Common Craft - Modern Tech Topics in Plain English
September 19, 2007 | 3 Comments
Common Craft has built a series of presentations explaining modern tech topics in “Plain English”. What’s most interesting about their presentations is that they use a classic method of stop motion animation to explain these things. This counterintuitive approach is done entertainingly with paper cut-outs.
I think the Google Docs video I included above is their best, but if you were entertained by that, check out the older ones:
RSS in Plain English
Wikis in Plain English
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Tags: common craft, commoncraft, delicious, google docs, plain english, presentations, rss, social bookmarking, stop motion, video, wiki, wikis
Google Presentations Coming This Summer
April 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Google announced today that presentations are coming to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This was of course rumored a couple months ago, and certainly expected (or eagerly awaited…) by the tech industry.
From the blog:
we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia. They have some great technology for presentation creation and document conversion, and it will be a great addition as we add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Looking into Tonic a bit more deeply lead to the FAQ on tonicsystems.com:
“Tonic Systems is a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools.”
My only fear is that the technology they are buying as part of the Tonic acquisition is Java based. Docs and Spreadsheets is much lighter as pure javascript and xhtml. I trust Google will strike the appropriate balance and get this new application integrated and working nicely. As soon as screenshots begin to emerge, I’ll be sure to post those.
Tags: docs, docs & spreadsheets, docs and spreadsheets, documents, google, google presently, java, javascript, office, powerpoint, presentation, presentations, spreadsheets, tonic, tonic systems, writely
MySQL Performance Blogs
March 7, 2007 | 2 Comments
I’ve recently been doing a lot of work with performance tuning in MySQL. Here are a few blogs that I have found highly useful by people who are involved in some of the most serious MySQL based projects on the internet.
Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko: MySQL Performance Blog
Zaitsev used to work as manager of High Performance Group at MySQL. Now he and Tkachenko run a consultant business specializing in high performance MySQL. He is common on the presentation circuit and has made his presentations all available. Tkachenko worked as a performance and scalability engineer under Zaitsev at MySQL. This blog contains great benchmarking and deep understanding of the MySQL infrastructure.
Domas Mituzas: Vaporware, Inc
Mituzas currently works for MySQL and is responsible for much of the scaling and performance tuning for Wikipedia. He also worked to make WordPress much more efficient in the latest versions. His blog has some examples and tips for scaling and performance tuning. Since he has such solid real world experience with Wikipedia, these examples and explanations are truly invaluable to understanding how to work with MySQL in amazingly efficient ways.
Jeremy Zawodny: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog
Zawodny works at Yahoo and is responsible for the amazing MySQL administration tool mytop. When it comes to MySQL, Zawodny is likely the best recognized name. He also wrote the O’Reilly book, High Performance MySQL. He also has some informative presentations available, but they are definitely starting to become dated.
If anyone else knows of great MySQL blogs, specifically that apply to performance tuning, scaling, and optimization, please let me know.
Tags: blog, blogs, Domas Mituzas, jeremy zawodny, mituzas, mysql, mytop, O'Reilly, performance, performance blog, Peter Zaitsev, presentations, scalability, scaling, tuning, Vadim Tkachenko, vaporware, wikipedia, yahoo, zawodny
S5, A Good Start
January 18, 2006 | 2 Comments
I really like the idea of having all my office applications replaced by web based versions. I want to be able to manage any document from where ever I’m sitting on whoevers computer. I then also want to be able to collaborate and share viewing and/or authoring with whomever I like.
Writely does this very well as relates to Microsoft Word. For three months now I have used Writely exclusively for my word processing needs. I no longer have any use for Word.
S5 is billed as “A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System.” Check out this example slideshow. I love what they are accomplishing with their standard, and it is purely XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the background.
If someone can take this concept one step further and build a nice WYSIWYG tool to create slideshows and make it web based, PowerPoint may be the next Office application I stop using.
Maybe the Writely developers could add a simple tab to their app that allows creation of presentations on the S5 standard… Whoever does it, I’ll be in line for the beta, as I’m sure thousands of other will be as well.
Tags: collaboration, excel, html, javascript, presentation, presentations, s5, standard, web 2.0, web20, word, word processing, writely, xhtml