Tumblr Engineering: Staircar: Redis-powered notifications →

Soon after I started at Tumblr all the way back in May, I was tasked with reworking our aging notifications system. A notification is the item that shows up in your dashboard, interleaved with posts, that tells you that another Tumblr blog reblogged or liked one of your posts or started following…

Our team just implemented a backend service in Redis as well (not nearly as large), and our experience was just as positive. Redis is an incredible piece of code.

“Enhanced” Pat-Downs / Mass Sexual Assault

I usually stay away from soap boxes on here, but this is just too much:

The US Airline Pilots Association, in a letter to members, described an incident where a pilot was disabled emotionally by the pat-down search experience: One U.S. Airways pilot, after being selected for an enhanced pat-down, experienced a frisking that has left him unable to function as a crew member. The words this pilot used to describe the incident included “sexual molestation,” and in the aftermath of trying to recover, this pilot reported that he had literally vomited in his own driveway while contemplating going back to work and facing the possibility of a similar encounter with the TSA. This is a very serious situation, and it represents a crossroads for all U.S. airline pilots. Might the emotional effects of searching the pilot create a new danger for travelers? USAPA further advises its members to “make sure you are emotionally fit and not stressed in any way by your close encounter with the TSA” before deciding to proceed with their flight.

When intuition and math probably look wrong

Riddle:

A couple has two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that they have two boys?

The part about Tuesday does matter, and there is an answer.

The Cold War is definitely over

RT @whitehouse Welcome to @twitter President Medvedev! RT @KremlinRussia_E: Hello everyone! I’m on Twitter, and this is my first tweet.

— @BarackObama

We are schooled in institutions that train us in the acquisition of facts and data, of definitions and diagrams, of explanations and analysis. Our schools are very good at doing this. When we study persons, whether God or humans, we bring the same methods to the work: analyzing, defining, typing, charting, profiling. The uniquely personal and particular are expunged from the curriculum; and that means the removal of the most important things about us—love and hope and faith, sin and forgiveness and grace, obedience and loyalty and prayer—as significant for understanding and developing as persons. The fact is that when we are studied like a specimen in a laboratory, what is learned is on the level of what is learned from an autopsy. The only way to know another is in a personal relationship, and that involves at least minimal levels of trust and risk.

— Eugene Peterson

Classic.

From an interview of Adobe Cofounder Chuck Geschke by All Things Digital’s John Paczkowski:

John Paczkowski: Why isn’t Flash an open standard?

Chuck Geschke: It is. What are you talking about?

JP: Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It’s not Open Source. Let me rephrase: Why isn’t Flash an open standard overseen by an open-standards body?

CG: As soon as Adobe acquired Macromedia, we openly published the SWF format and removed the requirement that you have a license to use it….No, we haven’t put Flash out to a standards body yet as we have with PDF and Postscript. But I wouldn’t be shocked if we do someday when it makes sense.

As John Gruber observes: “In other words, Adobe maintains as much control over its own platforms and formats as it sees fit. That sounds pretty much like what Apple is doing with iPhone OS.”

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100514/chuck-geschke-on-adobe-flash-apple

We just closed on our first home! It was a confusing and difficult process to say the least, but we’re very excited.

What they don’t teach you…

Another thing they don’t teach you in design school is what you get paid for…Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace…Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali. The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for.

— Paula Scher [via TJ]

It’s that simple.

Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future.

From the blog of Jean-Louis Gassée.