Justkez

• Milkshake Shop show how changing a user input error message for processing credit cards to be less...accusatory...has dramatically increased sales.

• I spent some time trying to setup GT.M and MD/B on Ubuntu to immerse myself in key/value databases. It has been around since 1986, and shows some impressive benchmarks (compared to the CouchDB, MongoDB, Tokyo crowd), but I didn't quite get mine off the ground. More research needed. One downside, and comeback on the criticism it presents against modern day key/value databases is that whilst it is open-source, the support is commercialised.

• kuro5hin proposes the greatest program ever written - a chess game for the Sinclair ZX-81, with AI, and with only 672 bytes of memory; astonishing.

• The Google phone (Nexus One) is out. I'm more inclined to agree with the "two years too late" and "iPhone competitor" camps, instead of the "wow fantastic" camp. Certainly wouldn't for out £330 for one offline whilst already owning a (first generation) iPhone.

• ...However, I would fork out £130 for the Boxee Box; it would replace an archaic laptop plugged into the TV via VGA.

• A link and thread on the word for the "smell of rain" - most notably when rain falls on dry earth. That word is Petrichor.

• An interesting posting on The Physics of Space Battles - not tremendously scientific, but certainly an enjoyable diversion for the Sci-Fi inclined.

• Theodore Dalrymple's (pen name for Anthony Daniels) Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics & Culture of Decline looks like a good last-minute stocking filler. An old boy at the pub claimed that Theodore "is a sage" - high praise.

• The Guardian's crowdsourcing MP expenses system is a fantastic demonstration of social technology. Simon Willison talks about the lessons learnt from building such a system (twice).

• Also from Simon Willison is a superb introduction to Node.js - it does look tempting.

I'd love to do one of these every day...

• An interesting coming-together of computing science and popular internet culture. The New York Times has a piece on Dr. Jim Gray, who saw an inevitable shift in the practice of science because of data innundation. In the mean time, Merlin Mann contributed "Enough" - a piece highlighting excessive consumption of digital media for Seth Godin's free ebook, What Matters Now.

  Update: A great piece on Internet information overload by Thomas Petersen. There must be some neural networks/machine learning algorithms in development for something like this; raising important entities to the top of a stack, and leaving the less-applicable in an easily searchable space below.

• Hopefully Aldo Cortesi has satisfied his mind's "wondering" with his recent project The impact of language choice on github projects. Fingers crossed that the next service that serves his curiosities will have the infrastructure to support 55Gb of needless transfers (5000 Git repositories), and the subsequent hosting of a 100Mb "findings" database.

  Here's hoping he is a fully paid up member and recent donor to Github.

• Jeff Atwood recently experienced slight data loss over on Coding Horror - feel for the guy, and I'm sure he has learnt his lesson. Inevitably, Joel Spolsky chimes in (although no direct reference to Jeff) so he can play high and mighty when it happens to him. Chances are that if you do have a full backup, you don't really mind sifting through it for 24 hours to get it restored.

• 24 ways is back, but seems to perform awfully in Google Chrome; serious vertical scroll issues.

Although these posts aren't stricly daily...

• The BBC Internet blog talks about what they do to optimise the iPlayer delivery - pornography for the optimisation obsessed. Makes my use of WP_Super_Cache look a bit weak.

• Nice, simple comparison of using and not-using gzip to compress your website. (Bit of an optimisation theme so far...)

• Nice breakdown of the traits of successful user interfaces. Although, whilst Office 2007 is consistent, it doesn't make it good.

• Great overview of CSS font sizing options. It would be great if one value meant the same accross all web and publishing mediums, but we all know this will never happen.

• Doing the rounds, but The 50 Most Brilliant Atheists of All Time - hard thing to categorise, is brilliance. Good read on the whole, but people still have this notion of "look at me I'm an atheist". Nonetheless, good profiles of very interesting people.

A wrap up of what piqued my interest today.

• A thorough analysis of The New York Times' front page. Conclusion being that they don't really care about their content (BBC News is a good contrast).

• The fallacy of "web experts" - first there was HTML, then SEO and now Social Media - what's next? In the UK the legal definition of an expert is that person in the room with most knowledge on a subject...the web is a big room.

• First time on Copyblogger through their post "Three Grammar Rules You Can (And Should) Break" - good to highlight them to a wide audience, but generally pretty subjective and target-demographic specific.

• Steve Souders gets detailed when benchmarking CSS import vs. link techniques in "don't use @import" - pretty thorough.

• Impressive outline of Chartbeat from Ross Hill. They must be packing some serious bandwidth.

• Impressive centred CSS tab action by Matthew James Taylor. He has some other good examples of general CSS goodness.

• Simply superb Sorting Algorithm Animations. Fantastic illustrations, explanations and discussions around popular sorting algorithms.

Continuing a popular, city-naming trend, here is my list for 2008:

• San Francisco, CA
• Las Vegas, NV
• Honfleur, France
• Split, Croatia
• Hvar, Croatia
• Krakow, Poland
• New York, NY
• Hackensack, NJ (x2, whoopee)
• Singapore, Singapore

Choosing to ignore UK cities/towns, as that doesn't sound too jet set, does it. Unfortunately falling well short of a silver executive club card with BA. Maybe next year.