Mind-Reading

There was a time I had quite an interest for metacognition, thus I dedicated some of the best years of my life to analyze and study in deep trying to deliver this scenario and its possible consequences, from a scientific point of view.

Today, let me point you to an essay, written by Daniel R. Ames and Lara K. Kammrath, entitled Mind-raeding and Metacognition: narcissism, not actual competence, predicts self-estimated ability.


Unlike previous work, the authors show new evidence about who misunderstands their sensitivity and why.

Even having myself greater doses of narcissism, as I realized when, time ago,  I was applying myself into the fields of metacognition, I arrived to this conclusion: yours truly has been surrounded by incompetence for a while. Like you, dearest reader.

Self-estimation and self-confidence given, in this kind of incompetent scenario , then is a pro, to have success in life.

Here, a link to the essay, available in PDF format. Below, an entertaining story.

Web 2.008

The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism was introduced at ETech2008, this is  four years ago.

An excerpt, by Mr. Ethan Zuckermann:

Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

Creativity

Spreading some news and essays that I have received via email.
There is an interesting essay on componential theory of creativity, one of the major theories of creativity in individuals and in organizations.
This theory was articulated by Teresa Amabile in 1983,  and from its ground, focuses on a intra-individual components proposal.
Read the essay in PDF format, by Mrs. Teresa M. Amabile, here.
Via HBS Working Knowledge.

20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer

It was the past weekend, when I was gently invited to record a music session of the ancient times, when,here in Europe, in the early nineties, it was Liverpool, it was Madchester... And it was Badcelona . In those fury days there was a place called FistBar!, a hellish & avantgarde factory where all the new media and craft attitudes from the young europeans met, comfortably chilled with a bar service, filled with the best beers and whiskeys from all over the modern world.

Last Sunday,  I get an invitation by Mr. Nemo - principal gang leader of the podcast radio programme '20.000 Leguas de Viaje Submarino' -.  An invitation to record an aural travel of what-did-they-mean those years; a 160min music discourse they have fixed and edited in a session that you might want to listen here.

Madchester Sessions - DELFIN, May 2012

This fictional travel reproduces what that "Manchester" sound meant to some of us, then and still now, from a perspective.


 A bunch full of memories and factories, of dreams and youth. 


20.000 Leguas de Viaje Submarino is a radio program for listeners from Radio Universidad de Concepción-Chile, actually emitting a Sunday Live emission through the airwaves and via streaming on the Internet simultaneously.

The funniest thing is that I have never been in Chile, yet. 

My wish is that you like the session as much as I have enjoyed recording it.

For your ears only.

Back to the Future, part two.

Back in the 90s, there were only three stories carried by the press. Let's see if I remember them:

1. Apple is dead.
2. Microsoft is evil.
3. Java is the future.

via Dave (Winner).

FUA

Ajax: Asynchronous JavaScript + XML
 ASP: Active Server Pages
CSS: Cascading Stylesheets
DOM: Document Object Model
FTP: File Transfer Protocol
GPL: GNU General Public License
HTML: HyperText Markup Language
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SQL: Structured Query Language
UI: User interface
XML: Extensible Markup Language

Cordova

Just installed Cordova in 127.0.0.1 is where the heart is.

Apache Cordova is a platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

1. Once done, download the mobile-spec .
2. Open X-Code.
3. went to the repo.

  Et voilà!

You Should Do Something

Some interesting links, via Mr. Egor Homakov:

• Cross-Site Request Forgery For POST Requests With An XML Body.
• HTML5 Top 10 Threats Stealth Attacks and Silent Exploits.
• Preventing CSRF and XSRF Attacks.
• CSRF Is A Vulnerability In All Browsers.

Plazes are Gone

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... It was 2005 and we were all excited about the new 2.0 revolution.

 I remember when, in If my memory serves me well, that year of 2005, I was gently invited by Kosmar to be on Plazes - one of the first two-dot-zero adventures, one of the first social-based web based app; developed and designed by a company based in Berlin. We , after all are all euros, after all.

As pioneers we were devoted to all that brave and furious new thing the web was evolving into. It was in the year 2005.

By July 1st Plazes.com won't be around after that, and all my personal data (including my account info) will be erased.

Now, there is a kind explanation - a wunderbar infographic design - of what has been a life inside Plazes. And, once logged in, and I am able to download this a piece of personal history that belongs to my life, a digital life shared with friends from allover the world.

In the year 2005 there was no location, near-field apparels, neither maps to tell one where has it been or what did you like.

