Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Book Titles, If They Were Written Today
11, Sep 2009Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them
Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany
Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us
Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss
Then: The Prince
Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)
- In: General| Uncategorized
Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server
10, Sep 2009Facebook has announced
the release of its Tornado web server under the Apache license.
“Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework
written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous
connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Tornado is a core
piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality,
which we plan to actively maintain. While Tornado is similar to existing
Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google’s webapp, web.py), it focuses on
speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.” The code
can be had from tornadoweb.org.
- In: General| Uncategorized
Facebook just announced that it has released Tornado, the real-time web framework that powers FriendFeed, as open source code. According to Facebook’s David Recordon, Tornado is one of the core infrastructure pieces that power FriendFeed’s real-time functionality. The framework, according to Recordon, is similar to other Python frameworks like Google’s webapp or web.py, but is faster and able to handle more simultaneous traffic than its competitors. On his personal blog, Bret Taylor, one of the co-founders of FriendFeed, explains the technical details behind Tornado in more detail.
Sponsor
Tornado is available under the Apache open source license. A basic demo of Tornado showing the commenting feature is available here.
Developers will now be able to tap into one of the core infrastructure pieces that made FriendFeed tick so well. While other services (like Twitter) tend to have a lot of trouble to scale up when they grow, FriendFeed never ran into these problems and Tornado was surely one of the main reasons why the site managed to stay up and running even when demand spiked during major events.
Here is what developers will get when they implement Tornado according to Bret Taylor:
All the basic site building blocks – Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.
Real-time services – Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed’s servers.
High performance – Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado’s baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks
NASA scientists have created an magnetic field powerful enough to make lab mice levitate, which is a big Where’s My Back to the Future Skateboard breakthrough. The only problem is that the mice have to be high as kites too.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have created a superconducting magnet that generates enough energy to lift lab rats animals off the floor. While there were experiments with tiny animals like frogs and bugs before, this is the first time they have made a large animal like this fly under these conditions. The magnet pushes the water inside the mice up, making them fly.
The amazing fact is that the JPL magnet works at room temperature (Correction: the space the rat is in is room temp, not the magnet) —not the ultra-cooled down environments typical of these magnets—and it's powerful enough to make these rodents levitate, something that wasn't possible before.
The mice were high in more than one way, though. According to researcher Yuanming Liu, the “first mouse actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented.” So they gave a mild sedative to the next mouse, who was happy to float. [Live Science via Yahoo News]
- In: General
- Tags: anti-gravity, jpl, Levitating mouse, Magnets, Nasa, Science, Superconductors
Early birds may get the best worms–or at least the best garage sale deals–but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do. In a new study researchers Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux, both at the University of Liège in Belgium, and their colleagues first asked 16 extreme early risers and 15 extreme night owls to spend a week following their natural sleep schedule. Then subjects spent two nights in a sleep lab, where they again followed their preferred sleep patterns and underwent cognitive testing twice daily while in a functional MRI scanner.
An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.
13 Ways to Categorize Gifts in Holiday Emails
9, Sep 2009This post was originally published in December 2008, and we’re reposting it as it will be helpful as you gear up for Holiday 2009. Remember, these ideas are also applicable to home pages. Special thanks to Anna Yeaman of Style Campaign, you can read…
- In: General
- Tags: Email Marketing, holiday
I recently toured our state (Michigan) with members of my staff. We met with small business owners to offer them actionable marketing and sales advice that they could take back to the office that day. Much of that advice revolved around social media marketing.
While no two businesses were the same, we did find ourselves discussing a few of the same topics quite often. So I’d like to share those with you, along with the best practices that we suggested. Perhaps you, as a small business owner or manager, have many of the same issues.
I have a small marketing budget. What can I do?
This was a question that many small business owners had for us. They knew they needed to get involved with online marketing, but were afraid their budgets …
- In: General
- Tags: Marketing & Revenue Growth
Querying a Multi-Tenant Data Architecture
8, Sep 2009
During my career as a consultant and web developer I’ve worked on a number of “software as a service” (SaaS) web applications. Such web applications are designed to be used
by multiple customers, where each customer is typically a company that has dozens or hundreds of users (its employees or customers) that access the system. One such SaaS-style
application that I’ve worked on for the past several years is a hosted application used by hospitals and clinics to manage patient information, doctor’s appointments,
billing, prescriptions, and so forth.
When developing a SaaS-style application you need to decide how to store each customer’s data. The article Multi-Tenant
Data Architecture examines different data architectures for SaaS applications. One option presented in the article is to store all customer data in a single database.
This approach requires adding a CustomerID column to all of your tables to determine which data belongs to what customer. Moreover, whenever you query the
database to display data in a web page you need to make sure to filter the data by the CustomerID of the currently logged on user. Another option is to use a
separate database for each customer. This approach lessens the risk of a user somehow seeing or modifying data for a different customer and this level of isolation may be
necessary for applications that store sensitive data, such as health care and financial applications. The hospital software SaaS application I work on uses such a separate
database data architecture.
One downside to using separate databases is that it is harder to run a query against all customer data. For example, if you find an anomaly in the data for one customer – say,
a patient record that has a street address specified but no city specified – it can be difficult to quickly determine whether the same anomaly exists in other databases. This
article discusses different ways to query multiple databases and shows a simple, web-based tool I’ve created and routinely use for those SaaS-style web applications I work
on that use separate databases to store different customer data. Read on to learn more!
Read More >
- In: General| Uncategorized
The lightweight (small file size) and concise jQuery library makes it relatively easy to add interactive effects and merchandising to just about any ecommerce website.
In this edition of “Web Design Tips,” I will quickly show you how to combine a few jQuery effects and the jCarousel jQuery plugin to create a merchandising section near the top of a sample page. This merchandising section will show four products at a time and slide to the left, revealing additional products every three seconds. When a visitor aims his mouse pointer at one of the product images, the slider will stop and display a brief product description for that item.
Video: Combining jQuery Effects and Plugins For A Great Marketing Effect
[video]
Downloading jCar…
- In: General
- Tags: Design & Development