evandavid

+1 recommended reading for "In Defense of Food". It's way outside my regular reading tastes (pop-ish science + nutrition related), but I enjoyed every moment of it, and it's definitely changed the way I think about eating.

You could still keep a record of all calls made, and the tower(s) used to make each call, without getting down to this level of granularity. I might be wrong here, but it seems that they're storing a stream of triangulated location data for a given handset, regardless of the actual network activity like calling.

Let's say that the carriers only stored call records with tower IDs for each call. If there was a dispute every so often because a call was made on a close-by tower that itself happened to be located in a different toll bracket (resulting in an incorrect overcharge to the customer), I'm sure the carrier would happily write off that charge if you disputed them about it, which is probably what they'd do right now anyway.

There must be another reason they're keeping it, even if it's just a case of it being super-cheap to store, and they think that they might figure out something to do with it later.

I'd also like to know whether this information can be or has ever been used in court as evidence. "Where were you on the night of such and such...?" may become a question of the past. Frightening.

Thanks! Moving to San Fran in 2 days (from New Zealand). Hopefully there's some useful stuff in there.

The new layouts for both gizmodo & lifehacker seem quite buggy to me (Mac, latest Chrome). Most obviously, there is a grey line that tracks its way up the screen as I scroll past 'the fold'. And I agree with earlier posters: user test before release (qualitative), and split test as part of the release (quantitative).

I think the better all round solution (in terms of privacy, functionality and maintenance) is to go with a free private git hosting provider like assembla.com. I have tried both the dropbox solution as well as setting up git+ssh on a vps, and assembla is now my goto for personal and side projects.

Haha. Make that three.

I like the idea. I have two quick questions:

- what happens when my site is experiencing issues and you receive massive volumes of complaint/problem emails

- how do I continue to integrate support in our product/feature management workflow, to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard?

- are you hoping to introduce phone calls and other support methods?

Thanks!

Fair. Would you feel the same way about a web application, as opposed to a content-heavy site?

Not trolling. But I admit that I'm overstating my position a little bit to see if any interesting discussion comes of it. The reality of my current situation (a one, sometimes two person team) has meant that I have indeed been following the convention I just described. That's not to say I want to, but as I mentioned, I will probably continue to for the foreseeable future without too much hesitation.

For the time being, I will personally continue to build #!-only websites, designed exclusively for javascript enabled browsers. Maintaining two versions (along the guidelines of progressive enhancement) is just too much work (maintaining and testing html view templates as well as jQuery or moustache templates) considering that so few people lack javascript. I wouldn't let a release go live without running a selenium suite across it in any case. My perspective would be different, I imagine, if I worked on a large team that could 'afford' to take the progressive enhancement route.

I worked in Biometrics for a few years. I was on a fingerprint team, but I was part a wider team that was also responsible for forensic-quality facial recognition technology (a world leader). To put it bluntly, the technology is still very, very, very weak. When it works, it's really impressive, but that's normally during a demo from a nicely curated database. There are some facial technologies that can "work" from a distance (and they are used in airports already), but the success rate is low and the original image still needs to be of decent fidelity. Often times the results from the automated matching will be shortlisted for comparison by human operators. Maybe I was blinded by the awesomeness of fingerprint technology (still blows my mind thinking about it).

Combine this general lack of automated matching awesomeness with the fact that people age, can wear glasses or a beard, etc, and we are still many years away from this kind of capability.

Still, it's always fun to think about the possibilities that biometrics can and will provide.

I'd also like to hear some pragmatic CSS professionals weigh in on this topic. From what I've seen so far, I agree that some of the resets are over the top, but I'm not sure whether the opposition to them is a result of purism over pragmatism. I really just want to speed up CSS development...

Requires a Linkedin profile to sign up!? Really!? There are so many reasons that is a stupid idea.

For people who can't remember if they ever signed up:

Go to gawker.com and use the 'forgot my password' utility. It's under login > forgot my password. Enter your email address in the field provided. It will tell you straight away "That email address is not in our records. Please try again."

I can't think of any reason this would be incorrect based on the recent events. Of course, this doesn't tell you whether your password is vulnerable, just whether you have an account.

Often times, efreedom ranks higher than StackOverflow, and in some cases SO isn't even on the first page (for some reason the official source 'misses' with my search terms). In those cases, I open up the efreedom link and click through to SO. This seems to be happening more and more.

EDIT: I see that the extension actually redirects to SO. So in a way the presence of those sites when I wouldn't normally see SO results is a good thing. Nice.

Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it. Like I mentioned in my original post - it's so hard to keep a clear head looking in from the outside and seeing all the media reports etc.

Yeah I had thought about that fact - I wouldn't want to get into a lesser position by applying for a job remotely than what I could achieve applying in person. I think I will follow some of the other advice mentioned here and do a sort of email/Skype blitz in the 3-4 week period before I arrive, and just make sure that I use any responses to schedule in-person contact for as soon as I get there. Thanks for your advice.

This is a kind of obvious problem to approach, but as people here have mentioned, it would be extremely difficult (milo are trying, as have others). An idea I had once upon a time was that you could essentially solve it by building a kick ass point-of-sale and inventory management software system that customers are able to use for free, provided that they're happy to have their goods indexed on a location aware product search engine. Needless to say, that is still an extremely difficult challenge. I've got a feeling these guys might attempt it at some point: www.vendhq.com

I found it possible to absorb more knowledge (wisdom?) about UX by performing user tests than by any other method of studying the subject.

Grab a copy of "Rocket Surgery made Easy" by Steve Krug, a copy of Silverback for Mac, and start doing some user tests.

In time, you will start to see the same patterns coming up over and over again, and this information will begin to unwittingly inform your thinking during the design phase.

This isn't going to help you with visual design so much, but it certainly will help you with the communication aspects of the software/website, and will help you to avoid design/UX pitfalls.

"that you I be able to" = "that I won't be able to". I have no idea how that came out so wrong.

I've been using spoon.net on and off for cross-browser testing for about 2 years. It's a decent product, but remarkably unstable. It's very common by the middle of the day that you I be able to launch an app from within Spoon, and if I look in the task manager, there is around 8 spoon.net processes locked up and using 100 odd megs of ram each. YMMV, but I've had this on many separate installs. To be honest, this situation has gotten bad enough that most of the time I just run separate machines with different IE versions and access them via RDP. When it works, however, it is very impressive.

Keynote is a great, flexible application. I like to use it for wireframing, and then use Photoshop to create the individual page graphics (rather than designing the whole site layout in there).

Check out http://keynotekungfu.com/

A large part of the customer base for our premium web app is corporate. That means a lot (about 30%) run at 1280 x 1024, which I don't see in the poll as an option.

Just read about how it works. Agreed.

It didn't even need a restart. Cydia is on the home screen, and all the previous data and user configuration is intact. I'm quite dumbfounded with how easy that was. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds.

Just doing this now on girlfriend's iPod touch.

My question: how are they kicking off this process from within the browser? It's pretty seamless.

The dishes needed rearranged in order to fit more in there. The original arrangement was never intended to be more than a prototype. I swear.

That said, I'm sure there is a target market out there who will be more than willing to use the product in its current format. I'm looking forward to seeing where this idea goes.

I love the idea. Love it. Like, really excited. However, I'm not prepared to use a service like this in a hosted environment. Too many risks: you go out of business, security, privacy, etc. Plus the information just feels to personal to be sitting on someone else's server. I would love to see a quick daily prompt like this added to Macjournal or similar software.