JA-SIG uPortal Performance HOWTO – the UBC guys know what they’re doing. It seems they’re running their myUBC portal for the entire campus (32K+ undergrads?) on a Sunfire 280R 2x750MHz/4GB system (Oracle + Tomcat + Apache).

Wow, that is a pretty rawkin job posting. (via phil)

So you were a top Web Developer, once, many years ago, until the “correction”. Now nobody cares and you are shunned in public, much as lepers were in the fifteenth century. Your modern-day equivalent of the chiming bell and vile burbling exclamations of “Unclean! Unclean!” is the obnoxious ringtone on your expensive mobile.

…

Ideally you will also be fluent in the, and I quote, “uploading of ASP pages from a SAP business connector”. I said that out loud and Shub-Niggurath appeared and attempted to devour my soul through some impressive shambling and ominous tentacle-writhing, so I won’t investigate it any further.

The pay rate looks like it’s in AUD. According to xe comes out to oh, about $16/hr…

Opensourcetesting.org: Performance test tools. Jmeter, Deluge, and Dieseltest all look quite neat.

I’ve been giving some thought to use cases for social-networking software. Friendster really is the most useless functionality-wise if you’re looking for people you [used to] know irl, but well, even the best (tribe.net right now, I think) are still limited.

Part of the problem is that these services are designed for ‘meeting new people.’ That’s fine and all, but I suspect that for a lot of users, the keeping track of people you know part of is a lot of the draw as well; most of these applications fail miserably at that task.

• searches – should return all the personal information that a person wants to allow the public to see on searches (ie, there are a lot of John Doe’s; the Doe’s should be able decide if they want to be found or not, but if they want to be you should be able to try to narrow down to the one you want to find by more than a 10px thumbnail)
• privacy control – related to the above, there needs to be a way not only to specify your searchability on the network, but also of controlling relationship/info propagation
• groups – basically the ‘tribes’ idea, however, there needs to be a better way of filtering/organizing/subsetting these things
• creating agents to regularly monitor based on criteria (ie, keeping a lookout for high school buddies)
• notes – personal tagging/organization of friend’s profiles

Note, that the current centralized client/server model wouldn’t necessarily be the ideal infrastructure for this kind of application. (yeah, I still need to think of a project codename)

Seeing the recent spat of rounded corner articles (kalsey, meyerweb, mezzoblue), I decided to give it a shot.

Rather than adding rounded corners, my goal was to try to be able to dynamically knock off corners from an image. I was originally trying to experiment with -moz-border-radius, but unfortunately, while this property works on background colors, it doesn’t affect background image clipping. I suspect this is a bug; CSS3 border-radius behavior specifices that the property “causes the element’s background to be rounded,” so eventually this behavior needs to be implemented.

In any case, having been stymied by the easy way, I’ve proceeded to do it the old fashioned way way; writing a Javascript function that adds the four corner images dynamically:

Click to round corners of all images on page

This will look funny in IEPC because of its crap PNG support (I coulda used GIFs I suppose, but having real alpha makes the edges look nicer - I'll probably add a switch for IEPC people later); This probably could have been written in XBL/CSS, but I don't think there'd be much benefit.

• DOM-based auto corner rounding [view source]

Oh yeah, since Andy was givin’ me crap about it, I threw a simple rss feed up. Full feed functionality coming eventually (after the rest of the blog stuff slowly goes up).

Teens Now Spend More Time Online Than Watching TV – aww yeah.

So, was down in SD for SIGGRAPH today. Spent almost more time driving than at the conference, but well, it was worthwhile. Can’t wait for it to get back to LA. Much less travel-time that way.

I Heart New York X Icons for OS X and XP. Also, a Creating Aqua Images in Adobe Photoshop tutorial

UCBerkeleyNews: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative:

Four
researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about
the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political
conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for
inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to
political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management