Semergence

World, meet Whatever Is Fine With Me. I think you two will really hit it off.

Whatever Is Fine With Me is a easy, quick polling or voting application that you can use to find an answer to a question faster than you can sing the Canadian national anthem.

The site was created after we found it difficult to make ad hoc decisions among our group of friends. Most famous is “where are we going to lunch?” Of course, the most common answer to that is: “whatever is fine with me.”

I wanted to create a site that is task focused, fast to use, and with as close to a zero barrier of entry as possible. I am sick of creating accounts on sites, so my first rule was banish account signups. It’s still fairly secure, as each page is identified by a very hard to guess URI.

Why use Whatever Is Fine With Me?

• No login required for you or your friends
• Extremely fast and easy
• Totally and completely free

I’d love to hear feedback, please post any comments to the Whatever Is Fine With Me Forums. If enough people begin to use it, I’d be happy to add features.

Some new features I was thinking about or have been suggested:

• Make “whatever is fine with me” an explicit option when choosing your votes
• Remember your friend list, so you don’t have to type it in multiple times
• Remember all your past questions

So please give it a shot and I hope it’s useful!

(I’m posting this to see if anyone wants to use it. I’m really hoping so, so I can justify spending time on it.)

And while Whatever Is Fine With Me is perfect for asking your friends questions, if you want to ask the world a question, you definitely want to check out Ask 500.

• Task-Centered User Interface Design : Main page and Shareware Notice
  The central goal of this book is to teach the reader how to design user interfaces that will enable people to learn computer systems quickly and use them effectively, efficiently, and comfortably.
  (tags: ui usability)

• MiniAjax.com / A showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts
  ajax demos
  (tags: ajax web)
• Design Patterns for Simulations in Erlang/OTP (ResearchIndex)
  (tags: erlang patterns)
• ZigZig Software - ZigVersion
  (tags: mac osx subversion)

• InfoQ: Programming for Parrallelism: The Parallel Hierarchies Pattern
  (tags: algorithms parallel)

• The Structure of Information Networks (Jon Kleinberg)
  Note to self, quit job, read all of these.
  (tags: information networks)

So Bill says XMPP matters and is “pushing” a push model for message delivery.

Am curious, though, if this debate can be re-framed as Stateless or Stateful? A stateless messaging system would map to a Pull strategy, placing the burden on the client to actively poll or pull its messages. A stateful system would map to Push, where the server maintains a connection for every subscribed client.

Stateful systems are hard to scale over the internet. One reason is because there’s a limit to the number of TCP connections I can maintain open at any one time. What’s the limit? Not sure, probably OS and configuration specific, but is that a limit that I’ll easily hit? If I’m not actively maintaining an open connection, can the system still be called Push?

An aside on Push vs Pull. Push might make for faster reacting systems, but I know that Pull is usually the way I want to process information. The more Push events I have, the less I get done, the less I can focus, and the more transient everything becomes. To get things done, I need to Pull information when I’m good and ready. So even if we’ve figured out how to scale Push and deploy it everywhere, the edge agents of mine will still buffer everything until I’m ready to Pull it.

So take that, Outlook email notification popups!

• Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial
  In depth tutorial on using CSS floats.
  (tags: css html)

• calendardateselect
  DHTML calendar, built with Ruby on Rails in mind.
  (tags: rubyonrails calendar)

From Bill de hÓra: Wag the dog:

As strange as might sound, businesses might get more value from computer systems once those systems stop being optimized around transient business requirements or features. You can customize things, but only above the infrastructure. That seems to be part of the pitch for something like EC2.

Bill is talking about the systems level architecture, but can this observation be applied to software level services? Is this the pitch for SOA, in that business systems can be composed from existing smaller discreet services in the cloud?

Yahoo Developer Network blog has links to their recent OSCON Hadoop Presentation with downloads of PDFs and a video of the presentation.

Hadoop is an open source implementation of a framework for processing large sets of data. Yahoo is currently using it to process log files, among other things.