Letter Never Sent

I think I broke something from laughing so hard while reading tBoCL…

1. I want to fight a Vegan: “Condition 2. You must be an all-out-level-three-Vegan (for at least three years). This means no honey in your herbal tea, not even on Spring equinox! No leather shoes, and please, don’t be a sell-out by having a sorry ass job at a conventional Café that serves low fat Tuna Club sandwiches.”
2. Pregnantish? Take my extra Clearblue Easy!
3. Goodnight Austin
4. Nervous Wreck Seeks Domineering Bitch for Rebound Melee – 33: “Please be able to completely annihilate any residual faith in humanity, delusions of happiness, and sense of self worth. Depigmentation of my hair is not fully complete at this stage – and I am looking for you to finalize the process. Bonus points for initiating enough stress to drag me down the path of premature baldness, or inducing permanent stress-related gastrointestinal damage.”
5. I ONLY had to take a leak. You didn’t need to scar me emotionally

Leeroy Jenkins, of World of Warcraft fame, now has his own soundboard.

Found some great stuff while surfing around this weekend.

• Inspirational, courtesy of the wonderfully thematic Growabrain blog. How to Make a Million Dollars by Marshall Brain of HowStuffWorks: “There are two mentalities: Be an employee, or Hire employees” A must read.
• Five Habits of Millionaires by Barbara Reinhold. “Michael LeBoeuf, author of The Millionaire in You, points out that to increase wealth, it’s essential to emulate millionaires who view money as something to save and invest, rather than income to spend. Many wealthy people live quite simply, he points out, choosing less pretentious homes than they could theoretically afford and opting for financial independence over material showmanship.” Warren Buffett still lives in the same small home in Omaha he bought long before he was a multi-billionaire.
• Encrypt your “mailto” links with this handy form. It will prevent most spam spiders from pulling your email addresses from mailto links.
• Godaddy’s Bob Parsons on his 16 rules for life: “1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone. I believe that not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.”
• RandText. Awesome free Perl script to include random bits in your webpages. I’m using it for the testimonials at my Duet Design page. Refresh to see it in action.

How long will it take this very cool large-scale marionette event in France (via Waxy.org posted this morning) to appear on Boing Boing?

I visit the wonderful One Man Safari blog several times a day because you never know what you’ll find there. Lately, “one man” has been posting images from old issues of National Geographic Magazine.

Signal vs. Noise reports how Google is wreaking havoc on their web application product, Backpack, by deleting user pages:

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page — including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway. Disrespect.

We discovered this yesterday when a few people were reporting that their Backpack pages were “disappearing.” We were stumped until we dug a little deeper and discovered this Web Accelerator behavior. Once we figured this out we added some code to prevent Google from prefetching the pages and clicking the links, but it was quite disconcerting.

Users on the SomethingAwful forums posted screenshots of being logged in on other user accounts. Bad. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this.

Just installed this Google Web Accelerator from Google. Let see how it works.

1. 1. What is Google Web Accelerator?

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google’s global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Please note that Google Web Accelerator is currently in beta test mode. If you have any problems using it or have suggestions for how we can improve it, please see the Google Group devoted to it.

Also note that during the first part of our beta testing period, users outside of North America and Europe may not see much improvement in their web page loading speed.

2. How does Google Web Accelerator work?

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

As a QA tester, this blog post at O’Reilly’s Radar is interesting:

Remarking on new companies like Spikesource and SourceLabs, he said: “It seems to me that the tester rather than the coder is becoming the new hero of the open source community.”

I think he’s onto something.

Hmm… if both designers and testers are the new heroes, is this further evidence of my oft-argued “open source paradigm shift”, where open source is leading to the commodification of many forms of infrastructure software, making testing and integration more important as an industry competency. Meanwhile, the new web applications “up the stack” are driven by a whole new class of “infoware design patterns”.

The decentralized nature of Open Source demands a need for rigorous, process-based testing of software before businesses can be expected to adopt it as part of their infrastructure.