Whether you’re a web designer, a print designer, or a photographer, you probably share a common trait with me and other creative types – a love for all things design related. Here are some blogs that cover various topics from web design to package design.
Ryan McAdams writes “Popular websites, such as Facebook, are wasting as much as 75MBit/sec of bandwidth due to excessively long URLs. According to a recent article over at O3 Magazine, they took a typical Facebook home page, looked at the traffic statistics from compete.com, and figured out the bandwidth savings if Facebook switched from using URL paths which, in some cases, run over 150 characters in length, to shorter ones. It looks at the impact on service providers, with the wasted bandwidth used by the subsequent GET requests for these excessively long URLs. Facebook is just one example; many other sites have similar problems, as well as CMS products such as Word Press. It’s an interesting approach to web optimization for high traffic sites.”
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cocoanaut writes “A new project launched by Google’s Python engineers could make the popular programming language five times faster. The project, which is called Unladen Swallow, seeks to replace the Python interpreter’s virtual machine with a new just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that is built on LLVM. The first milestone release, which was announced at PyCon, already offers a 15-25% performance increase over the standard CPython implementation. The source code is available from the Google Code web site.”
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Jane Q. Public writes “At the Federal Trade Commission’s Seattle conference on DRM, FTC Director Mary Engle started off by referencing the Sony rootkit debacle, and said that companies are going to have to get serious about disclosing DRM that may affect the usability of products. She also said that disclosure via the fine print in a EULA is not good enough, and ‘If your advertising giveth and your EULA taketh away, don’t be surprised if the FTC comes calling.’ Transcripts and webcasts are available from the FTC website.” Update 18:13 GMT by SM: as Jane Q. Public was nice enough to diplomatically point out, the webcasts are no longer functioning, but transcripts are still available.
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Death Metal sends along an Ars Technica piece about The Pirate Bay’s plans for a virtual private network service to help ensure its users’ privacy. “The Pirate Bay is planning to launch a paid VPN service for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting. The new service will be called IPREDator, named after the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that will go into effect in April. IPREDator is currently in private beta and is expected to go public next week for €5 per month. … IPREDator’s website says that it won’t store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web. Without any data to hand over, copyright owners won’t be able to find individuals to target. … The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay’s users will decide to fork over 5 per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won’t care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use.”
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Australia’s official online censorship board’s web page was offline Thursday, hours after hackers hijacked it to protest revelations the government was going to require ISPs to block public access to thousands of websites, many of which aren’t obscene.
Getting an idea and inspiration is sometimes really hard and when you are planning to start your new web design project and you are curiously finding for a mind blowing web design inspiration so you don’t want to spend too much time and want to get start something as soon as you can.
There are tons of sites out there comparing other sorts of products. Affiliate programs have spawned so-called review websites, most of which simply rank the companies based on the payout. A new site, HostMonk, doesn’t.
narramissic writes “In a paper set to be delivered at an upcoming security conference, University of Texas at Austin researchers showed how they were able to identify people who were on public social networks such as Twitter and Flickr by mapping out the connections surrounding their network of friends. From the ITworld article: ‘Web site operators often share data about users with partners and advertisers after stripping it of any personally identifiable information such as names, addresses or birth dates. Arvind Narayanan and fellow researcher Vitaly Shmatikov found that by analyzing these ‘anonymized’ data sets, they could identify Flickr users who were also on Twitter about two-thirds of the time, depending on how much information they have to work with.'”
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An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. ‘Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,’ which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM’s WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM’s database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM’s front against Visual Studio. ‘All in all, this move would solidify IBM’s role as “the developer company,”‘ McAllister writes. ‘In other words, if this merger goes through and you’re an enterprise developer and you’re not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'” And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL’s director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue’s control.
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