random($foo)

• A Living Document – NPR’s Annual Reading of the Declaration of Independence. Worth hearing out loud.
• vvvv is a toolkit for real-time video synthesis and controlling physical devices. It’s a novel approach to creating media applications.

  vvvv was designed to facilitate large media environments with multiple computers, physical interfaces, audio, and real-time graphics that can simultaneously interact with many users. But that does not mean that you can’t develop more modest applications with it.

Meghan Newell’s Flash Portfolio – a couple notes on Flash design/usability:

• Because of resizing, navigation (tiny numbers) moves by itself making linear nav, which should be incredibly simple, very difficult
• Fitt’s Law
• Launch area on all the rest of the area including right above the numbers
• Confusion of status, navigation, text

Most of this can happen in HTML… Flash just makes it easier/more egrarious. Also the general Flash problems (no bookmarking/URIs, visited link history, status bar, browser navigation).

Justice rejects data request – now this is reaching new levels of ridiculousness:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Department of Justice’s database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.

“Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating,” wrote Thomas McIntyre, chief in the justice department.s office for information requests.

Advocates for open government said the government’s assertion that it could not copy data was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.

“This was a new one on us. We weren’t aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them,” Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity, or CPI, said yesterday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the justice department.s decision.

So, if this data can’t be copied out without risking destruction, how do they access their own information? And shouldn’t these people (Ashcroft down) in the Justice Department be dismissed or arrested already? I don’t get how we can claim to be a nation of law when it seems like those in power are able to repeatedly break them with impunity.

(Well, this accurately reflects what our country is, I suppose.)

• Rhizome – new k nowledge management experiment exploring interesting issues

• PHP Scalability and Performance – Jeff Moore summarizes some of the recent links re: PHP scalability
• todo: memcached vs msession
• Lots of good stuff recently on Aaron Swartz’s Weblog
• Bruce Bartlett Calls Clinton a Successful Eisenhower Republican – also, some interesting commentary:
  

  First, can we please please please please please please PLEASE!! stop talking about Bush’s “tax cuts.” There are no tax cuts. There’s a tax shift–current taxpayers pay less, and future taxpayers pay more. Only by pretending that nobody has to service and amortize the growing federal debt can you talk about Bush’s “tax cuts.” They aren’t there, any more than a $5,000 increase in your VISA limit is an increase in your income.

• Tiger Gadgets/Widgets – see the gadgets now.
• Hyatt writes about Dashboard Gadgets – Dave describes Dashboard as sidebars outside of the browser. Active Desktop but windowable is how I’m looking at it. Now if WebCore could build in the rest of the DOM2 functionality it’s missing… In either case, Dashboard is nothing like Konfabulator. It’s WAAAY better from a web geek’s perspective.
• How many hours? – Photomatt asks how many productive hours you average per day. I have most of my days blocked out in iCal these days. That and maybe a focus tracking applicaiton and some rulesets could probably make some interesting charts

• New Walkman announced – the supposed “iPod killer” still converts everything into ATRAC3. $400 for this (20GB) POS? Give up Sony Consumer Products. Sony Music has you completely whipped.
• Motorola A630 announced – interesting form factor (mini Nokia Communicator style)
• Waxied! – yes, yes, permalinks coming soon

Friendster goes PHP – check out the comments. Didn’t realize Java v PHP flamewars were still in vogue. Architecturally, I like Java (sometimes it would be *really* nice to have a long-lived VM), but as far as ease, simplicity (definitely an order of complexity, at least), PHP remains my preferred ‘do stuff’ language.

Joyce follows up:

1) We had not one but TWO guys here who had written bestselling JSP
books. Not that this necessarily means they’re great Java devs, but I
actually think our guys were as good as any team.

2) We tried rewriting the site in Java twice, using MVC and all
available best practices. It actually got slower. Anyway, what does MVC
have to do with speed or scalability? I thought it was a design
cleanliness and maintainability thing.

3) We tried different app servers, different JVMs, different machines.

4) Anything that money could do, it did.

I’ll try to get permission to publish some performance stats soon.

Now, that’s something I want to read.

Related: I’ve been working my way on/off through both Advanced PHP and J2EE Best Practices. For some reason the J2EE book is just a real slog in comparison. I guess EJBs just isn’t my thing.