The amount of data you have to keep tabs on when working in the web industry can be pretty overwhelming. On any given day, I’m confronted with code snippets, news items, user-interface roughs, to-do lists, client proposals, meeting minutes, company financials, etc., and it can get pretty overwhelming pretty fast.

I’ve been oscillating between various methods of tracking notes and other items of interest for the past year and a half and currently have a whole slew of various solutions. Some of the stuff I tried have been fairly ridiculous (using Mac OSX’s Screen Grab in combination with FlickrUploadr to take visual notes and store them on my Flickr account, which obviously only works when you don’t need text-based search), while others have vastly improved my productivity. Notae, in particular, has proven to be a friggin’ fantastic all-in-one notebook application, and is all the better because you can navigate the whole UI without a mouse. Microsoft’s OneNote is also a real gem — possibly one of the few M$ products I really like, along with Reader. I also use GeekTool combined with todo.txt to have a transparent overlay of my most pressing tasks superimposed on my desktop (it makes it harder to ignore them).

One new technique I’m trying out this week is something I came across on MicroPersuasion, which involves using GMail as a universal notebook (you know, kinda like Google Notebook, except with better search). You only need three things to set this up: Google Toolbar, a Gmail account, and enough knowhow to setup your own email filters.

The first two are simple enough. You can grab Google Toolbar here, and Gmail is finally open to the general public so opening account is easy (of course, you’ve had yours for years right?). The third one is also pretty straightforward: just look for the little “Create a Filter” link near the top of the Gmail inbox page and define a filter that looks for the keyword “@db” in each incoming message’s subject line.

On the next dialog box, check “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply label” (I use “Database” as my label, but you can use anything), then click “Create”. What we just did here was tell Gmail that any incoming message with a subject containing “@db” will be automatically archived and labelled “Database.”

That’s the first part of the puzzle. How do we actually implement it? That’s where Google Toolbar’s very handy “Send to Gmail” button comes in. Let’s say you’re viewing a particular webpage and you find a snippet of text and/or image that you’d like to store. Just select the area in question, click the Send to Gmail button, and a Mail Composer window will popup with the stuff you selected right in the body of the message. All you have to do then is enter your email address and add the keyword “@db” at the start of the subject line. Once you’ve clicked send, the email gets whisked away to your inbox, filtered into your Archive, and labelled “Database.”

The main advantage of course is that Gmail leverages Google’s search capability so that all your notes will be easy to locate (that, and the fact that you can access your notes from any place with an internet connection).

I haven’t decided if I’m going to stop using Notae in favor of this method just yet (I haven’t found a way to implement the entire Gmail-as-notebook workflow without grabbing for the mouse or trackpad yet, so Notae is still the faster approach), but I’ll certainly keep trying it over the next few weeks. If you’ve got your own little productivity tips, feel free to share them in the comments :)

Web2.0 Asia writes:

Uberme, a Myspace-like blogging/social networking service from Samsung Mobile, has launched. Featurewise, it’s got the whole pakcage; videos, photos, blogs, groups, etc. But the key differentiator of Uberme might be its focus on mobile: Uberme aims to provide as good an user experience on mobile phones as on the online.

And interestingly:

All in all, the service looks similar to Myspace and Bebo. But then, none of the big name social network services of the US have established a very strong foothold in the Asian market, perhaps except for Windows Live Spaces. This gives Uberme a chance to become a big player in Asia.

There’s a reason why Myspace and Bebo aren’t big in Asia, and it’s certainly not for the lack of trying. IMHO, it’s because there’s no way to provide a generic social-networking service for such a heterogenous region. Much love to Samsung and all, but when your audience is fragmented into at least 5 major language groups (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean and English) it’s unlikely they will all ever be able to interact. And to do language-based segregation (ala Wikipedia.org) is only solving part of the problem. The main issue, in my mind, is that you can’t ever just do a direct translation if you really want to connect with your audience. There are too many language nuances that you have to eschew in favor of portability, and you lose the distinctive local flavor that you would have otherwise achieved had you focused on a smaller target.

Granted, services like Friendster have done reasonably well in Asia (at least, in the Philippines) although I believe that that was more due to the fact that there were no compelling alternatives out there at the time. Of course, when enough Filipinos had jumped onto Friendster, there was no turning back — it was standard Tipping-Point-type stuff.

Fast forward to now, and Samsung has a tough journey ahead of them. They have to somehow reconcile the multi-cultural tastes of a vast Asian market and still provide an experience that is Myspace-but-better. Perhaps using a Germanic word as the name of this Asian Myspace-killer wasn’t the best idea though, I don’t know.

(This article was originally published on http://blog.syndeomedia.com)

Just sat through one full listen of what is possibly the worst Unplugged album ever recorded (which coincidentally sports one of the worst Unplugged album covers ever as well). If you listen to local radio, you’ll undoubtedly have heard the “Freak on a Leash” single already, and sadly, the entire session was that bad, or worse. Evanescence’s Amy Lee sits in on this song, serving only to highlight the fact that Jonathan Davis is incapable of harmonizing with anyone. Check out the video here.

