Another well-written and insightful post from James Bennett on the ridiculous conflict that seems to spring up between designers and developers. Honestly, Bennett’s writing is so good, you should really just subscribe to him, NOW.
Designers and developers: FIGHT! by James Bennett
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Friday, June 27, 2008 @ 10:59 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
Researchers devise neural implant that learns over time
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 @ 13:45 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
This is a very cool development in the area of brain-machine interfaces, and will probably propel artificial limb technology by leaps and bounds. It will be wonderful… until the machines rise up and overthrow us.
Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 @ 08:34 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
An interesting essay illustrating how human behavior is not rational. This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but it bears repeating less we get too full of ourselves.
Savage Minds: Warcraft and the Craftsman: Grinding, Crafting, and Craft.
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 @ 10:53 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
A fascinating article providing an anthropological take on virtual worlds like Second Life and games like World of Warcraft. It’s well worth a read.
The basics of creating a tumblelog with Django
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 @ 10:49 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
I’ve been toying with adapting my site code to do this sort of thing. It’s always nice to see when someone else takes the time to publish their solution. I don’t know if I’ll end up doing exactly the same thing, but this post certainly gave me some ideas.
Minimal
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Sunday, June 15, 2008 @ 10:42 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
I’m kinda digging the new design of James Bennet’s site with the minimal look. It almost makes me think I’m going in the wrong direction by trying to go bigger and more multimedia on my site. That being said, I tend to think these minimal extreme designs (while being more content focused) are actually more difficult for users to navigate without directions, so I’d probably need to find a sweet spot in the middle. However, Bennett’s minimal approach is wonderfully readable.
Marketing Sucks
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Sunday, June 1, 2008 @ 08:27 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
This is a really great post from Chris Penn. In it he discusses how marketing, as a discipline, has a branding problem and has managed to ruin its credibility with its audience. He argues that short term thinking has resulted in numerous bad decisions that have been detrimental to a marketer’s goals.
A lot of this kind of thinking is old hat to people who have been following and are excited about social media and permission marketing, but this article is a particularly cogent description of the issue, as well as how to correct it.
National Terrible Unfinished Novel-Writing Month: Epilogue
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 14:57 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
This is a great post from Andy Ihnatko on writing. It’s a bit tongue in cheek, but he’s got a valid point. It’s certainly something I am guilty of, as are many others I know. Read it, let it marinate, choose what you want to do, and then do it.
Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 11:17 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
Over Memorial Day weekend, Revision3’s servers were brought down benenath the weight of a Denial of Service attack. The culprit? None other than MediaDefender, an anti-piracy service that specializes in disrupting P2P traffic.
Apparently, MediaDefender was abusing Revision3’s Bittorrent tracker (which they use to distribute legal copies of their own shows), by “injecting a broad array of torrents into [Revision3’s] tracking server.” When Revision3 deauthorized those torrents, MediaDefender’s servers “initiated a flood of SYN packets attempting to reconnect to the files.” Approximately 8,000 packets per second, by Revision3’s logs. MediaDefender claims that this was not an attack aimed at Revision3, but a natural consequence of losing contact with the torrents they had improperly injected into Revision3’s tracking server.
DoS attacks are illegal, and even if this wasn’t a targeted attack, you would think MediaDefender would still be liable for any financial losses Revision3 suffered as a result of the attack, as well as illicit profits MediaDefender earned through the unauthorized use of their server. However, I am not a lawyer. I’m hoping that Revision3 will take action, because this is really just the tip of the iceberg for MediaDefender, and they need to be brought in line.
New Image and Video Demos of Android
Bookmarked via Ma.gnolia on Thursday, May 29, 2008 @ 08:41 CDT by Daniel Andrlik
The new demos of Android, Google’s mobile operating system, are very impressive. The UI has had a makeover, and there’s some impressive stuff going on here. Supposedly, Android will be shipping on some phones later this year, I just wish we knew more about the hardware that will be running it.
