skywayradio.com

1. One Button. Endless Possibilities.
2. I live my life like there's no tomorrow.
3. The bubble to end all bubbles?

1. Diplomats seek truce as Gaza's civilian toll rises

Tech

1. Portal Wiki
2. WebSphere Software
3. IBM Support

The World

1. Alex at Gawker
2. NY Review of Books
3. Reddit
4. DeadSpin
5. The Register
6. Slashdot
7. NY Times
8. The Guardian
9. Bloomberg
10. Wikipedia
11. Cursor
12. Reason
13. Salon
14. New Scientist
15. Smithsonian
16. Media Matters
17. James Wolcott
18. Sadly No

Media

1. Netflix
2. MSNBC
3. Hulu
4. TidalTV
5. Democracy Now!
6. MIT World
7. CNN
8. CBC News
9. Yahoo News
10. Google
11. YouTube
12. Book TV
13. C-SPAN
14. Book Notes
15. NOW
16. Frontline
17. Open Culture

Music and Talk

1. 770 Radio K
2. KEXP Seattle Archive
3. Last.fm
4. Air America
5. Princeton
6. WMBR Cambridge
7. WFMU NYC
8. KZSU Stanford
9. KGNU Boulder
10. KPFA
11. KDHX
12. BBC Radio 1

Radio Directories

1. Singing Fish
2. Webby Winners
3. radio-locator
4. Groove Guide
5. Google

Minneapolis Minnesota

1. MNSPEAK.com
2. City of Lakes
3. Star-Tribune
4. City Pages

World

1. Yahoo! Actualites
2. News
3. Netherlands

Please stop

Noticing far too much documentation larded up with excessive politesse. For example, I recently received instructions from IBM Support to do the following...

1. Please use the...
2. Please perform the...
3. Please re-install...

While far be it from me to decry decorum where appropriate, it seems the example above, and numerous other examples, in addition to being highly obsequious, also reduce one's ability to scan instructions quickly. The mind has to skip over these utterly useless words to find the nuggets of useful information.

You really don't need to constantly use the world "please" in procedural documentation. I am happy to follow the instructions, don't need the servile encouragement, and would find it easier if I did not have to unconsiously say to myself: "Ok", "Excuse me", "No problem", "Sure", or whatever is considered the appropriate response to being asked please, please, please over and over again.

Ants and Parrots

Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson's followup to his Pulitzer Prize winning The Ants has been released. The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies.

How does an ant work out how far it is back to the nest? Simple: by counting its steps. Glue stilts onto its legs as it sets out and it will pace out into the wilds; take them off and it will walk only part of the way back.

Another noteworthy book just release, Alex & Me: The Cage Bird Speaks by Irene M. Pepperberg, which chronicles the extraordinary communication skills of a a brainy parrot...

During one training session, Alex repeatedly asked for a nut, a request that Pepperberg refused (work comes first). Finally, Alex looked at her and said, slowly, "Want a nut. Nnn... uh ... tuh." It was as if he were saying, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it out for you?"

Perching near a harried accountant, Alex asks over and over if she wants a nut, wants corn, wants water. Frustrated by the noes, he asks, .Well, what do you want?. Mimicry? Maybe. Still, it made me laugh.

After performing major surgery on Alex, a doctor hands him, wrapped in a towel, to an overwrought Pepperberg. Alex "opened an eye, blinked, and said in a tremulous voice, 'Wanna go back'" . It's a phrase Alex routinely used to mean "I'm done with this, take me back to my cage".

Migration and tuning

Before doing migration from one WebSphere environment to another, patch both environments up to latest fix pack levels.

For load testing, most important...

1. Spin up new appservers
2. Enable servlet caching

Run As The Root Account

Secure Gmail

1. Sign in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page.
3. Set 'Browser Connection' to 'Always use https.'
4. Click Save Changes.
5. Reload Gmail.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers - regardless of platform or language. Jump in and share your software engineering expertise! No registration or account required.

WebSphere Portal v6.1

Note to self: Do not click around the Web Content Authoring portlet while the ConfigEngine script is still running. Contention.

Also, The configure-express task requires that authentication information be set in portal properties file.

 

Faster page loads

For faster loading pages, use hyperlinks with a trailing slash

Follow along

• brad setser's blog
• roubini's
• calculated risk
• alea
• aleph
• interfluidity
• econbrowser
• economist's view
• housing wire
• information arbitrage [cf.]
• brad delong's sdj
• macro man
• marginal revolution
• naked capitalism
• igreed
• the big picture
• market movers
• economics blog
• alphaville
• deal book
• robert reich
• greg mankiw

Augustus Ceaser

Someone I know reading The Lives of the Twelve Caesers. Augustus Caeser had some good project management mantras...

Hasten slowly

...and...

That is done fast enough, which is done well enough.

Web page testing tool

You can use the WBox HTTP testing tool to stress test servers and apps...

% wbox http://localhost clients 4
WBOX localhost (127.0.0.1) port 80
0. 200 OK    9939 bytes    14 ms
0. 200 OK    9939 bytes    22 ms
...

...or obtain splitted timing information...

% wbox digg.com timesplit 1
WBOX digg.com (64.191.203.30) port 80
0. 200 OK    44134 bytes    1326 ms 
       [0] 0-4095 -> 728 ms
       [1] 4096-8191 -> 254 ms
       [2] 8192-12287 -> 16 ms
       [3] 12288-16383 -> 17 ms

Signal vs. Noise

Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we are peering through a straw.

Here is an example...

This site believes in a lot of white space and blockquotes too. Might have to expand formatting even more...

Using Mainsoft's Visual MainWin, .NET developers can deploy ASP.NET applications as pure JSR 168 portlets.

lsof