As for today, Plazes has been acquired by Nokia ( formerly known as Microsoft ); and it's time to me to say good-bye.

It's been a great journey.

Businesses & Decisions

Software development of apps was much harder than publishers had anticipated, because they had hired Web developers who knew technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Publishers were astonished to learn that iPad apps were real, if small, applications, mostly written in a language called Objective C, which no one in their WebDev departments knew.

Publishers reacted by outsourcing app development, which was expensive, time-consuming, and unbudgeted.

An experience written by Mr. Jason Pontin, here.

Madchester is Back. Again.

Internet Hall of Fame

Celebrating people who bring the Internet to life.


 A nice web-site, with a cute design ( congrats Internet Society!!) that might be seen and visited here

How Browsers Work

Web browsers are probably the most widely used software.

In case you were born after 1982, and you are kind wanna-be web designer o whatever-you-might-define-yourself-from-8AM-till-6PM, this ( click there ) is a nice article to learn and cope with covardice.

No copy-paste, my apologies. Via Tali Garsiel.

Madchester 11 05 2012

If you are in Barcelona, Mediterranean Coast, south of Europe; I will see you there next 11th of May.

Curtis

“The reason for designing new media is simple — to subtly and quietly change the world.”

- Hillman Curtis (1961 -2012)

Live Redesign

Jeff Zeldman is now performing what members of web industries developers and principals or managers, whom admire and respect his work and sapience, are doing everyday at work: A live redesign of his website. Again.

Then I ditched the sidebar. Multiple columns are so 1990s.

Agree completely. 
I hope this My wish is that his excellent work will influence costumers in a near future.


Do shall his excellent work influence customers in a near future?. I wish so.

To influence those kind of common costumers - as the role indicates - , whose lack of patience make their will not capable to understand that the web, that simple web we eat for lunch everyday, is just a daily evolving thing, a simple organic piece changing constantly.

The web is nor a commercial TV, neither a print ad. please, dearest reader, leave this misunderstood conception to the marketing people; bacuase of we - the rest of commons - are into real business, not floating and billing around.
 Webs might be considered as human beings, a web-site evolves, a web-site grows, a web-site dimishes. A web-site exists.

G+, for example, with its changes in the UI interface, evolve with its audience and costumers, in a cute manner to expose Zeldman's principles. Again.

Welcome to the future, you dearest reader. Welcome to the ever evolving sites.

On Patent(z)

At the same time, we are forced to live in the world as it is, and that world currently permits software patents. A relatively small number of very large companies have amassed large numbers of software patents. We believe such massive software patent portfolios are ripe for misuse because of the questionable nature of many software patents generally and because of the high cost of patent litigation. One defense against such misuse is to develop a corresponding portfolio of software patents for defensive purposes. Many software companies, both open source and proprietary, pursue this strategy. In the interests of our company and in an attempt to protect and promote the open source community, Red Hat has elected to adopt this same stance. We do so reluctantly because of the perceived inconsistency with our stance against software patents; however, prudence dictates this position.

via Red Hat

Rudeness

No one is hiring you to be their friend. They’re hiring you to design solutions to problems. But if they can get the same solution from someone who’s pleasant and someone who’s a jerk, they’ll go with the former

An excerpt from Mr. Mike Monteiro, via a list apart. .

Fire Up your Community Manager...

..And return to the, say, classical email marketing system. Everybody knows it works.

Facebook email addresses launched approximately eighteen months ago in order to promote the social messaging system, but recent studies indicate that email is still the dominant form of communication over social networks.

Via Digital Trends.

Uh, uh. Part Five.

A point of view by Mr. Geoffrey James, about the predictable future of those named social networks and mass trending topics, that you might want to read here, and some cite below.

With its awkward design, 1990s-style layouts, weird privacy policies, and intrusive advertising, Facebook is vulnerable to the next best thing. Frankly, I think it's just one online conversion program away from losing its customer base and becoming the next MySpace.

Back to the roots

It seems that the next trend for all the newbie crreators of web applications will be to return to th roots and priciples of the web ( independent and open ) as it used to be. Glad to hear about that, yours truly.

As the years have progressed the web has gotten a lot more social, and it makes more sense to have our own brand and site. We can still be ‘on’ Facebook in the sense that we plug into News Feed and fan pages, but having our own brand gives us full, top to bottom control over the product experience, something that we think is critical for building the best tool possible for organizers to create campaigns for social change.

