LonelyBob's blog

Facebook and Instagram analogies

So many great analogies, totally worth reading.

Facebook, a company with a potential market cap worth five or six moon landings, is spending one of its many billions of dollars to buy Instagram, a tiny company dedicated to helping Thai beauty queens share photos of their fingernails….

First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird….

Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom….

So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

via Percolate

Podcasts In Memory of 3/11 Northern Japan Earthquake

The 1 year anniversary of the 9.0 Japan Earthquake that occured on 3/11/2011 is this weekend. I'd like to highlight a few podcasts to listen to in remembrance of the event, to bring you back to that scary and historical time in audio form.

Note: Add this RSS feed to your favorite Podcatcher to download the episodes highlighted below:  http://rss.spokenword.org/playlist/6546

Japan's Earthquake: Deciphering the Fury - Curiouser & Curiouser host Jai Ranganathan examines the tectonic roots of the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

This Week in Asia Episode 88: Our Thoughts with Japan - This Week in Asia talks with Gen Kanai of Mozilla Japan about his experience in Tokyo during the earthquake.

Tech News Today 199: Japan Update and IP Rant - Tom Merrit and gang take some time out of this episode to focus on what's going on in Japan with listener reports including my friend and great photographer @jasohill of Iwate.

8-4 Play: After The Quake - Tokyo based video game localization developers discuss their experiences during the largest earthquake in Japan's recorded.

Also take a browse through 1rick's QuakeMap project that curated videos of the earthquake and tsunami and placed them on a Map for a better visual understanding of how the earthquake impacted Japan and it's coastline.

Funky Fractal Music video

Developer Challenge

And then, when you've written all that and got it working, you take it back to the user and they tell you it's not what they wanted. Or they show you some new input that doesn't match what they originally said. If you're good... and lucky, your code is robust enough to handle it. If you're not... back to coding with you! Repeat until dead.

In that light, a good developer is one who works well with others, but also can make a multitude of small, detailed decisions about a problem they know very little about. They need to take vague requirements and work with a user to turn them into something a computer can do repeatedly. A good developer looks beyond the immediate requirements and thinks ahead ensuring the code is flexible enough to withstand future change. A good developer writes code not for themselves, but for everyone else on the team.

interesting point.

From: http://blogs.perl.org/users/michael_g_schwern/2012/02/a-real-developer-challenge.html

記事にできなかったCES2012に出展されたカッコイイカーオーディオやナビ搭載の車たち #CES_jp

via ya-ko.com

@ya_k0's coverage of cars/vehicles/Ford/etc. from CES.

全米最大の家電展示会「CES2012」（Consumer Electronics Show）に行ってきた #CES_jp #CES2012

via ya-ko.com

Compilation of @ya_k0's CES coverage and photos from the Vegas show.

Blackout for SOPA

via www.insideview.ie

#StopSOPA and StopPIPA

海外旅行へ行く前に入れておきたい厳選iPhoneアプリ12個

海外旅行（出張）に行く時、旅程をしっかり立てる人も立てない人もこれだけは入れておきたいiPhoneアプリ12個がようやく自分の中で決まったのでご紹介。アメリカでしか使えないアプリやUS iTunesでしかDLできないアプリもあるのでその旨ご注意を。

via ya-ko.com

CES gadget & news coverage by @ya_k0

SAY Media Acquires Read/Write/Web

SAY Media, the San Francisco-based media company, has aquired the influential technology blog Read/Write/Web.

via www.beet.tv

My predicition, ReadWriteWeb to switch to Typepad/MovableType in 2-3 months.

Mitigation of Apache Range Header DoS Attack

There was a posting to the Full Disclosure mail-list yesterday by @kingcope in which he provided a script called killapache.pl that will cause a severe denial of service condition on Apache web servers.  I had a chance to test out the script and can confirm that it will lock up an Apache server rather quickly.  This blog post will highlight how the attack works and also the new rules that were just added to the OWASP ModSecurity CRS to prevent it.

via blog.spiderlabs.com

I hope that Apache and the various Linux distro providers are ontop of this.