Posts for February, 2009

Feb 28, 2009

Agile Development A Culture, If You Believe

Jeff Patton says that agile development is more of a culture than a process. It is quite refreshing to read constructive a constructive discussion on the topic, though it did put pressure on me to really understand what culture meant, and it can have several meanings. I think agile can be agile because it asks you to follow a set of principles without being restrictive about how we do that. [Continue]

Feb 27, 2009

Using MySQL For Schema-less Data

Bret Taylor, one of the founders of FriendFeed, explains how they use MySQL to store schema-less data. It is an insightful post not only because he explains why they chose MySQL, but also the limitations of their schema-less design over an RDBMS. And more importantly it illustrates The importance of modeling your data, even if it is to realize that it has flexible schemas, without thinking of what tools you will use.

Feb 26, 2009

Use Fan To Target Users On Multiple Virtual Machines

Fan – the new kid in town. Fan’s USP is its portability across Java VM and .NET CLR (and I assume Mono as well). Other than this, it seems to have combined good things from multiple worlds. [Continue]

Feb 25, 2009

Indian Bloggers Facing Legal Problems

Indian bloggers are getting in legal tangle. Bloggers have already faced legal threats from the mainstream media. But, because of the lack of laws, an individual usually chooses to back off and retract his/her opinions. [Continue]

Feb 25, 2009

Entrepreneurship In Schools

Sramana Mitra, as part of her series of entrepreneurship in India, asks if entrepreneurship should be taught to students. I firmly believe that school is the right place to inject the entrepreneurship bug. However, I believe it does not fit in the current marks-oriented curriculum in Indian schools. [Continue]

Feb 24, 2009

CMS Is Not At Fault, As Much As Wrong Choice Is

Clay has insightful thoughts about why CMSs don’t work. More often than not, off-the-shelf CMSs become a hurdle in the things we want to do our way. However, I do not think it is only the CMS to blame. [Continue]

Feb 23, 2009

ICANN Reconsidering gTLDs

ICANN is revisiting its decision allow custom top level domains. It was heavily criticized by corporate and individuals alike about its possible misuse, leave aside confusion it can create. ICANN has now composed a second draft (pdf) and is inviting feedback. [Continue]

Feb 22, 2009

User Interaction Can Make A Big Difference

Jared Spool gives an account of how changing a button made a big difference. Many site owners still measure their site’s success by registered members and that drives them to enforce registration. In fact a lot of user interaction is nowadays generalized assuming this. [Continue]

Feb 21, 2009

Warn Yourself If You Are Using IE6, And Upgrade

You will see the IE6 warning if you are reading this blog using IE6 or its older brethren. I have used conditional comments to detect the browser. <!--[if lte IE 6>] <p id="ie6msg">You are using an outdated browser. [Continue]

Feb 20, 2009

Ma.gnolia Gives Up

Finally, Ma.gnolia has given up, and lessons learnt. I had started using it about a couple of years back, so I did lose some links, but most of them have found a place in one of my blog posts. I have now moved to delicious, but like others, I have started to think of a way of protecting my data from such incidents. [Continue]