Many believe that zebra stripes aid the reader by guiding the eye along the row. However, despite being in use in both paper and electronic mediums for almost half a century, there is practically no evidence that it actually assists users in this way.

A List Apart: Articles: Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?

A programmer is walking along a beach and finds a lamp. He rubs the lamp, and a genie appears. "I am the most powerful genie in the world. I can grant you any wish, but only one wish."

The programmer pulls out a map, points to it and says, "I'd want peace in the Middle East."

The genie responds, "Gee, I don't know. Those people have been fighting for millenia. I can do just about anything, but this is likely beyond my limits."

The programmer then says, "Well, I am a programmer, and my programs have lots of users. Please make all my users satisfied with my software and let them ask for sensible changes."

At which point the genie responds, "Um, let me see that map again."

Best Programming Jokes

I've ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element.

John Resig - Processing.js

The cool thing about eBay's support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn't a Nigerian scammer. Timothy has discovered the awful truth behind today's eBay—something many readers here already know—which is that it's become virtually impossible to sell any sort of medium-to-high end electronics there anymore.

Nigerian Scammers: It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay

I'm reading a business plan that I received. 10 honking megabytes of brainwaves put to paper. 115 carefully crafted pages which gets me deep, really deep, into the mind of the entrepreneur. You are thinking to yourself, self, how could a simple business plan allow the VC to learn tons about me and my people.

Simple.

Make tons of changes to your document, pass it to your 'advisors' for advising, get back their edits, make more changes, save and send the document to me without accepting all changes and stripping out all the notes and comments.

The Post Money Value: The Coolest Business Plan Ever

In an effort to return to my roots, I spent the majority of the day compiling what I believe to be the mother of all technical SEO cheat sheets. The recommended viewing format of this cheat sheet is as a PDF rather than the traditional blog post (I found the blog posts inconvenient to print)

SEOmoz | The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet

The House of Representatives (in a bill called the Housing Retention Act) and the Senate (in a bill called the Foreclosure Prevention Act) are attempting to deal with this problem. These bills have many positive attributes, but they fail the key test. For a family now facing foreclosure, neither of these bills contains strong enough incentives to get people to work things out with their lenders. So lots of families are giving up and moving. As a result, by the time either of these bills is enacted, hundreds of thousands of families already will have sent in their keys and turned off the heat.

My father's latest opinion piece.

Give homeowners incentive to stay | Inman News

I'm dreadfully sick today and I think I've caught the GTA Flu.
It typically effects males between the ages of 18-35 and requires one if not two days off from work.

Digital Collage - I'm dreadfully sick today and I think I've caught the GTA Flu.

We've all heard of the elevator pitch: the brief overview of a product, service, or project that can be delivered in the time it takes to ride an elevator, usually around 30 seconds or so. Now here comes a new idea: the Twitpitch, and yes, it's just what you think - the same pitch narrowed down to 140 characters or less.

Twitpitch: The Elevator Pitch Hits Twitter - ReadWriteWeb

The reaction from the Facebook community was positive, so the folks at Animoto decided to step it up a notch. They noticed that a significant portion of users who installed the app never made their first Animoto video — yet the application (as they themselves admit) relies heavily on the 'wow' factor of seeing your first Animoto video and wanting to share it with your friends. On Monday the team made a subtle but important change to their application: they auto-created a user's first Animoto video.

That did the trick!

They had 25,000 members on Monday, 50,000 on Tuesday, and 250,000 on Thursday. Their EC2 usage grew as well. For the last month or so they had been using between 50 and 100 instances. On Tuesday their usage peaked at around 400, Wednesday it was 900, and then 3400 instances as of Friday morning.nullnull

Amazon Web Services Blog: Animoto - Scaling Through Viral Growth