27 Dinner pics

Posted 2007 October 28 @ 16:15 - filed under Computers.

Last night's 27 Dinner in Cape Town, at the pleasant Deer Park venue, was good. I would have liked a few more presentations, and more seating, but it's all good.

A few pics are up in the gallery.

50 Parties, 12 Photos

Posted 2007 September 16 @ 09:42 - filed under Stuff.

50 Parties is an initiative by Jimbo Wales (Wikipedia, Wikia Inc.) and Heather Ford (iCommons) "to inspire 50 parties with a mix of people, all over the world. 50 Parties aims to bring together people from Wikimedia, iCommons, CC, FSF, and other Free Culture groups including artists and programmers."

The second of these parties was held in Cape Town yesterday, and I took these pics.

Desurgency

Posted on 2007 February 15 @ 11:20 - filed under Admin.

Despite improved technology that now makes low-volume full-colour printing an option for homes and small offices, the actual cost of full-colour reproduction has been steadily increasing. In this light, psychohistorian.org will, until further notice, only be available in black-and-white.

Paul Graham 8, verse 12

Posted 2006 Nov 27 @ 22:00, via Gustav - filed under Computers.

"Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp."

Web tech family tree

Posted 2006 Nov 21 @ 11:16, via Bertus - filed under Computers.

FJAX, PHP, JSP, ASP.NET, CSS2 – for the big picture on how the various web technologies are related, get the big picture at modernlifeisrubbish.

Four-second website death

Posted 2006 November 10 @ 11:14 - filed under Life on the Web.

A BBC News item reports research which suggests that after waiting four seconds for your webpage to load, you've lost your reader.

The research was conducted by JupiterResearch in the USA, commissioned by online sales company Akamai (press release). "Four seconds is the new benchmark by which a retail site will be judged", said their VP for Marketing, Brad Rinklin, based on the finding that 75% of the people questioned stated that they would not return to a site that was slow on loading. Even more ominous, is that about 30% of the online shoppers said they formed a negative impression of a business if their website was sloppy.

Although slow load-times is not on Jakob Nielsen's 2006 updated "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design", response time is certainly still highly relevant ("Response Times: The Three Important Limits").

100 million and counting

Posted 2006 November 07 @ 08:55 - filed under Computers.

A new web survey by Netcraft reveals that, as of November 1, there are over 100 million websites on the Internet! In October alone, 3.5 million new sites came online. In 1997 April the Internet had just 1 million websites; since 2004 May, it has doubled in size. In the back office, the lion's share of the servers that host these sites goes to Apache, which manages 60% of the websites out there. Microsoft's server software handles 33% of the remainder. And Jakob Nielsen has his say...

Who uses eBay?

Posted 2006 October 12 @ 00:27 - filed under Psychology.

A recent study of the computer-use habits of American undergraduate students found that the use of eBay was more common amongst those students who were more active on the Internet, more proficient in computer use, and who were in senior years. Interestingly, age did not predict eBay use. The only correlation with sex was for buying (and not selling) on eBay – men where the biggest online-shoppers.

The sample consisted of 386 students (237 studying psychology & 149 doing a business course; median age of 22.0 years (SD=4.2); 213 female & 173 male). Details appear in Psychological Reports, 2006 (June), vol 98, pp 819-820.

How loud to turn up your iPod

Posted 2006 October 19 @ 09:14 - filed under Computers.

You're tooling along, jacked into your Apple iPod (now shipping with a virus), perhaps listening to your favourite astronomy podcast - just how loud can you crank it up before you risk damage to your ears?

Researchers at the US National Hearing Conservation Association have published findings and recommendations for safe volume levels and listening times. The details are summarised at YubaNet.com, but here's the bottomline: you can listen to a typical Southern Sky Talk podcast at 90% volume (on the Apple iPod) before you get into trouble.

I'm busy scripting the next edition now - I'll speak clearly and keep it short.

Keywords: Computers, internet, technology, website design

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