Velocity 2009 - Big Ideas (early registration deadline)

(tag cloud created from Velocity session & speaker information using wordle.net) My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: "What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?" While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part... http://ping.fm/JCPpP

Up Close with an Enigma

At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take... http://ping.fm/ueQ52

Overheard: @edjez on innovation in mobile

Question: When you plug something in do you say �I�m using electricity� or �I�m using the wall socket�? Sometimes I feel the discussion about innovation in mobile tech sounds like a discussion of innovation in energy?where the discussion centers on the design of plugs & sockets. Eduardo Jezierski, in Phones Don't Change the World, People Do. P.S. It's unbelievable... <a href='http://ping.fm/AojwD'>http://ping.fm/xD529</a>

Tim O'Reilly - Why Twitter Matters for News

Twitter has been used for a lot of different purposes, and one has been to report breaking news. But there's been some criticism of how Twitter deals with news, such as the Swine Flu outbreak. With that in mind, O'Reilly Week in Review talked to Tim O'Reilly himself, co-author of the new Twitter Book, about the role of Twitter in informing the public. http://ping.fm/ewSgU

Velocity Preview - Keeping Twitter Tweeting

If there's a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it's one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He'll be talking about that work at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference, in a session entitled Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site, and he spent some time with us to talk about what is involved in keeping the site alive. http://ping.fm/8qKfK

Eat Fast Get Fat?

As someone who fights with quick hotel and airplane meals as a part of my livelihood I found this chart unsurprising. It's known that eating fast doesn't give your brain time to get the "all full" signal so you can eat more calories - especially if you are eating calorically-dense fast foods. This chart was created by Catherine Rampell... http://ping.fm/uXrHM

2 minutes ago from Tweetie

Eric Rice explains the devolution of media, with 60 characters to spare: This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.... http://ping.fm/9ddjl