It's a simple service to convert the web pages to PDF files. No need to install applications on your computer. It's free and without registration!
Link: HTML-PDF-Converter.com – Free HTML to PDF converter online, convert HTML to PDF for free
Topify lets users manage their followers and respond to direct messages directly from their email inbox.
Link: Topify Lets You Manage Your Twitter Followers Via Email
By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big like AOL and Sun Microsystems and small JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July, Yahoo Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?
via Yahoo Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect – ReadWriteWeb.
A little late now, but for those who may have missed it…
It is codenamed "half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed" to give an idea where we stand in the grand scheme of things and to commemorate the many fruitful discussions we had during its development.
Link: FFmpeg 0.5 Released
While your designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an equation that explains why people do the crazy things they do. Lewin asserts that behavior is a function of a person and his environment: B=f(P,E). You can’t change a person’s nature, but you can design the environment he moves around in.
via A List Apart: Articles: The Elements of Social Architecture.
Yesterday [3/12/09], we flipped the switch and moved Jaiku to App Engine. Today, we are open sourcing the Jaiku code base under the Apache License 2.0. The code is available as JaikuEngine on Google Code Project Hosting as of now. Anyone can set up and run their own JaikuEngine instance on Google App Engine.
via Jaikido Blog: JaikuEngine is now open source!.
Presenting solutions such as Google’s BigTable and Amazon Dynamo, Magnusson said that distributed databases allow us to manage huge data volumes (BigTable is designed for petabyte tables) but issues of high availability while distributing across a number of systems bring a set of requirements that often requires the solution to diverge from the relational model and lean more towards key-value or document stores.
Gojko Adzic » QCon London 2009: Database projects to watch closely.
…we've created a new EC2 pricing model, which we call Reserved Instances. After you purchase such an instance for a one-time fee, you have the option to launch an EC2 instance of a certain instance type, in a particular availability zone, for a period of either 1 of 3 years. Your launch is guaranteed to succeed; there's no chance of encountering any transient limitations in EC2 capacity. You have no obligation to run the instances full time, so you'll pay even less if you choose to turn them off when you are not using them.
via Amazon Web Services Blog: Announcing Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances.
If you are storing all of your data in a relational database, and the load on that database exceeds its capacity, there is no automatic solution that allows you to simply add more hardware and scale up. (One day, there will be, but that’s for another post). In the meantime, most websites are building their own scalable clusters using sharding.
Link: Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups
It seems to bill itself as the “The First Instant URL Caching Website”. Sort of like the Way Back Machine but it backups up URLs
specify and it seems to be caching the full page, assets and all.
via BackupUrl.com – Create a cached copy of any url.
