Link list for today

1. My Manhattan Project
2. The Wider View: Nazi codebreaker which shortened the Second World War by two years
   
3. Google 香港財經現正推出，歡迎試用！
4. How my start-up failed: read this condom keychain story last year. Good to revisit
5. Skype for iPhone (iTunes link)
   
6. 癮香港：3HK M1n1Bus 狡猾軟件？

Link list for today

1. Wired: Entrepreneurs Find Gold in Gadget Startups
2. How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
   
3. Welcome to America, the World's Scariest Emerging Market
4. Review of 3D Engines for the iPhone
5. Is China the New America?
   

Reverse Image Search Engine

I have a few clients that got sued by Gettys Image for using their stock photo. Looks like TinEye's Reverse Image Search has matured enough that more companies will use it for copyright compliances.

"What we need is young people instead of them wanting to be an investment banker we need them to decide they want to be an engineer"

From Let the engineers rule :

Barack Obama has on The tonight show. pinned the zeitgeist with this quote "What we need is young people instead of them wanting to be an investment banker we need them to decide they want to be an engineer"

Tata Nano

Impressive.

Mailchimp Review

Some clients have been requesting large e-mail batches services, so I have been checking this MailChimp for a while.

Here's finally a review about Mailchimp.

Trucks Fail

From Failblog:

Yahoo! Paid Search sucks

From Y Hacker News:

....We tried Yahoo: It's a complete waste of time and money. Ads were always edited by Yahoo staff (requiring frequent e-mails to clarify the service we were paying for), bids may be changed at random, the interface is a nightmare kludge and there is no way to opt out of Yahoo's 'partner network' (which seems to consist only of spam domain landing pages), so bidding a keyword to the top of the Yahoo search results guarantees a load of expensive visitors from click-farms. I would love to advertise on Yahoo's search result pages and will do so the moment Yahoo Search Marketing is taken over by a competently run organization (Go Microsoft!)....

I am not familiar with the system in USA, but the one in Hong Kong runs like a Mafia. You cannot do this and do that, with entries require real Yahoo! eye-balls approvals.

Link list for today

1. College Prestige Lies
2. Why Django
3. Interesting Twitter server admin application
4. Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet
5. Great tower defense game on iPhone: I like the touch concept on a 3D sphere instead of a 2D one
6. Duck Duck Go Architecture
7. FedEx crash at Narita: direct link to the bounce video
8. Nothing to lose
9. Skype for Asterisk
10. Commandline-fu: learn a new "mtr" command, which is ping + traceroute combined
    

Update: Narita Crash video

Link list for today

1. O'Reilly Radar: How to build companies that matter
2. Mac OS Xploitation - PDF file
3. tempest on PS/2 keyboards
4. Google’s “designer drain” - Tech and designs are hard to mix?
5. Cat languages
   

Adamo, salespitch for the macbook air

Very cheesy TV spot. Try to stick an Italian? designer to look chic. The people using the notebook look like faking it.

Great BBC April Fool's Joke

What they have in store this year?

Link list for today

1. The oddities of being a scientist-programmer
2. Improving Running Components at Twitter
3. Wired Blog: SXSW: Objectified Teaches Us 'You Are What You Own'

Shipping my first Facebook application: 李炳光牧師 FBApp

Background:
Boss has been a faithful Christian that puts a lot of effort to Rev. P.K.Li's website pkli.com, mostly by putting persistent efforts to maintain the weekly sermons. No easy feat by all means for a tight budget group. A lot of the weekly sermons MP3 have to be edited by hands using Final Cut Studio 2, to reduce noise and normalize the videos, and then uploading to Amazon S3 for downloads.

Problem is the traffic seem to hover in the same level, about a few thousands people a month, not too impressive. So boss wants actions! So here were my suggestions:

• Mac OS X Dashboard Widget - checked!
• iTunes Store Podcast download - checked!
  
• iPhone interface - checked!
• Videos on Google and Youtube - checked!
• Facebook Group and profile - checked, too!!

Well, Facebook Group got 386 people as of today. iTunes Podcast does pretty good with 400 - 500 podcasts downloads a month. But boss wants more. So what to do?

Enter Facebook Application. Facebook Applications let you create an application that lives in Facebook.com. So here is the plan:

1. Write Application
2. Get as many people to add this application. Showered them with latest Rev. P.K.Li's speeches
3. Pester the people whenever there are new speech
4. Let you friend's know you added the Facebook app. More people joint. Yay.

How-to:






Creating a Facebook application is not difficult at all.

1. Sign up a Developer account. Register an application at the "Developer" Facebook app.
   
2. Go through the tutorial at Facebook Developer wiki with PyFacebook. I use Django to integrate with it.
3. Then hook up the Speech data in the original pkli.com's site with the Facebook FBML templates.
4. My mantra is Fail early fail fast. So ship it first http://apps.facebook.com/revpkli/ and wait for feedback.
   

Total time spent: 3 hours.

What's next

This app is not going to be as popular as gaming apps as Mafia Wars, so as long as more people download Rev. P.K.Li's speech, then it's mission accomplished for me.

Improvements coming up:

1. Add "My favorite" feature.
   
2. Let people rate the speeches.
3. More social networking features: send this MP3 to friend
4. Facebook Connect integration back on pkli.com
   

You are welcome to check it out: 李炳光牧師 Facebook Application

Very interesting killer contract

Simple contacts are always the best.

