Sam’s random musings

Ted Padova’s 101 PDF Forms Tips.

We’ve been mining for Acrobat tips in preparation for Jason Hoppe’s upcoming workshop on Building PDF Forms. This week, we’d like to link to the mother lode of PDF Forms tips:

101 PDF Forms Tips.pdf

Great list of tips

(Via CreativeTechs Tips.)

Golden Eagles can be up to three feet long with a…

Golden Eagles can be up to three feet long with a wingspan of over 7 feet. Here’s a video of a Golden Eagle hunting for food, a process that involves throwing live goats off of cliffs and then scavenging the carcass. If you’re at all sensitive about seeing animals die, you really shouldn’t watch this. For everyone else, the only way this could be more fascinating is if David Attenborough were narrating. (via waxy)

(link)

This is just nutty

(Via kottke.org.)

EXPLAIN Cheatsheet

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

If you are thinking of hunting for some query speedups in mysql this might help (now don’t be premature

(Via Planet MySQL.)

Behind The Scenes of Google Scalability

The recent Data-Intensive Computing Symposium brought together experts in system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to better understand existing capabilities in the development and application of large-scale computing systems, and to explore future opportunities.

Always interesting to read and see presentations on how the really big boys do it

(Via High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites..)

Timeframe: Prototype date range component

Stephen Celis got tired of wiring together two date pickers for the common use case of grabbing a date range, so he created timeframe, which is “Click-draggable. Range-makeable. A better calendar.”

This works well looks good and the like. But to me the interesting thing is I heard about it from a colleague first not the blogosphere

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Gmail: Google’s approach to email

How does it work? Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox). How come I only get ten? Our researchers have concluded that allowing each person more than ten pre-dated emails per year would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.

Haha…