REST, Restful

How I explained REST to my wife...

We need to be able to talk to all machines about all the stuff that's on all the other machines. So we need some way of having one machine tell another machine about a resource that might be on yet another machine.

Wife: Sounds like GET is a pretty important verb.

Ryan: It is. Especially when you're using a web browser because browsers pretty much just get stuff. They don't do a lot of other types of interaction with resources. This is a problem because it has led many people to assume that HTTP is just for getting. But HTTP is actually a general purpose protocol for applying verbs to nouns.

Wife: Why can't a machine understand a normal web page? (link works only in IE)

Ryan: Because web pages are designed to be understood by people. A machine doesn't care about layout and styling. Machines basically just need the data. Ideally, every URL would have a human readable and a machine readable representation. When a machine GETs the resource, it will ask for the machine readable one. When a browser GETs a resource for a human, it will ask for the human readable one.

Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

city of Christiansfeld, Denmark

For instance, the city of Christiansfeld, Denmark used “ambiguity and urban legibility” in street design to reduce high death rates on the town’s central traffic intersection. Instead of erecting warning signs, road markings, and traffic signals, Bjarne Winterberg and the engineering firm Ramboll removed traffic signals and road markings. No mode of transport was given priority and pedestrians, buses, cars, and trucks used eye contact to negotiate the junction.

Surface treatment, lightning columns, and junction corners were squared up. The purpose was to make the intersection resemble the centre of the town or to create a public realm. Expectedly, the number of killed or seriously injured (KSI) during the last three years was reduced to zero, moreover, traffic backups were reduced. Compared to junctions having traffic signals, ambiguous junctions prevent accidents, reduce delays, and are cheaper to construct and maintain.

Shared space is another woonerf principle that is applied to transform busy traffic intersections. In Friesland market town of Oosterwolde, different types of traffic intermingle giving an impression of chaos and disorder, in fact, traffic negotiates the junction using eye contact and care for other types of transport. No state regulation or control is visible and traffic movement depends on informal convention and legibility.

Interface First

Design the interface before you start programming

Too many apps start with a program-first mentality. That's a bad idea. Programming is the heaviest component of building an app, meaning it's the most expensive and hardest to change. Instead, start by designing first.

Design is relatively light. A paper sketch is cheap and easy to change. html designs are still relatively simple to modify (or throw out). That's not true of programming. Designing first keeps you flexible. Programming first fences you in and sets you up for additional costs.

Another reason to design first is that the interface is your product. What people see is what you're selling. If you just slap an interface on at the end, the gaps will show.

We start with the interface so we can see how the app looks and feels from the beginning. It's constantly being revised throughout the process. Does it make sense? Is it easy to use? Does it solve the problem at hand? These are questions you can only truly answer when you're dealing with real screens. Designing first keeps you flexible and gets you to those answers sooner in the process rather than later.

William McDonough on cradle to cradle design | Video on TED.com

Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "all children, all species, for all time."

William McDonough on cradle to cradle design | Video on TED.com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

25 leading-edge IT research projects | NetworkWorld.com Community

5. The Fluid Project

A handful of universities, including the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley, is working to build a software architecture and reusable components that can make Web applications easier to develop and use. The Fluid Project's work focuses on user-centered design practices. Vendors such as Mozilla Foundation, IBM and Sun are also taking part.

The latest news out of the project is that a grant has been awarded to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto from the Mozilla Foundation to promote DHTML accessibility and the adoption of ARIA (the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification).

25 leading-edge IT research projects | NetworkWorld.com Community

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Open Visuals

Open Font Library
http://openfontlibrary.org

Open Clip Art Library
http://openclipart.org/

Icon Library from Tango Desktop Project
http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project

Tango is used in Jaws is a Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites: http://www.jaws-project.com

Source: http://osuosl.org/hosting/clients

A very good list of Open Source sofware

The Architecture of Mailinator

The most interesting part to me is that the complete set of hardware that mailinator uses is one little server. Just one. A very modest machine with an AMD 2Ghz Athlon processor, 1G of ram (although it really doesn't need that much), and a boring IDE, 80G hard drive (Check ServerBeach's Category 1 Powerline 2100 for the exact specs). And honestly, its really not very busy at all. I've read the blogs of some copycat services of Mailinator where their owners were upgrading their servers to some big iron. This was really the impetus for me writing down this document - to share a different point of view.

Design

WhiteSquid

My name is G. Navdeep Raj, I am 18. I live work, and study in Bangalore, India. I’m relatively young to be doing what I’m doing. But if it’s any consolation I’ve thought about nothing but Design the time I was 11.

I took what I loved most and I made it my profession. And I think that’s the best way to describe me as a person. I’m very proud of the success of White Squid. Especially the fact that I took the road less traveled and arrived a little later, but on my own pure and untainted terms. I’m doing it my way.

Apart from my duties, I enjoy photography, experimenting here and there with whatever style presents itself. I picked up a Nikon Coolpix 8700 in mid-2005 and hope to be get professional with it very soon.

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