We will always do our best to fulfill your needs and meet your goals, but sometimes it is best to have a few simple things written down so that we both know what is what, who should do what and what happens if stuff goes wrong. In this contract you won't find complicated legal terms or large passages of unreadable text. We have no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. We do want what's best for the safety of both parties, now and in the future......


More....

Link list for today

1. qTip
2. jQuery imageSwitch
3. Rat Traders
4. Apple's MobileMe drop supports for a dead browser
5. Facebook Connect for iPhone
6. The Positive Legacy of C++ and Java
   

Link list for today

1. Yes, CEOs Should Facebook And Twitter
2. NYTimes: Why Bad Times Nurture New Inventions
3. Google releases Jakiu codes for their App Engine
4. Slow Computers Are the Only Reason We Still Get Breaks
5. Siftables - Making the digital physical
6. The Economists: An idea whose time has come
7. Niche Social Networking sites
8. Facebook Connect for iPhone: "I like this".
   

Cloud hosts deathmatch

Amazon has got the new pre-paid instance plan for their EC2 cloud computing services.

Rackspace also announced a similar service with Mosso.

And then there are Slicehost.

What a fun time to build web applications.

Link list for today

1. iPhone OS 3.0 coming soon
2. Ajaxian: Project DragonFly: Floor planning from AutoDesktop
3. New build of Sequel Pro 0.9.4
4. Intro Load Balancing for Developers – the Architect’s View
5. How To Develop A Facebook Page That Attracts Millions of Fans
6. Fluid Grids
7. Shrinksafe: Nice Javascript shrinker using Mozilla's Rhino Java based Javascript interpreter (my head is hurting...)
8. Comparison of data analysis packages: R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata
9. Good reminder on using Apache "ab" to optimize code
10. Django: Serving static files with Django and AWS - going fast on a budget
11. Global heroes
12. Google Voice Review: real screenshots!!
    

Link list for today

1. Fonts: Inconsolata, A free font success story
2. FFmpeg 0.5 released
3. jQuery UI Tabs with Next/Previous
4. Google Voice: one number for you to rule them all
5. How does they pack all the voices in Apple's new shuffle? VoiceOver works for other language, too, but not in Mac OS X.
6. QCon London 2009: How web is changing software architecture
   

Link list for today

1. Slashdot: IE 9 engine to be the last
2. Patents Being Abused To Put Your Life In Danger: TIA (this is America)
3. Wired: 10 Best Uses for RFID Tags: Point 7 is the best. The city aims to blanket itself with microchips—from bus stops to restaurants. Tourists may soon get maps, schedules, tips, and other info just by waving their cell phones.
4. Social media's history and trajectory -- talk notes from danah boyd is tl:dr. This is the distilled version.
   

Silicon Graphics to be delisted

(From multiple sources) SGI will be delisted tomorrow.

Too bad that PC based video cards and Linux eliminated the reason to use their stuff.
I still missed my old O2 and Indies, though.

Link list for today

1. Depression? Recession? No, It's the Great Restructuring
2. OpenProcessing: have a new website
3. iTunes gift card algorithm cracked
4. Face recognition demo: sounds more like facial feature marking to me.
   

Nice piece of Samsung marketing material

From Gizmodo:

Link list for today

1. Custom Authentication in Django using Facebook Connect
2. Understanding DateTime, tzinfo, timedelta & TimeZone Conversions in python
3. Remote image processing in JavaScript
4. The Hacker's Diet, by John Walker of Autodesk fame
   

QRCode vs. dood me co

硬喺唔明點會有人俾 8 亳子去做樣應該唔洗錢嘅嘢。喺 d 乜嘢 business model?!

dood me co vs. Google Adwords Print Ads 2D Barcodes

Target for Today

From NY Times: Steal These Federal Records — Okay, Not Literally:

Marissa Mayer On Charlie Rose: The Future Of Google, Future Of Search

Just watched this from TechCrunch:

Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney

Quoted: Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney

"ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store. Alvin Singh created Transit Sydney after he began teaching himself how to program in Cocoa Mobile. Within days of its Feb 18 release, Singh received a cease and desist notice from Rail Corporation NSW, the government body that administers Sydney's CityRail network. The email states: 'I advise that copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. ... Any use of these timetables in a manner which breaches copyright by a third party can only occur through the grant of a suitable licence by RailCorp.'"

I am going to watch closely on this issue. Maybe someday some morons decide to do the same thing to my Ontime HK timetable, too.

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Saw that on Y Combinator News. Funny as hell.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Link list for today

1. Smarter Django "If" template: less gluecode is always better
2. Etherpad clone: never try putting HAProxy and EvServer before. Will try this setting instead of using Google App Engine everytime
3. HTML5 Video / Flash support: 2 years later Theora will be the video streaming standard, hopefully
4. Skype SILK codec, royalty free license
5. Twilio looks fun: PBX scripting for the rest of us?
   

Google App Engine Pending downtime

Just gone to Google App Engine's status page and saw them have scheduled downtime coming up.

Here's their relevant thread on it.

Macropinna microstoma: A deep-sea fish with a transparent head and tubular eyes

Google I/O Session 2008: Google App Engine with Django

I am in the process of porting DB Timetable from a Django deployment to Google App Engine. The biggest problem is Google runs their server on UTC. So now I have to rewrite the time calculations with PyTZ and get them working again.

Here's their session last year by Guido himself: