untill we succeed
6. Worry about the other stuff only after this

Where as before we used to (CASE 2):
1. Do lot’s and lot’s of ideating (secrecy is a big plus here)
2. Write a clever business plan (volume of pages is a big plus here)
3. Gather a team (impressive cv’s, anyone?)
4. Raise funding (more the merrier)
5. Start executing the idea (it ought to be diffcifult, right? Everyone knows it is, when its big!)
6. Expose it to real customer (of course they can’t FULLY understand it at this point)
7. Fail

CASE 1 = cheap, some weeks
CASE 2 = expensive, some years

As back to Mark’s concern, it might help to rename the whole fail fast ideology. How about if we just call it “Try fast” or “Squeeze”?

I’m planning a followup article on the suitability of this ideology in terms of funding. Especially in Finland we are blessed (?) with many public funding instruments, which principals have a limited understanding of such thinking. How can you seek funding and say that we don’t have all the answers? Good question, and all input in regards to this topic, is greatly appreciated. Do drop me a line if you have good insights into this!

ps. Big thanks goes to Osma, who has a very wise view on these matters and who has pointed most of the source materials to me.

Resource Utility is for managing personnel resources in a calendar view. It works in a very simple way: select a project and then click on the day for a person.

Benefits include easy overview of resource utilization and free resources. You can use it either in a browser or using AIR client which works like any normal desktop application.

Resource Utility features:

Pricing:

Licensing

You can use the Resource Utility application for free. You can do whatever you wish with the back-end code. At least for now, the AIR application source code is not available. If you wish to obtain source code or need some custom modifications, please contact us at info east.fi. No support, sorry. Flex and AIR are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Inc. Resource Utility is a trade mark of East Interactive Finland Oy Ltd. And credit where its due; the original resourcing concept comes from Imppu. Thanks!

Privacy note

When downloading, we are asking your email address just out of curiosity. We will not spam and we will respect your wish if you don’t want to be notified of updates. Your email address will not be rented, sold, given or used for any other purpose than providing notification on updates. AIR application will contact our server to check for updates, and when it does that, we will save your IP address. We use this information for usage statistics and that is the only information that gets passed to us.

Try Online Demo

username: demo
password: demo

Or

ResurceUtility AdobeAir application
Backend cfg: http://east.fi/ru/demo/db/
username: demo
password: demo

Downloads
Resource Utility Server
Resource Utility Client (AIR)

In case you wonder, visualization on the front page is a graphical representation of our version control system activity from few of the projects we’ve been building the past twelve months. Check out the Subversion visualization tool to make your own visualizations.

Some of the bots are freely available and we plan to release more with very permissive licenses. For more information about the concept, visit Activebot.net’s own wiki.

Some benefits we’ve found with this approach:

Happy coding to everyone!

It is a perfect example of focus and specialisation – Let’s focus on the core business, the rest is sourced.
MMO gamers often complain about the need to “grind” stuff, farming gold and special gears by doing repetitive tasks for days or weeks. As a result, many choose to buy the in-game stuff with real-life money, so they can spend time playing instead of grinding.

Such opportunity obviously has given birth to a new kind of career.
It is a bit in the grey area whether it is a work or a game.

In South Korea, virtual game shows attract millions of audience.
Teenagers are coached and trained in camps “sumo-style” to excel in playing the games .
The parents are all supportive for such career path, that later on their children would prosper in the game industry.

This brings up the memory of the time when call center business started to pop up in India.
This demonstrates yet again what a strong impact video games have in our everyday life.

Many have claimed that print advertisement is ineffective (or even dead). Or then, more and more people stop watching TV these days. People are all getting so accustomed to following news and trends in blogs, forums, widgets and social networks. That everything has become dominantly digital.

In the meantime, book sales in Finland have increased in the past years. Print newspaper and TV news broadcast are apparently still the most important sources of news in Finland (a country swimming in technology and geeks?).

Certainly, it does not necessarily mean all these people who watch TV news and buy books would also faithfully subscribe to print ads and TV commercials. Also, the demography of these people is an a very important factor.

