I made this layout a few months ago for another project which never ended up launching. With some minor tweaks I’ve converted in into a Wordpress template and decided to use it for this blog. It’s clearly very very minimal, XHTML, and W3C compliant.

Two relatively new websites that I can’t live without.
Songza

Songza puts every other online music service to shame. It’s of questionable legal nature, but poses no risk to end users. Songza indexes the web for unprotected MP3s and lets the user play them in an extremely elegant flash interface. It’s not possible to download the music, [...]

Google makes its money from advertising. Everyone knows this.
Earlier today, Firefox was not rendering a page correctly, so I switched over to Internet Explorer hoping it would. As I did so, something dawned upon me: I haven’t seen an online advertisement in over three years, let alone clicked one.
For example, one website that I frequent, [...]

For those of you who like to be ahead of the curve, access your facebook account via http://www.new.facebook.com. It gives you a preview of the new version of the facebook design that is due to be released in the upcoming weeks.
I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I like the lack of clutter, [...]

Undoubtedly the best phrase that simply explains everything there is to scaling web applications.

Remarkable new search demo website called Powerset released today. It’s still in beta, and only indexes one website, Wikipedia, today. As they get more funding they will add more servers and computing power to index more websites.
Instead of doing simple keyword matches like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo do today, the engine tries understands what you [...]

I love audio books. I’ve found them to be a great way to stay awake during long drives, because it literally sounds like someone is talking to you the entire time. Music, especially music you’ve heard dozens of times, is easy to tone out but audio books aren’t.
iTunes and iPods/iPhones have the ability to remember [...]

http://photo.askthefool.com is back. It has new pictures from my Alaska trip and a few from this year. Oxford pictures are still down as they still need pruning, date fixing, enhancing, and tagging. The main problem with them is I need to synchronize timestamps from different people’s pictures.
Technical note: While my new photo gallery still looks [...]

Mini-feeds have a few problems. Not because people don’t like them and not because of the privacy issues it raises. Facebook has been tracking this relational data for years now, and this new feature is merely making that information available to its users. Facebook has a good enough product that people will use it regardless [...]

I’ve removed every use of the JOIN function when making queries to my database which powers my photoGallery after reading Cal Henderson’s presentation from 2004 on how flickr works. Instead of using JOINs I now use multiple copies of data, and a lot more SELECTs. Performance went up nearly 6 fold and the resources used [...]