Just now, I read an article about Google+’sstatus quo. The key point of this article is that it states that Google+ is nowa “Ghost City”. According to the article, users of Google+ spend only 3 minutesper month on Google+, this is a very low participation rate for a socialnetwork website. After reading this, Iwonder whether Google+ is really a Ghost City now, I cannot give my answer. Sinceit was released just around 8 months ago, so the user base is not very large. Iregistered a Google+ a few months ago. And I found some features of Google+ arereally cool, such as Hangouts a...

After Twitter introduced mandatory authentication with OAuth, many of the current scripts for posting content to Twitter don’t work anymore.OAuth can be great for more advanced authentication, but for a simple post to twitter script, it seems like a little overkill.In this post you’ll learn how to create a simple script that uses a quick and dirty version of OAuth for posting new tweets to Twitter.How to create a simple scriptSimplified, Twitter OAuth involves sending both application tokens and user tokens back and forth between your site and Twitter.If you want to authenticate ...

What should a ‘cache’ be? It means a lot of things, but to my mind the default programming type should be:“keep around expensive-to-generate bits of read-only data in case we need them again, or until the computer really needs that RAM for something else”I was writing a custom video editing program in Python (interesting choice of language for that problem) and I wanted to cache decoded frames; but I just wasn’t happy with the memory management of explicit caches.  It means making a decision about how much RAM to ring-fence for something without having g...

The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effe...

When Apple introduced the first iPad in 2010, I bought one immediately. I didn’t know what I’d use it for, but I was sure that I would find some use for it. I never did. I played around with it, wrote some code for it, but eventually stopped using it. I would pick it up from time to time to read something or watch a YouTube movie, but even that was a rare occurrence. I have since picked up an iPad 2, and I’m using it a lot more than the first iPad, but again, I’m pretty much only using it to consume content.I suspect that most people use their iPads similarly: to su...

These are the only things you need to do to be successful*. You can get away with just doing one of the two, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.If you you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it.Then make something that you can talk about. Make something cool. Something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it's the least useful thing you've ever made, if you can talk about it, make it. This part...

Here at Kendo UI, we have always encouraged you to give us feedback.  Whether it’s through our forums, or the Kendo UI User Voice site, what you think is important to us.  We take your thoughts very seriously.  We receive a lot of feature requests, enhancement requests and other various pieces of product feedback. One of the things that we heard loud and clear from our users was that our documentation could be better.  We took a good look at what we had, and we agree.  It can and should be better. Nothing is more important to you as a developer than to have the ...

Yesterday  I published a piece about Newry in Northern Ireland, which is looking to help boost its economy by encouraging a startup ecosystem. A little later, a post entitled ‘You will not be the next Silicon Valley, please stop trying‘ appeared over on Pando Daily, in which the author decided pull a bunch of Irish stereotypes out of the bag to attack the idea.Now, I could detail everything that’s wrong with the article, but the comments there do a perfect job of ripping it apart. It certainly missed the point of what’s happening in Newry. Indeed, if Trevor Gilbe...