However, it is obvious that offline marketing is not dead and digital is not all mighty. They are just different medium. And the fact is, different medium have their edge in different time and space targeting different people: morning coffee, afternoon coffee, evening couch-potate time, or private time in toilet; for females, people in their middle age, or teenagers. Careful planning and timing is crucial.

Timing apparently also has it that while I am still browsing through my magazine pile, Captain Blackbeak has made a bunch of excellent points concerning recession and marketing.
Instead of following the herd blindly, or going digital full speed as if there is no tomorrow, the key question for both agencies and clients at the moment, as Captain Blackbeak also stated, should be “Where is my advertising effective and why?”

It is true that in the current recession digital marketing is very likely going to grow significantly. It is not because there has been lots of hypes and optimism spinning within the marketing scene. It is just that tough time forces people to look for alternatives, challenge accepted status quo, and be more effective in achieving results. It is just that both agencies and clients have to get smarter.

and further that
• traditional media is really suffering
• 47% will be increasing their internet marketing spending
• 56% will be increasing their email marketing spending
• 40% will be increasing their mobile marketing spending
• 52% will be increasing their search engine marketing spending
• other growth areas are direct marketing and in-shop advertising

so things are looking rather peachy for digital agencies. Or are they?

So what is it that those marketing euros will be spent on? My guess is, that the most immediate stuff is:
• more keyword advertising
• lot’s of banners (auts!)
• some campaign sites (double auts!)

But other than that, what are advertising agencies and digital media agencies offering? Hopefully many different ideas and concepts will be planned and tried. But in times like these, are marketing decision makers brave enough to do something out of kilter? Next time you plan, consider some of these, and please feel free to suggest some more ways to do something else than banners, keywords & campaign sites:

• different forms of viral marketing (more about these in another post later)
• blog sponsoring
• product blogs
• blogs providing full transparency
• sponsored & syndicated content
• recommendation marketing
• transaction marketing
• custom communities
• community participation
• discussion forums
• commenting
• comparison services
• questionnaires
• application
• games
• affiliate marketing
• email marketing
• mobile marketing

… and the list goes on. Of course marketing planning should not start from means instead of business objectives, but means is a fair gauge of how “digitally aware” your marketing is.

Couple interesting findings:
• Taneli’s interesting look at two popular communities and their demographics: Facebook Finland Network revealed + IRC-Galleria comparison

• Osma’s (very detailed) look at how LinkedIn deploys AdSense. This one raises lot’s of interesting questions about the future of targeted marketing: How LinkedIn’s special keyword Google AdSense works

Less money, more results

Having less money around, there is less things you can do. Now how this can be a good thing? In situation of limited resources you are forced to look the optimum way to reach certain result. When pursuing for goal you are much more challenged looking to alternative paths how to reach it. It the “fat old days” not so long ago it used to be that you had plenty of choices that you could choose from –developing certain online service you could choose doing it yourself, finding right partner to do it or use already some existing and modify it.

Now with fewer resources many of the top decisions are already done for us. We can only focus on the really relevant doable options and just have to discard others. So this means we have to sacrifice some of the results also – right? Think again.

Scarcity brings clarity

There exists interesting study of comparing human performance in different option spaces. Economic game involving MIT-students moving in the virtual rooms / options aiming for best possible income provided interesting results. The performance of players actually dropped 15% when more options were introduced. This is because of human psychology; “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss”

Putting this into business context is kind of interesting. The downturn has closed many doors for all of us and sure it hurts us but as that is something we cannot change let’s think that the economy did us a favor – we even may have some increase in productivity.

Other means speeding up on the downturn

Less competition. Competitors decrease as the players with weak business models drop out. Just make sure you are not belonging to that group. There is also chance that some players are forced to move in to your market but established players should be in good position to counter new entrants.

Good people. It is easier to keep and recruit new employees. Not many are willing to change jobs on downturn so there is good chance keeping the key people for your business. Those companies that end up with difficulties may have to lay off good people so capturing a talented individual or even a team is a good possibility.

So at the end economic downturn and scarce resources do not have to mean fewer results and may even be an opportunity to getting more done and build your business ready for the economical rebound. Who knows – maybe the recovery can be as fast as the tumble.

