Quoted: When it comes to paper prototyping made in a digital fashion, there are two tools that really stand out: Balsamiq Mockups and iPlotz. People often wonder how the two compare one to each other and since there is no comparison available I thought it would be a good idea for me to write one. So here it is.

Quoted: Rural India is showing signs it can pick up the economic slack for slowing growth in other sectors.

Quoted: Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.

There are some helpful tips in here, whether or not you use replication. In my experience, the most important thing with database performance is to minimize the time and row range over which you hold write locks -- and that's what this post is essentially about.

Quoted: Piping data through application is the best solution in many cases and is quite easy - it is trivial to write the function which will take SELECT query and the table to which store its result set and use in your application in all cases when you need this functionality.

Quoted: Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone process. Developers can spend 90% of their time working around browser quirks. In addition, building, reusing, and maintaining large JavaScript code bases and AJAX components can be difficult and fragile. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) eases this burden by allowing developers to quickly build and maintain complex yet highly performant JavaScript front-end applications in the Java programming language.

So do you need to install the .net 3.5 framework to run .net 3.5 assemblies, or will these assemblies work with .net 2.0?

Quoted: Yesterday I had a discussion on an internal Microsoft Developers meeting about the status of .NET 3.5. We had presented that .NET 3.0 is an extension of .NET 2.0, and not a new version. My statement that the status of .NET 3.5 is the same, it is basically .NET 2.0 with extra features, was received sceptically.
Just to prove I'm right, here my observations.

Some things to keep in mind if you are writing applications for the "new facebook".

Quoted: On the canvas page you can prompt the user to allow your application to access more information and ask for additional permissions. This is essentially the same as what we earlier announced as authorizing an application, but now the experience is even more lightweight -- see the sample login dialog to your right. This Ajax dialog replaces the current add page and the login screen you saw in earlier posts.

We inadvertently provisioned a few database machines with MyISAM instead of InnoDB, and it has been a nightmare. I strongly advice against using MyISAM -- ever.

With MyISAM, we periodically get these incorrect "duplicate key" errors that don't go away until you run the lenghty "repair table" command that somehow fixes everything.

Quoted: Use MyISAM when: The data isn't too critical ( "unreliable and slow, related to table size, table repair process" )
...
Use InnoDB for tables when: The table will be big (100Mb+ - "For reliability and performance, we use InnoDB for almost everything at Wikipedia - we just can't afford the downtime implied by MyISAM use and check table for 400GB of data when we get a crash." )

Instructions for Facebook application developers re: integrating with the new Facebook design.

Quoted: We’re getting ready to launch some significant changes and improvements to Facebook, including a new profile for users and a new navigation bar for the Facebook site. These changes are intended to help users communicate and share information more easily with each other - on their profiles, through applications, and through News Feed.