Month: September 2002

Business Week nails the analysis of why the Internet is stalled.  The roll-out of broadband to the home is slowing due to a pricing problem and not a services problem.  If prices were $19.95 a month for T-1 speeds we could easily get 60% plus penetration.  Even using the wrong technology (anything but fiber), cable… Continue reading Business Week

Enhanced Thumbnails for Web Search. Those crazy kids at Xerox PARC are at it again with this neat thing they call Enhanced Thumbnails. The web search demo is particularly interesting. This demo is a re-creation of the user tests conducted by the research staff, comparing Enhanced Thumbnails to more traditional methods of displaying search results.… Continue reading Enhanced Thumbnails for Web Search

ZDNet: PHP tools come to the UK. PHP, a server-side scripting language that supports applications in Web pages, is now the leading Web scripting language, according to Wick Hill. The company is now distributing commercial tools from Zend for UK developers working with the language. “In the next six months, we will see a recognition… Continue reading ZDNet: PHP tools come to the UK

Tales from the trenches: MySQL, Linux, and Thread Caching. Wow, it's been a busy week. I was totally swamped for several days dealing with the remember.yahoo.com MySQL servers and related stuff. And then I used a day or two to recover (sleep, shower, etc). Anyway, I made some interesting discoveries along the way. The most… Continue reading Tales from the trenches: MySQL, Linux, and Thread Caching

A Very Shifted Library. Thanks to Lori Bell, I've been scanning the Memorial Hall Library's web site (they're located in Andover, Massachusetts). They do a great job of providing remote access to their databases, live online chat with a librarian, a browsable catalog (instead of just a searchable one), and they're even circulating Gemster ebooks. Lori… Continue reading A Very Shifted Library

developerWorks: Tuning Red Hat for maximum performanceThis tutorial details the ins and outs of transforming a stock, “out of the box” Red Hat installation into a finely tuned, stable system customized to individual needs and tastes.  [Zope Newbies>]

A Plan for Spam. Quote: “I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up. They have so far, at least. But they have to deliver their message, whatever it… Continue reading A Plan for Spam

New Architect: Progress Paralysis. Quote: “A Web site has two sets of constituents: the customers who use it to get things done, and the employees of the organization that builds it. As site complexity grows, so does the difficulty of the task each group has to accomplish.” Comment:via the always good Column Two, which also… Continue reading New Architect: Progress Paralysis

New Architect: The Road to Usability. Q&A with Tim Bray. Today's Web UI doesn't look much different than it did in 1994. Have we learned nothing? Second, the huge gulf between the visual access your desktop provides to your hard drive and the “query, hit Enter, look-at-lists-of-items” basis of most Web apps. [Tomalak's Realm]

The Future of Flash as a rich client. Mike Chambers has created … an example of the Flash MX DataGrid control. It's a great example of the richness of the client environment created with Flash MX. We're now reaching the richness of the traditional Mac/Win desktop in terms of user interface components. I know the… Continue reading The Future of Flash as a rich client