Aggregation Enlightens: An Interview With Kayak's Paul English
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In this audio podcast, David Weinberger interviews the founder of the travel search engine about the future of aggregated data and vertical searches.
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Matthew Turland has mentioned his article in the latest issue of php|architect magazine (the December 2007 issue) covering web scraping.   Just a quick post to announce (albeit a little late) that the December 2007 issue of php|architect, which includes my article on web scraping. Please buy a copy, give it a read, and feel free to post comments on the forum thread for the article. I'd love to hear some reader feedback!   Other articles in the issue include "Writing an Object/Relational Mapper in PHP", "Understanding CLI" and the cover story "Going native with mysqlnd".
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Great writeup from Tim Bray WRT Dynamic Java  ...  Here's the funny part.  Whats up with all the damn coffee in these pictures?  One can only come to the conclusion that caffeine makes you smart as hell!  caption: Coffee  caption: Coffee and Java  caption: Java and Coffee
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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Rui Capela's software has appeared in this column many times. I've written about it directly (see At the Sounding Edge: Using QSynth and QJackCtl and HDRs and DAWs For Linux: The New Breed) and it shows up in almost every article I write. I'm not exaggerating when I state that Rui's programs have become indispensable components here at Studio Dave, so naturally I'm interested in the mind behind it all. In this entry I'll recap the nature and state of Rui's software, after which we'll meet the man himself in another lively interview here at the sounding edge.
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Wednesday we pushed a new build of Rojo  which introduced a few new and important features:  * Tags *  Chris does a good job of explaining  tags so I'll start there:  "Feeling taggy? Some prominent bloggers have been talking about tags and there have been some fascinating discussions about how tags, also known as keywords, can facilitate the "merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture." But if you have been using sites like del.icio.us or Flickr you don't need to read this high-brow stuff to know: tags are cool. They are an easy way to categorize your stuff and a great way to see what your friends are categorizing as well."  Tags ar ...
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Matthew O'Phinney had the chance to present the Zend Framework during a meeting he attended of his local PHP user group (BostonPHP) as a part of a series their doing.   Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.   He mentions a talk that Chuck Hagenbuch (of the Horde project) gave on the current state of the project and a bit about his presentation (including some portions that pointed out problems with the Zend_Db component). You can check out this and the rest of the contents of his presentation here [pdf] and here [mp3 podcast].
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.  Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere." Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages. And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?  The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.
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Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several 'shortcuts' from O'Reilly and Addison-Weseley.  I love this format.  For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page "book".  The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome.  The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value.  October marks the beginning of Apress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails.    Apress also has Practical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer.  Now, on to interview news!
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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Henry Jenkins  and his observations on social responsibility in Chinese video game culture.
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Found this really cool search engine (Koders ) via ResearchBuzz:   "An article at Newsforge pointed me to Koders ( http://www.koders.com ) a search engine for finding programming code. Nifty. The front page allows you to specify keywords, sixteen languages (from..."  This is pretty dead on.  I had a similar idea about 3 years ago I was calling SourceEngine which for a while was my Alexandria  project under Jakarta.  Some of this technology morphed into Gump .  Heres one innovation which I don't think Koders has picked up yet; use source includes as indegree to compute a CodeRank.  There you go... I'm giving you guys that one for free!  This is the Google innovation but applied to source code ...
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Over the last week, I've been writing about the disconnect between flow and rank. Paradoxically, sites that are ranked high don't always deliver a lot of hits when they link to you. On the flipside, there are some sites that are rarely on Top 100 lists, or talked about very much, that deliver substantial flow. Two of them stand out, one a veteran site, and the other a relative newcomer. 1. Daring Fireball is a thoughtful blog written by John Gruber that focuses on the Macintosh. Since I've returned to the Mac in 2005, and have been writing more about Mac issues, I've started getting links from this site, and when I do, they usually send between 1000 and 2000 readers my way. And they're generally interesting people with useful information and ideas. I follow Gruber on Twitter and have learned that he is a Phillies fan and therefore disappointed this year. His posts are interesting there too, and irreverent, which I like of course.  2. A Digg-like memetracker, news.ycombinator.com is in the same league as TechMeme, about 1000 hits for a highly ranked piece. I don't know much about the site, I'm not a regular reader, and I don't know much about the people who visit from this site.
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By Chris Tomlinson  You may have noticed that the web is obsessed with lists. This is either something to do with ordering content logically or the autistic genius of its early creators.
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.