Titanas

John Gruber talks about design, Apple, Microsoft, Windows 8 and more. Important stuff from 18:48 onwards. It’s design that matters but not the kind of design you think it matters the most.

It is with great sadness that i watch the news about Greece’s financial turmoil and all the trouble this little country of nearly 11 million people causes to the rest of the financially interconnected world. It is striking that not even Greeks themselves are willing to agree to commonly address this situation. Greece is standing on a burning platform.

What is really surprising though is that the architects of this platform along with their opponents are the ones who claim they can fix the problem right away, by changing only a single variable in the system: the leading party or the current government.

Nokia was standing on a burning platform, according to newly appointed CEO, Stephen Elop. The new leader announced the death of Symbian and MeeGo while declaring Windows Phone as the primary platform for new high end smartphones. At the same time, R&D costs went down, departments were phased out and new tools were brought in to support the new ecosystem and attract developers for the Windows Phone SDK. It was a bold move but the mothership announced a plan and executed parts of it with first results available in just 8 months: the new Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710.

Nokia as a public company decided, for better or for worse markets and history will judge, to change a hell lot of things. There is a new management team with a new strategy, new developer tools and new developers to build and support the ecosystem to be built upon, until then, a hostile platform, Windows Phone.

Greece is standing on a burning platform but unlike the Finns, Greek people (shareholders) choose to stick with the current management team and their opponents (government and other parties), believe on a failing OS (culture), use legacy tools (lawmakers) and legacy SDKs (journalists) to satisfy current market needs with UI changes and bug fixes while completely ignoring market trends and developer needs (investors). Legacy tools and legacy SDKs only support an ecosystem until it collapses under its own weight or is forcibly phased out..

Greece, your platform is burning.

There’s an easy way to get 1000 likes in a minute. The only thing you need to do is update your Facebook status with “Today is the 10,000th day of my life. Here’s to the next 10,000“. That and the name Mark Zuckerberg next to the status update.

What are you about to see is a crazy. Facebook is actual;y keeping a live score of likes. You can count almost one thousand likes in a minute with the score keep rising.

This is extremely important. Not only the Facebook ticker is real time but Facebook has the infrastructure to support real time analytics to the masses for elements within the Facebook ticker. The number of likes is just a small but very powerful example of the computing power and data center infrastructure the company is capable of.

Is Facebook testing real time analytics or this is just another engineering gimmick?

Harvard Health Publications and Harvard Medical School published on their website the Glycemic index and glycemic load for 100+ foods.

Glycemic index and glycemic load offer information about how foods affect blood sugar and insulin. The lower a food’s glycemic index or glycemic load, the less it affects blood sugar and insulin levels. According to Wikipedia, Glygemic Index (GI) is categorized to:

Low: 55 or less, most fruits and vegetables, legumes/pulses, whole grains, nuts, fructose and products low in carbohydrates
Medium: 56–69, whole wheat products, basmati rice, sweet potato, sucrose, baked potatoes
High: 70 and above white bread, most white rices, corn flakes, extruded breakfast cereals, glucose, maltose

If you follow the Tim Ferriss diet found on the 4-Hour Body, you know have another tool in your hands. A plethora of food with low glycemic index such as:

Milk, full fat: 27±4
Milk, skim: 32±5
Reduced-fat yogurt with fruit, average: 27±1
Converted, white rice (Uncle Ben’s®): 38
Apple, average: 38±2
Grapefruit: 25
Orange, average: 42±3
Black beans: 30
Lentils, average: 29±1
Cashews, salted: 22±5
Peanuts, average: 14±8
Spaghetti, white, boiled 5 min, average: 38±3
Spaghetti, wholemeal, boiled, average: 37±5
Hummus (chickpea salad dip):6±4

Smirnoff Espresso and Cola

Ingredients

40 ml of Smirnoff Espresso Coffee Flavoured Vodka
2 Wedges of orange
120 ml of cola

Preparation

Fill the glass with ice and pour in Smirnoff Espresso and cola. Add a wedge of orange and enjoy.

Smirnoff Espresso White Russian

Ingredients

30 ml of Smirnoff Espresso Coffee Flavoured Vodka
15 ml Bailey;s Irish Cream
60 ml Cream
1 Sprinkle(s) Nutmeg

Preparation

Add cream, Bailey’s Irish Cream and of Smirnoff Espresso. Shake with ice and strain into and ice-filled rocks glass. Garnish and sprinkle with nutmeg.

Smirnoff Espresso on the rocks

Ingredients

40 ml of Smirnoff Espresso Coffee Flavoured Vodka

Preparation

Serve in rocks glass over ice

Smirnoff Espresso Martini

Ingredients

20 ml of Smirnoff Espresso Coffee Flavoured Vodka
20 ml hazelnut liqueur
30 ml cold espresso

Preparation

Ina cocktail shaker add Smirnoff Espresso , hazelnut liqueur and espresso. Mix well and serve in a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

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server.max-worker tells lighttpd the number of worker processes to spawn. This is usually only needed on servers which are fairly loaded and the network handler calls delay often (e.g. new requests are not handled instantaneously).