Their answer is “yes but no way, we will not commission you.”
I thought it was about confidence on our competences and experience. And I showed them some stuff we have done and the relevant prices.
“So, are we not good enough?”
“Certainly yes. And you are cheaper. But still no.”

They showed me what one agency has done for them so far.
“The concept is .. ah… lame”
“Yeah, tell us about it!”
“The visuals are kind of fresh, though.”
“Yes, but the UI makes us mad! And we complained about it already in the last campaign.”
“What is the campaign supposed to achieve?”
“Lots of eyeballs from the streets and screens. And win an award.”
I almost choked when they told me how much their agency charges them.

I thought my team and I can do a better job for them.
I asked “So what do these agencies provide you that small agencies like us do not?
“Nothing. Actually, probably even less.”
“Umm .. But still you would not commission us?”
“Nope, that is the painful reality. We are bound by traditions and bureaucracy.”

So, bound by traditions and bureaucracy, marketing agencies sell less results for more money?
It really got me thinking, especially in the context of such an economic downturn.
Shouldn’t marketing be focused on getting results first? Namely sales of a product, instead of winning an award. In bad time like this, I would expect people reflect more on their habits and traditions, be inventive and make changes.
Well, maybe and maybe not.

This is what they say:

Tour de Flex includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. Topics include the Flex Core Components, Flex Data Access, AIR Desktop Capabilities, Cloud APIs, Data Visualization, Mapping, and a growing collection of custom components, effects, skins, etc.

How cool is that?

Papervision3D is for real. From what I’ve ever seen with Flash3D this is the first time I’ve seen something that’s really usable 3D in Flash! Carlos Ulloa, the author, has done a excellent job in creating a very clean, easy to use api. I was up and running in less than 10 minutes with my first project!

Now, if you come from a background in 3D with programs like 3D Studio Max, Maya or Softimage, you’re gonna love this. It works the way you’d expect it to work with controlling 3D space – x, y, z, rotationx, rotationy, rotationz, scalex, scaley, scalez. PV3D also gives you the ability to manage a camera with zoom and focus to create different lens effects.

Papervision3D and Anaglyph

The implementation of Anaglyph technology is truly easy, all we need is papervision3d project. If we have an older version of Papervision3D, we just need to swap out the existing Scene3D with AnaglyphicScene3D. For papervision3d GreatWhite release, must be used the AnaglyphicRenderEngine and ejoy.

All codes for anaglyph tech is available here.

With some perspective of doing various kind of development projects I am more and more convinced that in many cases the challenge and opportunities of continuous development still remains to be fully discovered. Project being big or small, product or service – the same challenges seem to exist.

There are few facts that we know regarding just about any project or development effort
-    The budget and timeframe is always challenging, often both fail short
-    The final results are not perfect – not even when it was exactly what was envisioned when starting the project
-    Lack of understanding what really needs to be done – requirements and the features of the “thing” is understood not until the project is already well on its way
-    Listening customer – Once the project is completed we start getting the real feedback from our efforts, but very often chances to react are limited because of lack of resources (which are often released soon after the “thing” launches)

All of these are symptoms of one-phase-single-try discontinuous development.

This does not make sense – unless you are in a discontinuous business.

Reasons for this are:
-    Business is continuous evolving interaction with customer – (at least should be)
-    The launch of the product or service is just a beginning of that interaction, the work really starts from there  – not end as many have tendency to believe
-    If the product/service development is subcontracted the customer wants to have long term development partner
-    The subcontractor wants to have successful customer providing continuous stream of development orders also in future

So the solutions part – nothing above was anything new for anybody -  iterative and agile development are the practical tools for these, HOWEVER on the business management level we STILL seem to operate like the old days of deliver-and-forget kind of mode.

Simple solutions:
1.    Start with small steps – not major big bang but gradual increments
2.    Try different things – test and experiment various opportunities to reach your goal
3.    Start spending in right points of time – when you have proof that something seems to work, focus resources to develop that particular area
4.    Reserve resources for continuous development – note that this does not mean MORE resources but rather using those same resources for the right things at the right point of time
5.    Build for long-term-result based partnerships rather than one-time-deliveries

Sounds easy? Too easy? What do you think?