I use OmniFocus to capture and organize my tasks and Basecamp as communication platform. They are great and help me keep my inbox empty. But I really missed a link between them. It would be great if some of my OmniFocus tasks would automatically appear inside my Basecamp account and vice versa.

OmniFocus’ online synchronization feature gave me a broad hint to build a web application that connects these two worlds. You neither have to run a computer nor to install anything. If you, for example, update a task on your iPhone, it flows directly into your Basecamp account and your Mac’s OmniFocus database. Simple like that.

(via 37signals Product Blog)

Much of LinkedIn’s important data is offline – it moves fairly slowly. So they use daily batch processing withHadoop as an important part of their calculations. For example, they pre-compute data for their “People You May Know” product this way, scoring 120 billion relationships per day in a mapreduce pipeline of 82 Hadoop jobs that requires 16 TB of intermediate data. This job uses a statistical model to predict the probability of two people knowing each other. Interestingly they use bloom filters to speed up large joins, yielding a 10x performance improvement.

via Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Revenge of the sound professional! This video is packed with all the clichés currently spewed by clueless producers, which sound even more ridiculous through a character-to-voice translator.

via Boing Boing.

The unstoppable Radio Lab introduces Words, where one thing leads to another:

Words have the power to shape the way we think and feel. In this stunning video, filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante bandy visual wordplay into a moving exploration of how language connects our inner thoughts to the outside world.

via Bobulate

To repeat, get the Pot. I have had about a dozen over the years. I always buy Zojirushi. I have no idea if that is the best. I use a 3-cup and a 10-cup. They make many models and sizes. Have nothing to do with anything “Micom Programmable.” Nothing to do with words like “Neuro Fuzzy.” No dials or “settings.” I am saving us money. What you want is your basic Pot with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Sometimes it says Hold.

“Son of of bitch”

(via Luxist)

The NY Times interviewed eight North Koreans who recently left their country about the increasingly dire conditions there. It seems impossible, but the November currency devaluation has made life worse for what was already essentially a country of slaves.

via Kottke “Kim Jong-il: putting the dick in dictator since 1994.”

Matt Gemmell on Finger Tools:

On a touchscreen, you often have a simplified interface, with very few options, commands or tools. I was thinking about how to improve interaction in canvas-based applications (drawing, painting, charts, diagrams, etc), and it occurred to me that you often have fewer commonly-used tools than you have fingers. So, I created a UI concept/prototype that I call Finger Tools (or perhaps Touch Tools, or the Tool Glove, or some other such thing).

The Finger Tools concept is that your fingers are your tool-palette, so that useful tools and commands are literally always at your fingertips.

A place is bounded by four dimensions. For two things to be adjacent, they must be close to each other on one of four axes: up/down, left/right, back/forth (x, y, z), and time. As rich as physical places are (and we still don’t appreciate how rich they can be), they limit the number of connections that entities can make within them. A person in a place can only interact with a fixed and rather small number of other people in the same vicinity. Artifacts can touch only the other artifacts in close proximity.

A space, unlike a place, is an electronically created environment. It is where more and more of the economy happens. Unlike place, space has unlimited dimensions. Entities (people, objects, agents, bits, nodes, etc.) can be adjacent in a thousand different ways and a thousand different directions.

With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.

http://www.cube20.org/

Just a quick announcement for everyone using Facebook Chat in Adium:

If you’re experiencing problems, we recommend switching to the official XMPP implementation of Facebook Chat due to its increased stability instead of using the Facebook plugin that comes with Adium.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale