In an effort to take on the Google’s online storage efforts, it seems Microsoft is about to launch a new online storage service. The word of this online storage drive effort is embedded deep in the Fortune magazine story on Ray Ozzie. (Business 2.0’s next issue has an interview with Ozzie by John Battelle. Its a good read!)

GigaOM : » Get Ready for M(icrosoft) Drive

Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized or articles written, adding an extra monitor will considerably raise your output - 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.

Multitaskers find that a 2nd monitor beats Alt-Tab - Technology - International Herald Tribune

I spoke with Balaji (our marshalling guru) about changing the element-centric (upper) version to the attribute-centric (lower) version, and it turned out to be a single-line of code change. So my natural question was "why were we using the element-centric version which is much trickier for a programming language to parse?" And the answer was that several people considered the element-centric version easier to read, which I must admit it is - especially once the objects start having many many attributes and as you start having long lists of objects.

This is what puzzled me. Structurally, the element-based system is much more complex, but most people considered it much easier to read. So why is it easier for humans to "parse" one version, and easier for a programming language to parse the other. Both are textual in nature, so it's not like the apples-to-oranges question "why is it easier for computers to understand binary than text while binary is inscrutable to humans?". No, this one is more subtle. The only thing I can think of is that the human brain is sophisticated enough that rather than being put off by the extra structure, it takes advantage of it to more easily chunk the information into digestible nuggets. I.e. the element-based form changes the "person" definitions into something resembling a paragraph rather than just a list of run-on sentences.

IBM developerWorks : Blogs : Building tools to support software developers

I think it's becoming clear now that AJAX enabled applications generate a higher load on an application server than a non AJAX application. I guess customers will have to size their boxes appropriately as a result. The problem is related to the fact that an AJAX enabled pages simply send more requests to the server because of their high level of interaction versus a conventional web page.

High level discussion on whether this is true.

/dev/websphere: AJAX and its impact on servers

One slide in particular jumped out to me during the presentation. It showed a micro-view of IBM’s revenue breakdown comparing Linux-related activities and traditional IP royalties and licensing revenues. Yochai showed this graph as part of a pattern that he points to in which collaborative peer-based production is 1) happening, 2) measurable and 3) large scale in certain applications. I found what I believe to be a similar version of this slide in some random PDF that Google dug up for me (see slide 5).

Whirlycott - Philip Jacob » Yochai Benkler at HLS

Given the pervasive security that now surrounds the President of the United States and just about everything associated with him, it's a bit far-fetched to think that a couple of pranksters could sneak onto an Air Force base, tag Air Force One with spray paint (while the other person recorded the event with a videocamera), and escape unscathed — and even more astoundingly, not a word of the feat reached any news outlet.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Tagging Air Force One)

Summary:
Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Matt Cutts confirmed today that the AdSense mediapartners bot (aka mediabot) is indexing pages for use in the Big Daddy Google index. Both Greg Boser and myself have found evidence of mediabot's crawls for AdSense ad targeting purposes have ended up being used in the natural Google search results.

It could definitely be used as a tool to detect when content is being cloaked for either the Google or AdSense bot, particularly since the mediapartners bot has been indexing pages since at least the beginning of February.

It will be interesting to see if other consequences arise for webmasters, such as excluding pages for googlebot via robots.txt that end up being indexed via the mediabot.

If you think about it... this isn't very cool. Googlebot is a well-known robot that people may have reason to block from certain content. It is easy and well-documented how to do this. It seems reasonable that Google should launch a second bot under a new name for a different index and different function. But it seems shady (although logical) for that bot to also feed into the Googlebot index, unless it were to respect robot.txt directives for Googlebot as well as mediabot in those cases. Which I doubt.

Matt Cutts confirms AdSense media bot in natural search index - JenSense.com

I found a new LaTeX package the other day, known as cancel, which allows me to either strike through or zero out a term in an equation.

\jeff{krimmel} � Cancelling Terms in LaTeX

But, some in the Northeast get even one more day. Taxpayers who live in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont or Washington DC have until Tuesday because Monday is Patriots Day — the annual commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.

Time Is Up For Tax Procrastinators - CBS News