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The primero recommendation for speeding up a website is almost always to add cache and more cache. And after that add a little more cache just in case. Memcached is almost always given as the recommended cache to use. What we don't often hear is how to effectively use a cache in our own products. MySQL hosted two excellent webinars (referenced below) on the subject of how to deploy and use memcached. The star of the show, other than MySQL of course, is Farhan Mashraqi of Fotolog…

Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco…

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More evidence of the “new” advertising: the centrepiece of Onitsuka Tiger’s marketing over the coming year will be a meter-long model of a trainer-shaped mini-city created using Rapid Prototyping technology. The model appears in a commercial and in print ads, but copies will also tour in an exhibition and be made into promotional merchandise. Plus - and here’s where it gets really Ad2…

No matter what one does, whether one's deeds serve virtue or vice, nothing lacks importance. All actions bear a kind of fruit. - Buddha...

Much of my days and all hours are now spent on contemplating the value of the arts and design. Of course there is the economical value of art as artifacts that accrue value, or design as enabling enhancements that result...

I missed an opportunity to take part in a BBC broadcast yesterday regarding the question, “. . . whether religion helps make better politicians.” My answer to that question would have been generally no, it does not. Put quite simply, religions are collections of false beliefs, and false beliefs generally provide a poor foundation for policy…

Pope Benedict XVI exposed a part of his moral character today as a hate-mongering bigot in an encyclical critical of modern atheism. As reported in the International Harold Tribune, the encyclical says that, “[Atheism] had led to some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" ever known to mankind.” Hate-mongering involves the selling of hate, typically for a profit or for the benefit of some group or organization that the hate-monger favors…

People are shocked - shocked! - that Facebook is engaging in aggressive, creepy advertising. The complaints around the web community surprised me, honestly. I thought it was clear what we were all getting into with Facebook.Here's how it seems to me: Facebook doesn't exist to be good in the sense that Google wants (wanted?) to be. They don't exist to connect you with your friends, or to build things that help people, or generally to provide social utility as their primary goal…