Other lowlights include a really awkward cover of Radiohead’s Creep — from the sound of it, this may be the first (and undoubtedly last) time in his career that Davis has ever attempted to sing in falsetto in front of a live audience — and an unholy mashup of “Make Me Bad” with The Cure’s “In Between Days.” (Nope, he can’t harmonize with Robert Smith either.)

I think my main issue with this recording was how tremendously overwrought it was. According to the Wikipedia entry, there were no less than “four celli, two basses, two cimbassos, two bass/contrabass trombonists, a saw player, a glass harmonica player, choir bells, and a six person taiko ensemble” in addition to Korn themselves. I mean, c’mon, when Nirvana did this 14 years ago, there were exactly 4 guys on stage, and they still managed to rock harder than these jokers. When Alice in Chains performed in 1996, Layne Stayley looked like he wasn’t even completely there, and their performance was one of the most memorable Unpluggeds ever. And Pearl Jam had more power in one friggin’ song than Korn can manage throughout this entire concert.

(Watch the full-length Alice in Chains Unplugged performance right here.)

I just finished writing a very complicated proposal for a video-sharing social network project that was essentially YouTube built with Rails. The online video-sharing arena is already pretty crowded but apparently there are still latecomers who want to get in on the action.

What was most surprising to me — at least, during the course of my research — was exactly how cheap it was to build our very own YouTube clone. Obviously as you approach YouTube’s size (45 terabytes of data and counting), it becomes more and more difficult to keep your operating costs down, but starting up is getting cheaper by the minute. (Which probably explains why everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.)

A big part of the steadily cheapening technology costs is the fact that you can now get pay-as-you-go grid computing and storage at very affordable rates. There are a whole bunch of services available out there, but for this pitch we decided to go with Amazon EC2 and S3.

Our project requirements required us to build an application that could handle 5,000 videos of 3-minutes-or-less per day, or as many as 300 submissions per hour. Those are piddling numbers compared to YouTube’s 65,000 per day, but they were big enough that we were understandably worried about how to manage the processing and conversion to FLV (streaming Flash video).

The process we were proposing to build worked like this:

1. User uploads a video.
   The average 3-minute MPEG video weighs in at 15mb.
2. Video is encoded or queued for encoding.
   The video, assuming it is not corrupted or obviously broken in some way, is encoded into FLV, using open-source encoders FFMPEG or mplayer. Given the stated 300-videos-per-hour scenario, it’s entirely possible that you will run out of CPU resources to handle the load during peak hours of operation. (My Macbook Pro took about 10 seconds to do one full conversion of a 3-min WMV during my informal tests. 300 videos could take almost the entire hour.) When this happens, videos are held in a queue until enough resources are available to process them.
3. Video is queued for approval.
   (This was a client request and is probably in response to the recent spats with YouTube and Viacom.) After a video has been encoded, it enters another queue, this time for editorial approval. Our estimates indicated that it would take an editor an average of 60 seconds per submitted video. This immediately presents a problem, as it suggests that your peak of 300 submissions would take 5 hours to process. If you have several peak hours in a row (which are often the case), you will have approval queues spilling over into the next day. A management solution must thus be in place to allow several editors to work in parallel.
4. Approved video is displayed on the website.
   At this point, the video is available for public viewing. Flash video streaming would be accomplished by using the lighttpd web server, which rather conveniently supports FLV-streaming out-of-the-box. You could optionally also use flvtool2 to insert meta-data into each video. Every approved video is taggable, rateable, commentable, emailable, etc. (It’s a YouTube clone, what can I say.)

So how much does this whole thing cost?

Well, first let’s talk about some more numbers.

The big issue here is storage. Each new FLV weighs in at 2-4mb. If we assume that our maximum growth rate is 5,000 FLVs per day, we’re looking at a storage ceiling of about 450GBs in one month. If growth continues at a steady pace, you would need to have at least 6TBs of storage for your first year. And that doesn’t even include the raw originals, which would be 3-4 times larger. Neither does it include any kind of regular backup.

After the storage, you then have to worry about bandwidth. Let’s do some simple math and assume that each video on this theoretical YouTube clone would only be watched 20 times on average for the duration of its existence. That means that each video on the website represents a bandwidth cost of about 80mb or so. 150,000 videos per month multiplied by 80mb equals 12TB of monthly bandwidth.

When you apply these numbers of a solution powered by EC2/S3, you get some fairly affordable figures:

EC2 grid-computing costs for 1 year = $1,800.00
S3 storage costs for 1 year = $7,800.00
S3 bandwidth costs for 1 year = $18,000.00

Your total technology cost is less than $30,000.00, for a website that would (theoretically) end up to be about 1/10th the current size of YouTube.com. When you consider that YouTube was valued at $1.65 billion, $30,000.00 is chump change. Of course, you would actually need someone to develop and maintain this darned thing for you. You’d also need to spend on a full-time editorial team to view each and every one of those pesky videos:

Development cost = $30,000.00
Maintenance cost = $12,000.00
Editorial team = $15,000.00

All together you come up with a grand total of about $85,000.00. Still less than 0.0005% of that $1.65 billion.

