State of Technology #50

#at_other_places –

• Time.is – very elegant and very useful
• Twitter bought Posterous this week
• Mind candy – Paul Graham’s delightful new post – ‘Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas’
• Think outside the box – New Volvo has an airbag outside the car for pedestrians

#architecture – JavaScript performance MythBusters (from SXSU 2012) – a four-person walkthrough

#code – ‘Database Changes Done Right’ – Full process of Software Engineering w.r.t. Databases (change, build, deploy)

#design – Google’s new “Report a Bug” or “Feedback Tool” now allows you to selectively capture screenshot in browser (Hat tip: Aalap Sharma)

#essay – Memes of the fortnight –

            Why I left Goldman Sachs (One word: Muppet); Why I left Google (One symbol: +); Why I left McDonald’s etc.

#mobile – Faux G – what on earth does that ‘4g’ in your iPhone 4s means
“AT&T and Verizon spent tens of billions of dollars to acquire new 700MHz licenses at auction and from existing license holders in a headlong rush for 4G. That left AT&T with the bragging rights of having a faster 3G network and a plan for a faster 4G one. In response, Verizon moved aggressively into 4G, pushing handset makers to deliver early kit (first laptop adapters and later phones), and lighting up LTE networks at a more rapid clip than AT&T. (Both now claim most of their 3G coverage will be LTE-ready by the end of 2013.)”

#saas – Amazon ‘cloud’ has roughly 450,000 servers across 7 data centers

 

#service – How large is your web page, and why it matters? Google home page is 0.5MB while a single tweet is 2MB!

#social – This music from the emerging rapper, released on Facebook, can ONLY be heard by one person at a time.

#tool – This man came up with the idea of iPad – 15 years ago!

#tweaks n’ hacks – London Bus stop now shows different ads to men and women

#etc

• Fonts as cats
• Ant Colony living in Scanner – Time Lapse video spanning 5 years

#parting_thought – “So much complexity in software comes from trying to make one thing do two things.” – Ryan Singer