Our New Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator
One of the most important things to take into account when calculating your hourly rate are the plain old numbers of hours, costs and profits. And to help you do this, we’ve built a simple calculator tool to play with.
Freelance Switch — Fun, nice design, and will give you something to think about.
A new process, visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF), transforms block-shaped text into cascading patterns that help readers identify grammatical structure. The new method integrates converging evidence from educational, visual, and cognitive research, and is made feasible through computer-executed algorithms and electronic displays. Among college readers, the VSTF method instantly increased reading comprehension and efficiency of reading online text, while reducing eyestrain. Among high school students, who read with the format over an entire academic year, the VSTF method increased both academic achievement and long-term reading proficiency by more than a full standard deviation over randomized controls.
At a minimum very interesting. It is very easy to scan stuff written this way.
Lessons in Personal Networking
I remember being a shy child, confused by how people expected me to follow their mysterious rules, unhappy at being told my questions were dumb. When I entered college in 1986 as a computer engineering major, I lived an introverted and awkward existence. I didn’t date, go to parties, or even have any hobbies than making graphics on my computer and running a local bulletin board. It’s twenty years later, and I feel I’ve finally broken free of my introverted tendencies. How do I know? I had a good time attending a business networking event, and I actually initiating conversations. Bizarre!
David Seah — Interesting story.
The pay-as-you-go business model of on-demand software makes it more difficult for up-and-coming vendors to reach break-even point than with conventional licensed software. Instead of signing a handful of customers to get enough money in the bank to start covering its overheads, an on-demand vendor needs to sign up dozens or even hundreds, depending on the market segment it targets and the value of each user subscription.
ZDNet.com
Evan Weaver's RailsConf Presentation
I read somewhere that DHH said at RailsConf in 2006 that he uses databases as hashes. Evan Weaver went one step further and said that there are very few Web apps where you don’t need a hash instead of a database.
Giles Bowkett — It is fun to read other people writing and saying stuff like this.
AIDA/Web Smalltalk Web Application Server
AIDA/Web is a web server and framework for complex web applications with integrated Ajax support, rich collection of web components to build web pages programatically, MVC-like separation of presentation from domain, nice looking and bookmarkable url links, with integrated session and security management and many more.
This has been around for a while (version 5.0 is the current stable version).
Atom and LDAP sitting in a tree...
“Tree”, as in a directory information tree. Its been slightly over a year since Don and I had a gee whiz moment to front end the directory server with Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). A year ago might have been a bit too early for a directory based APP server, though its clearly the right time now.
Trey Drake — Hmmm.
fValidator - An open source (free) unobtrusive javascript tool for easy handling form validation
Nowadays everybody knows that javascript can be used to validate input data in HTML forms before sending off the content to a server. Despite of that, when there are many fields in the form, the JavaScript validation becomes too complex and boring to code. That’s why fValidator exists, with it form validations are many times easier.
I’ll be taking a close look at this one.
The 8 'Rules' Of Software That Need To Be Broken
For far too long, business customers have had to endure a number of conventions about software—issues about pricing, quality, maintenance, and usability that, left unchecked, will continue to impede optimal business productivity. These “rules” about software have become accepted by the industry mostly through inertia, but there are ways around them. Optimize recently asked its readers to select the most frustrating rule about software that they’d like to see broken; we then compiled the eight most popular responses and asked CIOs, analysts, and vendor executives to provide the most common-sense and viable solution for each of the eight rules you see on the following pages.
Optimize Magazine — A few of these are long time pains.
(More) Software Rules that need to be brokendeal architect — Some of these are even bigger pains.
“Why do software companies need a sales force?” complained Hasso Plattner, then CEO (currently the supervisory board chairman) of SAP in the early spring of 1998. “If customers just looked things up on the Web and talked to some of our people over the phone, they would figure out that we had what they needed and that would be that.”
While this statement by Plattner is open to all sorts of interpretation, it may be the most succinct and directionally accurate statement of how the software industry needs to change in the coming years.
Erik Keller, Wapiti LLC on SandHill.com — A little more than a year old analysis, but this needs to be thought about… hard.
So what’s the difference between a NetSuite update and the typical on-premise software upgrade? First of all you so not have to pay separately for the upgrade. It’s included in the license subscription. Second, there are no backup-install-recover headaches to go through. You will not receive a bunch of disks in the mail with a long explanation of how to install them in the system. And you will not get stuck in the middle of the installation and have to call support for clarification. Nor will you have to come in on a Saturday to get it done off hours.
This is on-demand computing at its best. It releases business managers from the chores and frustration of the typical on-premise package. Concentrate on your core business, we’ll worry about the database and the servers. Take care of your customers, we’ll take care of the technology.
SightLines — Yes. Exactly. My company upgrades Raconteur (it is SaaS) a few times each week.
The stripe generator may have helped out those who are unable to place lines side by side, but that left a huge market gap: all those developers and designers who can’t figure out how to make a button.
Mashable — I like this.
Caution: Some soft drinks may seriously harm your health
Research from a British university suggests a common preservative [E211, known as sodium benzoate] found in drinks such as Fanta and Pepsi Max has the ability to switch off vital parts of DNA. … can eventually lead to cirrhosis of the liver and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. … used for decades by the €110bn global carbonated drinks industry. … when mixed with the additive vitamin C in soft drinks, it causes benzene, a carcinogenic substance.
Independent.ie — Oh. Fantastic.
Principles of Economics, Translated3quarksdaily — A very funny video.
Lone-DITA’s goal is to provide resources for solo Technical Writers, or those who are part of a small documentation team, who want to implement DITA at their organization.
