Vasudev's Tumblelog

Nice way to pass a little time.

The developer of the game is Reflexive.com.

Saw this news (you'll have to scroll down a bit down the page at that link) via a post on comp.lang.python.announce which is an interesting resource for info on what new stuff (like releases of Python-related software) is happening in the Python world. The post was by Steve Holden, one of the veterans of the Python community.

Just saw this article on IBM developerWorks - a very good article on the Google Web Toolkit - gives a small tutorial and talks some about its pros and cons.

Interestingly, apart from mentioning a few cons (not just pros), it also has a link (see the Resources section of the article) to a blog post by a blogger who thinks that the GWT and similar approaches - of eschewing JavaScript by allowing the developer to write in another language and then translating that to JavaScript - are not good, and giving reasons why he (that blogger) thinks so.

This blog gives updates on the status of the Twitter service. Should be useful to regular Twitter users who want to check why Twitter is down, when it may come up again, etc.

Got to know about via this post on one of Fred Wilson's blogs.

Incidentally, the post says that the Twitter Status blog is powered by Tumblr. 

The Summize Search API

About Summize (excerpt from their site):

"Summize's mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Our home page currently features realtime conversations on Twitter. Also check out Summize Labs for prototypes that harness conversations within blogs and reviews. Additional sources of online conversations are coming soon!

About Twitter Search

Twitter is a fascinating new source of realtime recommendations, opinions, and buzz. We index Twitter's public timeline in realtime, thread together associated tweets, and give you the search tools to dig in. Check back often as we continue to explore Twitter-based summization."

According to this ZDNet blog post by Mary Jo Foley, talking about his speech at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference:

- Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said that it often takes a strong competitor to truly galvanize Microsoft.

- "Microsoft has built up a culture of crisis,” Ozzie told conference attendees.

He acknowledged that Google is a "tremendously strong competitor", and said that, unlike Google, many open-source programmers aren’t beholden to shareholders.

This contrarian view from InfoWorld writer Savio Rodrigues is also interesting.

Heavy stuff ... :) 

Seen on ZDNet.com.

I've used the Sysinternals utilities some, myself, and particularly like the AutoRuns tool. It allows you to remove a lot of autoloading crud that tends to slow down your PC's bootup speed over time, as you keep installing various software apps. Works pretty well.

Excerpts:

"If you troubleshoot Windows PCs for fun or profit, then chances are you’ve used one or more tools from Sysinternals. Microsoft bought the company and its amazing library of diagnostic, troubleshooting, and management utilities in 2006, and the collection has been continually updated ever since. It’s also still completely free." 

"The new service enables you to execute the most recent version of any Sysinternals tool directly from an Internet-connected PC, without having to hunt for the executable file and manually download it first. To access the complete library of tools, use either of these methods from a Windows-based PC:"

Read more here. 

Article on FastCompany.com about the spirit at Google.

Interesting one ... read it.

Saw this recently. It's about the reported plans of the New York Times to provide an API for its content, for developers to use. Read more here.

Seen on TechCrunch .

According to the article, this move is in response to Google's OpenSocial, which is also open source. This may be a significant move as it means any other social networking site can now get similar functionality to the Facebook Platform; however, as the article notes, doing that will not be easy.

Mark Nottingham talks about how Yahoo! uses Web technologies to create high performance architecture for their many web properties with high traffic.

An interesting video. As a Yahoo! Mail user for a long time (from back when it was called RocketMail before Yahoo! acquired it, in fact :), I've seen that their mail service has mostly performed very well over the years, despite the undoubtedly increasing loads on it. In fact, I remember noticing that it was hardly ever slow, except that a few years back, for a couple of years it was sluggish, only around the time of Christmas and New Year; but I also noticed that after those two times, it has not been slow. Have not checked very recently though, as I don't use it that much nowadays.