I’ve been looking forward to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain ever since I saw the trailers late last year and spotted the gorgeous art book at A Different Bookstore (there’s also a graphic novel illustrated by Kent Williams). Aronofsky has been quietly making small art films since the late 90’s and his two previous movies (Pi, and Requiem for a Dream) both received great reviews and — as if often the case with these types of movies — floundered at the box office.

The Fountain is Aronofsky’s third feature, stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz and talks about big, sweaty topics like life, death, love and immortality. Mostly it depicts Jackman’s quest to save Weisz, in an adventure that spans two millenia. (Check out the trailer here).

I was looking at The Fountain as being similar to Tim Burton’s Big Fish, or Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth — a visually lavish masterpiece from a visionary filmmaker. For the most part, it does fulfill those expectations, although I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so … insubstantial. The Fountain is wildly ambitious and reaches out in at least three different directions without really capturing anything, and I left the theater wondering what it was that it was really trying to say. (Was it to accept death as inevitable? That love conquers all? That life and death are cyclical? That not all dreams are achievable without compromise? All of the above?)

Still, this is easily the most visually arresting film I’ve seen over the past 12 months (although I should probably qualify that by saying I haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth), and you should check it out if only to see how far Aronofsky has taken the art-form with this one feature.

In an awe-inspiring display of technical wizardry coupled with facial hair that would make Michael Arrington pee himself, the evil geniuses at syndeo::media have somehow managed to launch two new social networks in the same week. Odysseylive.net is the revamped, restructured sequel to Mobiuslive.net, and 3eep is a community site focused on sports out of Australia. (Considering that we were only fielding a dev team of 2.5 people, I’d say that that’s a fairly impressive feat.)

Since I’m too pooped to talk in more detail about the two new products, I suggest you head on over to the sites’ respective domains and see for yourself what our mad science has wrought.

Now, if you don’t mind, this evil genius is going to bed.

Now that you’ve got your Rails development environment set up and running, you’re probably asking what you would use to actually build something for it.

The question of which text-editor to use for Rails development is a fairly lengthy discussion, so I’ll just go ahead and throw some ideas into the mix:

1. JEdit - http://www.jedit.org/
2. RIDE-ME - http://www.projectrideme.com/
3. InType - http://intype.info
4. Meadow - http://www.meadowy.org/meadow/
5. Cream - http://cream.sourceforge.net

[ Read the rest of this entry … ]

In the last three entries in this series, we talked about the various technologies involved in Rails development, and walked through the installation of Ruby, Rails and MySQL. If you’re keeping score, there are still two files left in the list of downloads that we haven’t touched, and we’ll focus on those two now.

ImageMagick is the de facto standard in web-based image-handling, and there’s a very nice toolset written for Ruby called RMagick (download the ImageMagick/RMagick for Windows installer here) which allows us to use it in our Rails applications. Unfortunately, some incompatibility issues with Windows and the latest ImageMagick builds have caused the RMagick installation process to be a bit non-standard. We’ll go through the steps together now and see if we can’t muddle our way through it.

[ Read the rest of this entry … ]

There’s an interesting article on Ars Technica today about search engine startup Powerset, which is reportedly proprietor of “the most sophisticated natural language technology known to man” (developed at Xerox PARC).

On his personal blog, [Powerset CEO Barney Pell] argues that keywords [the traditional search method] are the equivalent of studying a foreign language for a year: you can get around, but can’t communicate with much richness. Searching for “book by children” and “book about children” should produce greatly different results, but search engines today generally throw out the prepositions and treat both queries the same way.

The article goes on to talk about another startup currently laboring on a similar offering, called Hakia, which is already up and running. If you try the “book by children” / “book about children” combo on Hakia, you get similar results so one could say that Hakia isn’t quite there yet either. (Interestingly enough, neither of the two results pages Hakia returned were more useful than the ones Google returned.)

The implications of natural language search technology are only as significant as the number of people that adopt them, of course. In other words, if this catches on, it’ll change the face of the search industry. Why? Because SEO/SEM will be completely screwed. I have a little bit of SEO knowledge from watching our search team at syndeo::media work, and I’m always startled by the sheer number of keywords they have to manage. If a traditional SEO gig runs to a few hundred keywords/keyphrases, try to imagine what would happen if you had to optimize for keyword+preposition combinations as well (which is what natural-language search optimization implies). Your phrases would increase exponentially. In terms of volume, I think this will render SEO too complex to be handled by mere mortals, and SEO houses will eventually have to replace personnel with big proprietary algorithms.

Whether or not that’s better for the rest of the world is not for me to say, but if the search technology truly is headed in the direction of natural-language, it’s going to be a trick for the SEO industry to survive unscathed.

I’m probably the geekiest person on the planet for noticing this, but check out this cool easter egg in the latest episode of Heroes, guest-starring George Takei:

Old-school sci-fi fans will recognize the license plate of Takei’s car as none other than the registry number of the starship Enterprise :))

… Yes, I am pathetic.