Links from 2008

Alice Fisher on Tate Modern's latest exhibition

The cheat sheet is from seomoz.org [...] Some of the advice directly contributes to an accessible site (which is something many have noted before), but a couple of items will impact on the experience for people using particular technologies.

An online community for people to share tips on places in their local area

A format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites.

"I've ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element." Nuts. Cool.

The lazy load pattern is a practical implementation of the Proxy Design Pattern. The goal is to avoid loading an object until it is absolutely needed—only then do we invest the resources in loading it.

When I originally checked out Get Satisfaction, I was immediately impressed. However, it wasn't until I needed to get in and use it for myself that I really began to appreciate the depth of thought apparent in the interface.

Stick this in your page, call $.profile.start() to start profiling calls to $(selector), and then $.profile.done() to stop profiling

by Flight404 (via crackunit).

"Over 140 stalls selling fashion, accessories, crafts, interiors and music" in Brick Lane

This historic, 1000-acre private estate on The Lizard peninsula has been transformed by restoring its environment and converting old or abandoned buildings to provide a real alternative to holiday inflation, based on green principles.

The station had become the latest target of flash mobbing, an organized routine in which dozens of mostly young people struck and held a pose in absolute silence for four minutes.

"Creates screenshots of web pages [...] provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations." PC only.

For some time now, I have thought that high-level project roadmaps (Gantt charts in particular) are one of the most worthless documents that a software project team can produce.

From the Space Marines 12", part of the Warhammer 40,000 series by Art of Perception. Yes, really.

Search Twitter in realtime

Helps block the more obvious Twitter spammers.

As discreet as the invisible man, TotalTunes Control gives you the control of iTunes. TotalTunes Control offers the ability to create shorcuts to control iTunes and toggle shown TotalTunes Control controller window.

We’re simultaneously at inflection points in programming languages and databases and network programming and processor architectures and Web development and IT business models and desktop environments. Did I miss anything?

Cheese Kit Diptych is an installation by artist Walter Willems consisting of two drum kits. In one, full rounds of real (mainly Dutch) cheese sit atop drum stands; in the other, plastic cheese replicas usually found in store display windows are employed. In this absurd setting Willems reinforces the international stereotype of the Dutch by using a classic Dutch export product as its main ingredient.

Cheese Kit Diptych was created specifically to be played by world-renowned Dutch improvisational jazz drummer Han Bennink. Bennink, ambassador of the Dutch free jazz scene, is known for his ability to drum on any surface, teeming with humor, virtuosity, and creativity through his animated style. Willems considered his installation incomplete until Bennink played both of the drum kits.

Brussels Meets Brighton : The MetaHub

“Between 30th April and the 3rd of May London’s exciting Shunt Lounge will host a massive exhibition involving Arts Collectives from Brighton, Brussels and London. The event will incoporate a feast of fascinating performance including: live music, puppetry, dance and physical theatre, video and sound installations, photography, slam poetry, scientists, robotics and more.”

In this article I’ll share my experience for installing on this server Django with Apache mod_python, with memcached caching and lighttpd for serving static files.

By not using it? "The goal of this tutorial is to distill the information at the official site for sIFR into a simple step-by-step process of how to implement sIFR on your site."

McFilter: A Taste of TED on DVD

There are six talks on the DVD. I picked ones that I enjoyed watching and that seem to be well thought of on the web:

1. Dan Gilbert asks “Why are we happy?” 2. Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce 3. Sir Ken Robinson say schools kill creativity 4. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen 5. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice 6. Gever Tulley on five dangerous things for kids

An alliance of creative folk - game designers, coders, writers - working together to create pro bono, pro-social games.

Another miseducated SEO rears their ugly head and slanders a well-known development technique as well as a high-profile SEO, accusing both of being spam. Better yet [...] Image Replacement has been dubbed “poor man’s cloaking”.

Or, at least, think more carefully about when and how you use it.

Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection and their value. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bring you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent.

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable.

Daft, brilliant. From the album 7 Guitars with a Cloud of Milk, out soon on LoAF.

Basecamp alternative. "Combines group collaboration, project management and document sharing using social networking principles."

"In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing more detailed specifications that will describe our support of semantic web standards. Initially, we plan to support a number of microformats, including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN." Rock on.

spend time on your project, not on your build system

Looks great but, ooh, expensive!

Great idea, massively overpriced.

Instead of spending his time shoving a square-peg concept into a round-hole medium, web guy should look to his own patron saint, Marshall McLuhan.

A web-based screen reader. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card.

Either businesses aren't supposed to be like charities, and we've proven by reductio ad absurdum that one or both of the principles we began with is false. Or we have a new idea.

"I have been researching new business models for artists working in the low end of the long tail. How can one make a living in a micro-niche? Is it even possible, particularly in this realm of no-cost copies?" Great, if dispiriting feedback from Robert Ri

"The key to Twitter is the level of listening you do as well as talking. It is definitely supposed to be an interactive program. And, in fact, this is where you build the majority of your Whuffie (aka social capital)." Mixed feelings.

Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools.