I've picked up a lot of new readers to this Tabby as of late, so now I feel like I really need to write some really entertaining and insightful posts. Unfortunately, my life isn't the perfect model of excitement nor insight, so all I can do right now is share some interesting links I've read lately.

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Did the Macintosh survive because of great usability? Nielson writes: "The counter-argument is that usability is the only reason Mac survived." Usability is the unsexiest part of web development - you're generally helping out a minority of users, supporting legacy browsers, and usability is generally the reason why engineers won't get to build the coolest, shiniest new thing. In software development, it's easy to get caught up with trying to push the envelope, when it really doens't need to be pushed. One of the best decisions we ever made with Deki was not to pursue OpenID - as much as I love the notion of OpenID, the implementation would have been horrendous, and adoption is so poor. Let others be the bleeding edge, and learn from their mistakes.

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An amusing quote which encapsulates perfectly why China can't dump US bonds:

Mr Luo, whose English tends toward the colloquial, added: “We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.”

Hah. I love how he just cuts through the crap and says exactly what's on everybody's mind.

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Give up and use tables? It's interesting that lately I've been running into a lot of designs which simply cannot be done effectively in CSS. Hmm...

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Web hooks are the new rage. I can't stop reading about them. They've existed in some form for a while now - I even wrote about implementing them for Tabulas last year. We'll have to see how the technology gets adopted. In Deki, there's some anticipation of these types of features - I figure there's going to be a huge boom of "push" technologies (it's about time for that wave again) - with Lyons, we'll have email notifications as the first push notification system. And of course, we're adding local hooks for the front-end to help users write their own push notifications (or you can use the API - but most of us are interested in spending about 2 hours on a hacking task, for which PHP is far better suited).

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Here's a random factoid I picked up tonight: New Jersey grows 2/3 of the world's eggplants. The Garden State, forreal!

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I absolutely love this scene from "Scent of a Woman":

If there was one way our educational system failed me, it's that it didn't teach me the basics of dance - so many life lessons are buried in dancing. I can't remember the last time I used geometry or calculus - the curriculum in schools today is still steeped in the Cold War mentality - trying to train a generation of scientists to make bombs (hence the emphasis on calculus, physics, and chemistry).