MiramarMike - Blog

[cross post with WaveADept blog ] Google I/O 2010 , this year's annual developer event Google hosts, has been full of interesting announcements , ( re ) releases and developer goodies (we are particularly interested in the Gmail contextual gadgets , expect more news from WaveAdept) and whilst we are certainly happy for our clients that Google Apps is expanding out to become a "platform" onto which the commodities of mail, calendar, documents can be built, we were chuffed to see the following session sandwiched inside the agenda . How to lose friends and alienate people: The joys of engineering leadership from Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. Whilst the session was aimed at "engineering leadership" it can, of course, be applied to any team. I love that they start of saying that the word "manager" isn't useful anymore (was it ever). But hey, don't take our word for it, here's the Wave used to annotate the session A

I'm sure you've all heard the hullabaloo from the digerati* (the people that jump onto the technology as soon as it comes out and leave it it in disdain when "real people" appear ... believe me, it happens) about the changes to Facebook's default privacy settings allowing more and more of the stored data to be accessed by anyone, anything or any app. So what, some online site changes it's default settings, who cares eh! Two reasons why "So what": They have 400 million users They don't care about any of them So now we have (conveniently for Facebook): The "flashing 12" problem The "surely they won't do anything bad" issue The "Meh, I don't care" attitude "Mike, this is all just computers, just too bloody technical for me - leave me be as I have some friends to talk with and a photo to post!!" I tried to tell everyone but it just wasn't getting through. And then I found this ... The Ev

Richard (McManus) doing what Richard does so well - taking a technical subject and distilling the key trends out of it so we can all see where the future is (probably) going. RWW Mobile Summit Keynote Presentation, May 2010 View more presentations from Richard MacManus .

That's how to make a point! These speed tests were filmed at actual web page rendering times. If you're interested in the technical details, read on! Equipment used: - Computer: MacBook Pro laptop with Windows installed - Monitor - 24" Asus: We had to replace the standard fluorescent backlight with very large tungsten fixtures to funnel in more light to capture the screen. In addition, we flipped the monitor 180 degrees to eliminate a shadow from the driver board and set the system preferences on the computer to rotate 180 degrees. No special software was used in this process. - 15Mbps Internet connection. - Camera: Phantom v640 High Speed Camera at 1920 x 1080, films up to 2700 fps "Why does allrecipes.com in the potato gun sequence appear at once, and not the text first and images second? And why does it appear to render from bottom of the screen to the top?" Chrome sends the rendered page to the video card buffer all at once, which is why allrec

I'm lucky enough to be a part of a conversation on the ninja-talk@groups.open.org.nz mailing list where I get to hear amazingly passionate people talk about how they want to actively help NZ Government become an open and sharing set of organisations. And being mainly self-confessed geeks (with a seemingly inequitable love of live offline quirkiness) the focus of many is to solve the NZ traditional "closed approach to governance" by using a computer. But there are also those that want to be real about it all and actually get physical in their approach - talk to people etc etc ... Nat Torkington popped up these few "real and active" actions that all Kiwi geeks can do in order for those in power (mostly politicians but by no means limited to that happy band) to get to hear the "open up our data!" request: Register where you live, to find your local MP's Office Commit to regular meetings (collecting dates and times, reporting back) Discussions