In case you are intrigued by the quote, might you read the complete impressions of Mr. John Battelle, here.

Web Awards 2012

One more year, fortunately, this yours has been invited to take part in the Web Marketing Awards 2012. See ya there.

The Web Marketing Association is pleased to announce the 16th annual Call for Entries for its 2012 international WebAward Competition, the Internet's premier award competition that judges website development against an ever increasing Internet standard of excellence and against peer sites within 96 industries. The deadline for entry is May 31, 2012 and the competition Website is www.webaward.org.

Useful links 2

A behind-the-scenes look at Facebook release engineering

HipHop converts PHP into heavily optimized C++ code, which can then be compiled into an efficient native binary. When Facebook unveiled HipHop to the public in 2010 and began distributing it under an open source software license, the company's engineers reported that it reduced average CPU consumption on Facebook by roughly 50 percent..

The death rattles of AM, then FM

But while FM is finally beating AM, its ratings today look like AM’s back in the 1950s. FM wasn’t taken seriously by the radio industry then, even though it sounded much better, and also came in stereo..

Harmony

It does mean that some of the ideas going back to the first ES4 proposals in 1999, implemented variously in JScript.NET and ActionScript, won't make it into any ES standard.

On ECMAScript Harmony, circa 2008.

Newbies

However, I think people would be better off starting to get into it in a more gentle way. Start by running your own server. That could involve a little programming . And you'll be getting a solid basis in why you would want to program in the first place. Setting up systems that make your life easier. Automating things you do manually that a computer could do for you, perhaps better.

Want to learn code? Read some advice, here.

Screenqueri.es

Damn it!.
Screenqueri.es | Pixel Perfect Responsive Design Testing Tool

On Open Source

These days, this ,yours truly, is proactively working using AMF under PHP, for a client's project.

 In fact, there is no need to use - I might say to employ - BlazeDS neither any Java based solution, due to the specifications, and the budget, of this project.

 One realizes, over his experienced career, that photographers - intended as clients - do not demand high technical neither sophisticated development in an application.

 They want things to be simple, effective, and with an ease to maintain or to update - even by themselves.

 Surfing on the Internet, and trying to look and to learn from past experiences of other developers, I have reached this post, where its author speaks - mainly because he developed it -  about one solution I was looking for: SabreAMF. An AMF client and server for PHP5.

So this is the  quote:

"It kind of went downhill when Zend_AMF got released in late 2008. Originally I was helping the (paid) developer with the implementation, but then communication went silent. I only heard about it again when it was announced with much fanfare as the Adobe/Zend partnership. This left me with a bit of a sour taste. The developer at the time was struggling with decoding the AMF0/3 bits, which was just released as an open spec at the time.

Originally the AMF0/3 specification was closed, and as far as I know, there were no open source implementations...After checking out Zend_AMF, I found that the developer didn't bother trying decoding himself, but effectively just took my design and renamed a few methods..."

A bitter story, explained by Mr. Evert Pot, that has been repeating, like History repeats itself, in the carves of Open Source software. A curious story you can read here.

 You are not alone, Even.

News from Pinterest

Pinterest, the trending hype these days on the net, has updated its policy and rules for better, I guess. Today I have received an email in which Pinterest explains its new rules to balded users like me.
Here they go:

• Pinterest original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest one grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never the intention and Pinterest removed this from their updated Terms. 
• Pinterest has updated their Acceptable Use Policy and they will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse. 
• Pinterest released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements. 
• Finally, Pinterest added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

Well, in case you had fear of images, have a patient look to my profile in that social network ADDENDA:Since yesterday, profiles have been followed by , say, mysterious spammers, most of them supposed pretty girls from Alaska with the motto "Follow me if you like (blah, blah). For this, I have removed the link of this yours truly.
You are welcome.

Jobs

Tradable jobs would have actually declined if the loss of jobs in manufacturing hadn't been offset by new tradable jobs involved in the creation of ideas (for example, consulting and the development of new information technologies, nearly all service sector jobs).

An interesting approach on the need of factory jobs, written by Mr. James Heskett. Here.

Metaphors

The Prisoner's Dilemma is not only useful in describing the problem, but also serves as a way to organize solutions. We humans have developed four basic mechanisms for ways to limit defectors: what I call societal pressure. We use morals, reputation, laws, and security systems. It's all coercion, really, although we don't call it that. I'll spare you the details; it would require a book to explain.

Mr. Bruce Schneider  wrote an essay book on security.
You might find more details here.