Ambitious goal.
Now all this becomes a little repetitive so here is a new publisher function which allows you to publish your package on a particular URL so that any requests to URL’s ‘below’ that one will be resolved to a function in your package.
On Code — Nice!
When doing my JRuby talk at No Fluff, Just Stuff, one of the consistent questions I get is the morality question about open classes: are they evil? Open classes in dynamic languages allow you to crack open a class and add your own methods to it.
Meme Agora — No they are not evil. Closed classes are.
Your first few days on RubyCocoa at
I’ve been playing with RubyCocoa lately and really enjoying how easy it is to create OS X GUI apps with just a few lines of Ruby. … walk you through the first steps into the RubyCocoa world
Meta | ateM — Nice introduction.
Enough people think that you need to describe services formally that not having one is an unnecessary barrier to adoption. Personally, I’m one of those people. I think writing formal schemas is a good idea for language designers even if they never get used at run-time; they’re good for documentation, tooling, and (not least important) forcing you to think formally about your problem space.
ongoing — I’m a sceptic… but I’ll look at the spec, maybe even read it.
Accessible expanding and collapsing menu
I decided to recreate the menu from the tutorial in a more modern way, using leaner and more efficient HTML and CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript. This kind of menu isn’t anything new, of course. Nevertheless I think publishing this comparison of the two approaches may be useful.
456 Berea Street — First, the resulting menu is nice. Second, the comparison might prove very useful.
A lot of web copy is written by copywriters who aren’t trained in writing for the web—and much of the rest is written by people who aren’t trained writers at all. If you’re a designer who can consult intelligently on basic copy improvements, you can gain a substantial business advantage. This article is designed to help you do just that.
A List Apart — Don’t use me as an example of how to write for the web… use this.
Porsche -- You sweep the steps from the top down
T SEEMS INCREDIBLE TODAY, BUT LITTLE OVER A DECADE AGO Porsche was in serious danger of collapse. In 1993, it sold just 14,000 cars, down from 53,000 in 1986, and in 1991 lost around $150 million. Enter Wendelin Wiedeking. An engineer by trade, he came to Porsche in 1992 as head of its production and materials department. He had traveled to Japan and seen how car companies there ran their production lines; Porsche, in comparison, was back in the Middle Ages. Virtually everything was made by hand in-house, which brought the benefits of fine craftsmanship, but the downside of terrible inefficiency and occasional sloppy workmanship.
the coolhunter — It now sells around 70,000 vehicles a year.
Burstsort is a library for sorting strings, and is currently the fastest algorithm for doing so, being much faster than Quicksort and Radixsort. It has applications to computational linguistics, genomics, and many other areas of science where sorting strings is required.
SourceForge.net
'Hip Heterodoxy' and the History of Economics
Perhaps the Brazil-savvy Ruccio or his anthropologist wife will correct me, but I remember reading somewhere that the indigenous tribes of the Amazon were not primitive isolates as many believed, but the remnants of mighty nations, which once ruled over vast empires.
So it is with heterodox economists. To the sharp contemporary eye, we seem a handful of misfits, who somehow stumbled past the comprehensive exams and the tenure reviews, laid like land-mines across our paths. But that is not quite how we see ourselves.
James K. Galbraith, TPMCAFFE book club — Written by John Kenneth Galbraith’s son. I was kind of wondering what happened.
Challenging Orthodox Economics -- Part I
Today’s orthodoxy is laissez-faire neo-classical economics, and that orthodoxy significantly frames public understanding of the economy in terms of “free markets”; frames public expectations of what the economy can deliver; frames public beliefs about what institutional arrangements are feasible, and frames thinking about what policy issues are important and what policy solutions are possible.
Thomas Palley, TPMCAFFE book club — A good follow up to Galbraith’s article
The text editor for creative writers. Where “Word” and “Style” are not defined through buttons and palettes.
The Blue Technologies Group — This is a very well done writing tool (that’s their ‘slogan’ I quoted). It is a little pricey, but I really do want this…
generate text using vocabulary from fifteen different languages
A Lorem Ipsum text generator for macs (there is an OS X version, scroll down). That’s fifteen, ahhh, mostly rarely heard in casual conversation languages.
Burton sees the future of SOA and it is REST
If you are an architect or developer working on service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects, you probably are not doing representational state transfer (REST) now, but within the next five years you probably will be.
That is how Burton Group Inc. analysts answered their own rhetorical question – REST: Is it the next big thing? – with a resounding yes at a Web conference on Tuesday. Repeating the mantra “The Web is REST. REST is the Web,” Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton, said the only thing new about REST is that it is starting to catch on with SOA tool vendors and the open source community as well as architects and developers.
Search Web Services — Uh oh! Now they’ll screw up SOA/REST too!
One thing worth highlighting is how heterodox analysis of the economy has fled into other disciplines outside Economics. My Ph.D. is in Sociology but I was very much identified with the Economic Sociology tradition based on a range of thinkers analyzing the social structures of how markets work– and don’t work.
TPMCafe — More on heterodox economics (if that’s the right phrase).
Violate copyright? $150,000. Violate free speech? $0.
Viacom sends YouTube a list of 100,000 videos that Viacom claims violate copyright, and under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube has no practical choice except to take them down. Viacom did not look at all 100,000. Some certainly did not violate copyright. For this violation of First Amendment free speech rights, Viacom was penalized, um, wait, let me get out my calculator…yeah, nothing.
We need to stop giving the world’s Viacoms business incentives for violating our right to speak freely.
Joho the Blog
