Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind. Source: Apple

A representative of the browser software company Opera also chimed in with a few thoughts:

“But at Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology. Flash does have its purposes and will have its purposes, the same as [Microsoft's] Silverlight and others, especially for dynamic content. But flash as a video container makes very little sense for CPU, WiFi battery usage etcetera – you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there’s a reason for that.” Source: TechRadar

Even Microsoft’s General Manager for the Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, had nothing positive to say about the future of Flash:

“The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.” Source: Microsoft Developers Network

Apple has thwarted Adobe’s efforts at every step of the game in bringing Flash to the iPhone platform, and Adobe is now responding by requesting an antitrust inquiry into Apple’s new policy of requiring software developers who devise applications for devices such as the iPhone and iPad to use only Apple’s programming tools.

Adobe really ought to take Jobs’ advice, see the writing on the walls, and start building HTML5 tools instead of wasting it’s time complaining.

At Simple Station we couldn’t be happier to see Flash slowly going the way of the dodo. We stand behind open standards, fast loading interfaces, and interactions that make good common sense; we will continue to recommend open-source solutions over Flash to all of our clientele.

Posting to Locomotion has slowed down over the past week as my team has focused exclusively on the release of our first big Open Source web application codenamed “MediaCore.”

MediaCore is a free open source video, audio, and podcast publishing platform. It is built for organizations who wish to distribute media in a variety of formats on their website while maintaining the ability to control the user experience.

• Check out the project, features and docs at http://getmediacore.com
• View the demo at: http://getmediacore.com/demo
• Watch the screencast on how the product works
• Give us feedback over at Concept Feedback

Over the past year we have built the entire platform from the ground-up to create one of the most cutting-edge podcasting and media platforms available anywhere on the net. In coming months we will be documenting the process of how we created MediaCore, the stumbling blocks we hit along the way, and the lessons we have learned in designing and marketing an Open Source project. It has been an exciting road and we are looking forward to the next few months as the project unfolds.

A huge round of applause should go to Nathan Wright, Anthony Theocharis, and Melanie Wright for all their hard work in making this dream a reality for Simple Station. I couldn’t have done it without them! I would also like to thank the TurboGears development community for the valuable feedback they have provided us with throughout the development process.

We have already enjoyed some early success including a glowing email from Leo Laporte of TWIT.TV, and a whole slew of feedback from various web design agencies. As the project continues to evolve we will be leaning heavily on the community for guidance on design feedback and feature requests.

If you are a fan of MediaCore you might want to consider following us on Twitter or becoming a fan of MediaCore on Facebook

At Simple Station we are adding the finishing touches to optimizing our first big open source application and we have been looking for every possible way to optimize the JavaScript we use. Today I came across google.load(), which promises to significantly decrease JavaScript load times.

The benefits of using Google to provide these libraries instead of your own server include:

• Google’s huge CDN (content delivery network) can deliver the file much faster than your own server(s). Since Google has large data centers all over the world, these files will be served from data centers geographically closer to your users. This helps to reduce network latency and works to increase reliability, scalability, and website speed.
• The more sites that include Google’s google.load() API the greater the chance that a user has already has the file cached, thus enabling your site to load faster as the script will not need to be downloaded.
• You save bandwidth as you no longer have to serve the file(s).
• The versioning system that Google has created makes it easy to include specific versions of these libraries.

All you need to utilize Google’s google.load() technology is this JavaScript snippet:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi" type="text/javascript"></script>
google.load('mootools', '1.2.1');
google.load('jquery', '1.3.1');
google.load('jqueryui', '1.5.3');
google.load('prototype', '1.6.0.3');
google.load('scriptaculous', '1.8.2');
google.load('dojo', '1.2.3');
google.load('swfobject', '2.1');
google.load('yui', '2.6.0');

View the complete list of ajax libraries hosted by Google.

Advanced Beauty 7 of 18 / Directed by Jelle Feringa from Universal Everything.

Advanced Beauty is “an ongoing exploration of digital artworks born and influenced by sound, an ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators and architects” that was developed by the bright minds of Universal Everything.

What should happen is this:
http://www.simplestation.com/

Which automatically reroutes all requests to:
http://simplestation.com/

We’ve had some debate at our office over whether it is better to redirect all http:// traffic to  http://www. or take it out and we’ve decided to go without the www. because if you start using sub domains it starts confusing people when you switch from www.simplestation.com to www.subdomain.simplestation.com.

Additionally www. by the definition of the acronym (world wide web) is redundant since obviously you’re browsing the web when you visit a domain with this prefix. Lastly it just adds unnecessary lines to marketing text. Since yourdomain.com is shorter and simpler than www.yourdomain.com why would you still want to add this unnecessary complexity? More information on this is below.

Why is .www deprecated (obsolete)?

Aug 14, 2003 Source: http://no-www.org/

In order to answer this question, we must first recall the definition of WWW: World Wide Web: n. Abbr. WWW 1) The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system. 2) n : a collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol. By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required. Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it. Using the links at the top of the page, you may view recently validated domains as well as submit domains for real-time validation.

