August 2011
Fail Tales #1 – The Highlander Constraint – Designing for 65% Availability
In this installment of Fail Tales, we’ll take a look at the business, user experience and technology design implications of the Highlander Constraint and a few fundamental mitigation tactics. For those unfamiliar with the Highlander tale of film and television, the worlds fortune rests on one person who, by virtue of competitive mortal combat, wins […]
Build Apps Linked to Times Square!
Now, for the first time, your app can link directly to 19,000 square feet of LED screens in Times Square with one AJAX call. What makes this possible is a new API created by R/GA in collaboration with TS2 the Thomson-Reuters/NASDAQ alliance. This simple collection of methods (code named Pomegranate) enables apps to push text and images to fourteen […]
The Home Automation of Tomorrow, Today
With the release of Android @Home, it’s increasingly obvious that big companies are finally getting behind home automation. But what if you want to control your appliances from anywhere in the world and not just from within your home with your phone? Here is system that I developed to allow you to do just that. […]
CAP Theorem applied to Organizations
It’s well understood today that as you scale out internet platforms you can’t have perfect data consistency and high availability at the same time. Like system architects that are now forced to adopt alternative eventually-consistent data stores, big organizations are facing a similar dilemma as the demands for information consistency, speed and scale square off. Increasingly, organizations […]
Automation with open standards
In the past, my development tool-chain relied heavily on an IDE and build tools to provide automation services, Eclipes/Java/Ant, C#/Visual Studio/nAnt, and ActionScript /Eclipse/FDT/Ant. Moving to open standard development projects, the road to automation was not so clear. But with research and perseverance I have been able to find a solution. While it presently contains […]
UK users like polished Chrome
This week has seen the news that in the UK, Google Chrome has overtaken Mozilla FireFox to become the second most popular browser. According to data aggregated by StatCounter (a provider of website tracking software), Chrome now has 22.1% of the UK browser market, pushing it past FireFox’s 22.0% market share. Internet Explorer continues to dominate […]
