Links from 2010

Container-grown plants have restricted root space with limited access to water and nutrients, making them both hungry and thirsty. Add to this the increased exposure to the drying effects of wind and sun, and a lot of plants just won't be able to cope. The answer is to choose ones that have xerophytic modifications, which means they hang on to water for as long as possible.

The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.

I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work.

"This new feature offers you a way to change the URL displayed in the browser* through javascript without reloading the page. It will also create a back-button event and you even have a state object you can interact with. This means you won’t have to use the hash-hack anymore if you want add state to your AJAX-application, and search engines will be able to index your pages too." Not IE, of course.

The best solution would be to build linked clones. A linked clone is a copy of a virtual machine that shares virtual disks with the parent virtual machine in an ongoing manner. This conserves disk space, and allows multiple virtual machines to use the same software installation. It also means we’ll be able to run the two VMs simultaneously.

Basically paste your KML feed into the Google Maps search box.

We’ve found that one of the easiest ways to allow people to change the database is by using version-controlled SQL delta scripts. We’ve also found it beneficial to ensure that the scripts used to build development environments are the exact same used in QA, UAT and production. Maintaining and making use of these deltas can quickly become a significant overhead – dbdeploy aims to address this.

Info on how to configure DNS etc for safe mail sending from apps. Bit of a shill for the Postmark app, mind.

Quick summary of the Tom Taylor, Bobbie Johnson, Paul Ford media/shipping discussion plus nice reiteration on (no) comments: "I don’t think we should be looking at comments to see conversations. It isn’t much of a conversation when the same person determines the subject matter of every dialogue. The best online conversations I’ve seen have been blog to blog: somebody posts something on their blog; somebody else feels compelled to respond on their own blog. The quality of such a response is nearly always better than a comment on the originating blog for the simple reason that people care more about what appears on their own site than on someone else’s."

"HTML is a language with roots in library science. It doesn’t know or care what content looks like. (Even HTML5 doesn’t care what content looks like.) Neither a tool like Photoshop, which is all about pixels, nor a tool like Illustrator, which is all about vectors, can generate semantic HTML, because the visual and the semantic are two different things." Big fat yes to this.

Diffable uses differential compression to reduce the size of JavaScript downloads. It makes a lot of sense. Suppose your web site has a large external script. When a new release comes out, it’s often the case that a bulk of that large script is unchanged. And yet, users have to download the entire new script even if the old script is still cached.

"Over the next decade we’ll see game mechanics become ubiquitous amongst companies. Consumers will migrate in droves to companies who properly deploy game mechanics because doing business with them is more fun, rewarding and even addictive." Makes me feel slightly queasy.

The jury is still out on this'un.

For MacBook and MacBook Pro users, the choice of which of the two available USB ports to use for your sound card hook-up may have never occurred to you. New evidence is showing, that especially with the new i5 and i7 models, you might be missing out on performance by choosing the wrong port.

Working with their client Procter and Gamble, the advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy opened the ark with its online work for Old Spice. The campaign is simple: The manly star from the TV spots responds to queries on Twitter via humorous 30-second YouTube videos that are being watched and re-tweeted with abandon.

Still laughing at the @oldspice videos from last night, best way to keep warm

Donationware alternative to AppZapper.

Stamen's @shawnbot has put together a great context/history of dataviz for the class he is teaching at SVA in NYC:

wget is pretty good and all but not entirely convinced the words "ultimate" and "awesome" are totally justified.

Free, cross-platform diff app.

A new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation simple. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction. The Fake Workflows you create can be saved, reopened, and shared.

An automatic, personal diary system to help reclaim and consolidate your ever-expanding digital life with simple visualizations that you can use every day.

While it is important to understand how the algorithms work, it is not necessary to work the maths by hand. There are some first class freeware datamining programs available that do all the heavy lifting, so long as you know how to prepare the data and how to set the parameters of the algorithms so they produce valid results.

<blockquote>Employing an internal data griot makes a lot of sense: someone who can spend the time looking for both large trends and individual needs and uses that illuminate and portend. It’s a hard job, needing a mix of skills rarely found – a smidgen of hard maths and statistics, a pinch of programming, and dessert spoons of various liberal arts. The Economist (sub required) posits them as data scientists (a position Flickr are currently looking for), but this misses the ability to ask interesting questions, and having hunches – being so immersed in the data that relevancy screams out."</blockquote>

It seems in Marketing, the world of Digital still consists largely of people who’ve not yet twigged that ‘Digital’ means more than “…on the web” or “…on your mobile”. Conceptually, there’s still a divide separating the Digital from the Physical. Forward-looking brands and agencies are onto this.

The media object is an image to the left, with descriptive content to the right

Kone-R in the mix for Nick Luscombe's Flomotion radio:

Mmmm.

Yay etc.

Reference. Refusal to actively compete/collect.

A grand total of three south of the river.

My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.

By a landslide the 'Back' button was the most clicked of all navigation buttons which include the Back, Forward, Reload, Stop, and Home buttons. Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days.

Miniature collapsing chairs, robots hiding in transparent jewellery boxes, a story telling time-piece, tea cups full of mechanical storms and a machine that goes off with a bang