Calligraphic Code | Tudor Munteanu

One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in general, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who spend their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too easy for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in many projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.

quote from this awesome article about user experience.

‎”I think it’s safe to say that web applications are not going tocompletely replace desktop applications, just as the car hasn’treplaced the bicycle, television hasn’t replaced newspapers, recordedmusic hasn’t replaced live music, etc. In every case there is a”certain something” to ensure that the older technology will retain asecure …niche.” quote from eiffel-ga from Google Answers.



I’d like to replace the desktop applications part with native applications. None the less, web apps are making good progress and it’s just a matter of getting users accustomed to the idea of mobile web apps.

The official jQuery Mobile Framework. First of all because jQuery rocks. The community is cool, the development time it saves is amazing and the results are limitless. One thing they tried before is to make a standard for interfaces around the web trough their jQuery UI.
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Hi,
I am a British Black Ops specialist serving in top secret locations all throughout the world.  My team is recently attached with the NATO unit operations in Afghanistan.
 
We hijacked a suspected black Van between the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. We discovered other currencies including US dollars of about $ 16 million loaded inside the Black Van with so many types of machine guns, which intelligence suggests are Taliban funds raised through the drug trade. Our team performed a covet operation, fast roping upon several drug laboratories, shot and killed severalTaliban leaders and captured 15 enemy combatants.

We want to move this money out of this place to you, before they are
confiscated by corrupt government officials. This place is a war zone you will keep our share pending the end of our assignment here in Afghanistan.
 
We will take 70%. You take 30%. No strings attached, just help us move it out of Afghanistan, Afghanistan is a war zone. We plan to use secured logistics courier to ship the money out in a large box.
 
If you can help to receive the box for us, I will send you the full details. Kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication also your contact details. This should be a secret and must be a secret between us.

This is one of the most fun spam I ever received.

*Heavy drums while putting war paint*

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zomgitsbrian/4041372239/

The fun Reddit made me stumble upon this interesting thread on the great Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/487258/plain-english-explanation-of-big-o/487278#answer-487278 . Yes, I’m aware of the geeky path that lead to a nerdy result.

After almost 2 years of calculus, algebra and geometry I was pretty fed up with more maths, so this theory looked pretty boring to me in college. The lack of lack of practical examples was turning me off. These days, while going deeper in deeper in software development and scalability problems, I see the application of such theories and that brings me joy.

For example Google App Engine’s non-relational database changes the way a web developer should think about storing info. No more tables and normalization, it’s all objects and properties. I’m anxious to see the moment when one of our GAE apps will be saved by an optimization resulted from complexity analysis.

Google App Engine is great for fast deploying and fast scaling applications. That’s a fact. The default authentication system uses Google accounts. Another option is deploying a custom user/password combination, which is the more traditional approach.

For one of my recent projects, I wanted to make the user authentication even simpler, so I integrated Facebook Connect and the Graph API in App Engine . Now users can login with only one click.

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