WWW is depreciated

Another good article here: Source: http://sam.brown.tc/entry/160/how-to-remove-www-from-your-domain-name

The Solution

Add this to a .htaccess file in your public_html (or Apache document root) directory without the # symbols. If you don’t know how to do this. Contact us and we’ll gladly set it up for you.

# RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
# RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.DOMAIN.com [NC]
# RewriteRule ^(.*) http://DOMAIN.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Additionally get your webmaster to setup a Google Webmaster Tools account for you and set the preffered domain for your URL so that Google knows how to you prefer to display search results that link to your pages.

The 15 Best Mac Performance Tuning Applications and Tips

1. Disable Dashboard Widgets. Each dashboard widget you enable consumes both processing power and valuable memory. To disable widgets and speed up your mac follow these steps:
   • Open up terminal.app located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
   • Copy this, paste it in the terminal and hit enter: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
   • Then enter this: killall Dock
   • That’s it! Dashboard widgets are now disabled
2. Run the Mac OS X disk repair utility location in Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and then run repair disk permissions.  See this article on the repair functions of the disk utility.
3. Download and run Monolingual to remove all the additional languages that are built into OS X by default and you are likely to never use. I removed everything except English, Spanish, German and French since those are core languages on websites I sometimes frequent.
4. Download and run XSlimmer to remove all unnecessary PPC (PowerPC) code from Universal Binaries. Only use this if you are using an Intel based Mac. Additionally it is worthwhile noting that I had problems with Photoshop after slimming the application, so perhaps avoid using XSlimmer on CS3 or CS4.
5. Download and run OnyX. Run the daily, weekly and monthly scripts. Clear out all log files.
6. Removing unnecessary login items by going to System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. Note that in order to actually remove a login item you need to select the item and then hit the minus button at the bottom of the preferences screen.
7. Even though Mac OS X has a journaled filesystem that should automatically handle defragmentation on the fly, it doesn’t do a great job of keeping the drive from becoming fragmented. iDefrag solves these problems and more, by defragmenting and optimizing your Mac’s filesystem at boot time. All you have to do is restart your computer, run the iDefrag boot DVD and it will defragment the entire hard-drive. I noticed a substantial performance boost (I would say up to around 20%) after using this.
8. Minimize by using the scale effect by going to System Preferences > Dock and changing the default from the Genie effect to the Scale effect. Also you can uncheck “animate opening applications” to boost performance.
9. Ensure you have a minimum of 10% disk space available so that OS X can run effectively. If you don’t have this much space free try using GrandPerspective to determine what is using space on your hard drive and what you might be able to delete.
10. Remove fonts that you don’t use. You can do this by going to the finder and removing fonts from your home folder > library > fonts.
11. Turn off Universal Access by navigating to System Preferences > Universal Access and turn off anything you’re not using.
12. Turn off Bluetooth by navigating to to System Preferences > Bluetooth.
13. Turn off Internet Sharing by navigating to to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet.
14. Check the Activity Monitor located in Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor to see if there is anything running that is consuming processing or memory resources. This should go without saying.
15. On older computers you may notice massive performance issues particularly when Spotlight is running. To avoid these issues disable spotlight from indexing your entire hard-drive. You can do this by navigating to System Preferences > Spotlight and then unticking anything that you don’t want to see in search results. If you hit the Privacy tab you can also remove specific folders. I typically remove the Library folder, and also the System folder.

4 Command Line Performance Tuning Tips

1. You can speed up TCP connections by opening the terminal.app and typing pico /etc/sysctl.conf and adding the following lines to the file:
   net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1460
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=262144
net.inet.udp.recvspace=74848
net.inet.udp.maxdgram=65535
2. You can speed up SSH connections by opening the terminal.app and typing pico ~/.ssh_config and adding the following lines to the file:
   host *
controlmaster auto
controlpath /tmp/ssh-%r@%h:%p
It should be noted here that this may cause some glitches as I have run into some odd controlmaster errors after implementing this command. You can always try it and remove the code if it gives you problems.
3. Disable dashboard by opening up the terminal.app and running the command:
   defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
   and then run killall dock to restart the dock.
4. To optimize firefox’s tab/bookmarks/cache databases on OSX, close firefox, open terminal.app and run #cd ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/Profiles; for i in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i VACUUM;done; cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles; for i in */*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $i VACUUM;done;

The Missing Manual on OS X

David Pogue’s missing manual on Mac OS X also covers maintenance related tasks, and is a great starter for those users who want to learn more on the intricacies of OS X. For those not familiar with using Terminal or the command line there is a really helpful chapter on this in specific.

See it in action, here: http://simplestation.com/calendar

The Simple G calendaring project has its full-time home as part of Google Code. Check out the Simple G Project on Google Code.

Simple G was designed with flexibility and portability in mind. The interface can easily be themed with CSS, and the Lightbox-style popups can be replaced or removed without loss of functionality. Google’s own implementation of Google Calendar does not really allow the calendar to be themed so this implementation has been created to aide individuals who want to display their Google Calendar on their website but don’t want to use the Google calendar display widget.

Enjoy!