First ride on the new Specialized Roubaix Pro. Light, fast, comfortable — amazing.
Ginger & garlic broccoli stir-fry, accompanied with a red Yllera wine from the northern Spanish Ribera del Duero. First recipe I’ve made from the excellent Primal Blueprint Cookbook (Paleo recipes).
Ginger & garlic broccoli stir-fry, accompanied with a red Yllera wine from the northern Spanish Ribera del Duero. First recipe I’ve made from the excellent Primal Blueprint Cookbook (Paleo recipes).
Reading scary stories on the Kindle while waiting for kebabs. (Taken with instagram at Sheesh kebab)
Netflix switches to Amazon S3 (via @mjtsai)
For the past few years, we at Makalu have been engineering our customer’s products to run on the Amazon AWS platform — including EC2 virtual servers, S3 storage, and the CloudFront CDN. Although auto-scaling was one of the principle motivations, we’ve come to really appreciate the architecture as a whole (especially some of the not-so-frequently discussed aspects, like the load balancer), and the continual roll-out of new features, services and improvements.
The High Scalability blog published an interesting article last week discussing Netflix’s transition to Amazon S3 storage. That’s big news!
Convenient Bitly statistics with LaunchBar
Bit.ly, the URL shortening service, offers access to a link’s statistics, by appending a plus character, “+”, to a Bit.ly URL. For example: http://bit.ly/af3UDi+
Using LaunchBar’s configurable search index, we can create a shortcut that takes us to the Bit.ly statistics page.
Creating the shortcut.
Access LaunchBar’s search index:
Add an entry called “Bitly Statistics,” whose definition is simply *+ (The * is a token representing what you pass to LaunchBar, and the + is the Bit.ly appended character needed to access the stats screen.)
Using the shortcut
Copy a Bit.ly URL to the clipboard.
Invoke LaunchBar, type “Bitly”. This should select your newly created shortcut.
Hit the SPACE key, and paste in the clipboard URL.
Hit RETURN, and you’ll be taken to the Bit.ly statistics page.
For sale by owner. New home on Lake Lanier, in Gainesville, Georgia. Beautiful, with single-slip dock.
UI: Having reviewed your application, we invite you to submit your application.
In the process of applying for a domain brokerage with Sedo, I was shown this screen:
As a result of the automated review of my application, I’m being told that I may submit my application.
Apply pinprick when test passes — the culmination of user interface design.
Gosh do I pity the operator of whatever testing device or software was blessed with this paragon of user interface design.
Given the propensity of any poor soul faced with configuring this system to fall immediately into unconsciousness, we can be thankful they added the option to “Apply pinprick when test passes”. And I’d suggest the default state is enabled.
UX: A better device help system.
My HP printer just reported:
Print cartridge alignment failed. Please see device documentation for details.
The problem, of course, is that I have no idea at all where the device documentation is.
If this printer is smart enough to connect to my office wifi, it could surely be taught to send an email. A better help system would include a message that says:
Print cartridge alignment failed. Don’t worry; I’ve just sent you an email to email@address.com, containing a link to a help page.
Not only would this be more helpful to me, the user, but (via my clicking on the links) it could provide HP with some usable feedback data — namely, what kind of problems its users are having with its devices.
Programmers designing? Oh, boy.
I just received notification that Graphic Converter 7 has been released, boasting that, because we asked for it, “Four programmers have spent a year redesigning the interface!”
I’m downloading the update now, and hope it works well, but I’m only slightly more optimistic than if the ad had read, “Four designers have spent a year reprogramming the batch processor!”