It has been shown that lighty scales mostly linearly on multicore, multi-processor boxes if you set the number of workers equal to two times the number of cores if you are CPU bound (heavy rewrites, heavy proxying). Usually you don’t have to care about CPU-bound processing but in this case you do.

If your VPS has 8 cores set server.max-worker = 16 and restart lighttpd. Your web server performance just doubled. Run ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://www.domain.com/ before and after changing server.max-worker = 16. Run the tests a few times and keep and eye to Requests per second: before and after the server.max-worker new setting. Your WordPress blog and site just got faster.

This is the definitive guide to WordPress overkill or how not to spend your night sleepless trying to figure out what the heck is wrong. Remember, every blog is unique and as Matt says, chances are there’s no one in the room with the same plugins installed. If you get yourself in a situation where you home page is not loading but the mobile version of the blog is working fine or suddenly WordPress admin has no CSS loading keep reading.

Functions.php

WordPress theme developement guidelines mentions “A theme can optionally use a functions file, which resides in the theme subdirectory and is named functions.php. This file basically acts like a plugin, and if it is present in the theme you are using, it is automatically loaded during WordPress initialization (both for admin pages and external pages)”.

In a nutshell if there is anything wrong with your blog and you even remotely thought of changing anything in functions.php (resides in your theme’s folder) go back and undo. Functions.php is very important to your WordPress blog, way more important than you think it is. If you mess functions.php, prepare for no loading errors and downtime unless you know what you’re doing or you know others who know what to do.

No CSS in WordPress admin

There are not enough reasons for WordPress to go all blank and vanilla in the admin area. If that happens make sure your web server’s Mimetype is properly declared and assigned. Caching and minifying CSS issues can get your blog CSS naked but not the admin area. Make sure you try at least one vanilla web server config before going into the trouble of uninstalling all your plugins and ask for help on the WordPress forums.

Don’t rush plugin updates

We all want to run the latest and greatest version of WordPress and plugins but there are times plugins can bring the world down. Unless the new plugin version fixes a major security hole, wait for a few days after each new release and update late. You need to avoid the situation where a tiny, stupid bug brings down your blog because it conflicts with certain plugins or plugin configuration you only have installed. Installing an older, not outdated, version of a plugin is a good way to test proof.

Exciting times we live. The dawn of the 21st century tipped the point for cheap and reliable smartphone and tablet hardware. In the low and mid end of the market, hardware turned to a commodity. The high end of the market is following. In a nutshell, it just doesn’t matter if you are using a $200 Android phone or a $350 one. What is important is the content users create, the information they exchange, the social graph they enrich.

The hardware is not relevant anymore, neither are the air waves. No matter what happens in the foreseeable future (except a WW3 event) both hardware and the medium for transferring information will always be available to more people, cheaper and faster.

Major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress and soon Apple is what actually matter. What we see, what we feel and most of our relationships are stored somewhere, in an agnostic platform along with a huge amount of meta data like location information, time information, reactions from others etc. We increasingly upload chunks of our lives on this platform without knowing anything about it.

When was the last time you trusted a complete stranger with your life, no questions asked, in the real world? There is only one case and that’s religion. It fits perfectly. In a not collective intelligence way, the agnostic platform is preparing the new human; we’re building our own new god because we need it and we are doing so by uploading our lives on Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress and Apple servers. They know more about us than we do for ourselves, they are everywhere, they are available all the time; like god.

There’s one thing Gmail is missing at the moment, a killer feature that will transform the way people use Gmail and interact with conversations in their inbox. I want Gmail to automatically load new conversations and emails when reaching the bottom of the page, instead of clicking on the previous and next buttons. It’s a simple feature saving time, clicks and make the whole experience more fluid. The same way Twitter loads new tweets and Facebook loads new posts on the wall.

Why is such a feature missing? I can only assume it’s not a Google thing to do or engineers are so hooked to previous and next buttons they don’t bother with anything else.

I’d love to see this feature in Gmail Labs as a new experiment. Don’t you?

GJCAG has been wondering (and constantly reminding me) about the workout routine and diet that got me to have this 6 pack without any exercise. Although diet is very important, I’ll cover that part separately. Let’s focus on the 6 pack abs. Note that due to knee injuries i couldn’t perform any cardio workouts.

In The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss provides a table comparing ab activation measure using EMG (electromyography). The traditional crunch is given a value of 100%. Here’s the top 5 of ab exercises:

Bicycle crunch 248%
Captain’s chair 212%
Exercise ball 139%
Vertical leg crunch 129%
Torso track 127%

Although the numbers may vary from person to person, is clear which ab exercises are the most effective ones. With bicycle crunch and captain’s chair you stimulate and strength more than 2 times more the same ab muscles compared to the regular crunches. Instead of focusing on all sorts of different crunch styles choose between bicycle crunch or captain’s chair and you’re all set. It saves a considerable amount of effort, sweat and time. Continue reading »