Using 'Circles' for 'read later' and 'draft post' ideas
Google+ is all about building your social graph of friends and acquaintances. The biggest separating factor on the platform versus other platforms who have later followed suit, is the ability to group your friends, family, colleagues, into separate “circles”, allowing you to very easily share posts and photos with certain groups of people. On Twitter, I used to ‘like’ things that I wanted to read later, and would call up my page of liked activities as a list of bookmarks.
Vendor Lock-in, and how Facebook was trapped in a MySQL 'fate worse than death'
Interesting how the writer of the article below mentions start-ups who use easy access to SQL skills to launch their business prototype, but then have to grow into more complex systems over time. Vendor lock-in can be a serious problem for startups who find themselves at a pivot point of maintain growth but needing to move to alternate technologies and platforms in order to sustain that growth in the first place.
My Chromebook arrives Aug 3rd-10th 2011
This post was copied from my Google+ timeline for posterity. Followup: delivery will be EARLY!
In-line upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 on my workstation at the office.
I love Debian’s in-line upgrades, especially with how seamless Canonical has made it within Ubuntu. Still, I have to question the speed of their CDN when downloading 1800 packages is going to take 8 more hours. Comcast and Speedtest.net have verified we have 10Mbit-15Mbit connectivity, so why all the slowness? One of my favorite features about World of Warcraft was the bittorrent client in their upgrade/installer software, allowing you to download patches in a fraction of the time.
Dare to Compare: Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting
My buddy Subash re-tweeted an article he read about [the real cost of cloud hosting])http://chrischandler.name/the-real-cost-of-cloud-hosting). While there’s nothing too surprising in the article when comparing basic hardware and data center costs to running on Amazon’s EC2 platform, I’m curious how well you could compare those costs to Google App Engine. Granted, there are more question marks when planning to use (or move to) App Engine for a web application, and that’s partly why I’m headed to Google IO to learn more and maybe chat with the team.
How not to be secure: blogsvertise.com stores passwords in insecure ways
I was approached by blogsvertise.com recently to reactivate my account, because I let it die a slow, agonizing, forever-alone, kind of death. I figured writing occasional sponsored blog articles would give me some extra Starbucks money here and there, and after talking to “Melissa”, and telling her why I’d left (I was flooded by irrelevant advertising ideas like lawnmowers) and what I’d need to make it worth my while, she reactivated my account, at which point their system sent me an Email: