Just stumbled upon really nice presentation from Data-Intensive Computing Symposium made by Jeff Dean from Google. Handling Large Datasets at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions. Unfortunately, there are no events like this in our region so 58 slides will do for now. :) Check out pdf and the video.

If you build a webapp targeted for small and friendly crowd - usually nothing. But when you build a website for American presidential candidate... Uh well, it smells like XSS. This weekend, Barack Obama website accepted a comment from a visitor but did not escape nor strip out angle-brackets and quotemarks. A YouTube clip from zennie62 demonstrates the attack. The clip shows a user clicking on the blog section of the Barack Obama site, which caused the browser to redirect to hillaryclinton.com. Funny! :) I still love the design of barackobama.com though.

We have just received first shipment of embroidered goodies. Black baseball caps and surgeon's white lab coats. The analog tactile beauty, as a twist to the everyday pixel-perfect digital world, is astonishing. Check out the details, as our supermodels are preparing for a run down the catwalk.

Want one? Drop us an email, we will work something out.

Cap front detail:

Lab coat front - Nivas amblem - detail:

Lab coat back - Nivas Eagle - detail:

Zoomout:

Big up to our friend Tino for stitching this one together! Great work mate. City you are watching is Dubrovnik, and music in background is made by Matt John - Teleparty.

No really, why would anybody do something like this to his Honda?

So we are working on this new top secret project (that's gonna be really awesome when we release it), and 2 days ago i noticed that some of the icons on the site are blurred. First we spent 5 hours trying to debug this, check CSS, reexport images from Photoshop, try tons of different things, all for nothing. Then i installed back Firefox 3 Beta 4, and checked the same thing, and it works flawlessly. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is for some reasong blurring this images.

Check the image:

Does anyone have any clue?

We spend a large amount of time in optimizing frontend of each site we produce. Yes, everybody knows about famous yahoo's 14 rules (plus recent 20 new rules), but how to successfully reach them is another, story.

After some thinking and pimping, you can get straight A out of yslow. That's a fact. But then one day client comes and says - I need this banner here and that banner there and this tracking code and that tracking code.... 5 days later your straight A page becomes bullseye F. Why? Because you had to put tons and tons of inline javascript which not only broke your wonderful w3c compliant markup, but also completely f*cked up page loading/rendering time. Each page render now has to coup with inline javascript (even iframes) and loading of external javascript, images and flash files from different slow and overcrowded ad servers.

Until today I was mislead by thought that only we have that kind of problems, but my recent try to browse www.bbc.co.uk encouraged me to write this post.

Guys at BBC use (like many other) DoubleClick for banner management. There is nothing wrong with DoubleClick, or any other banner management software. In picture below you can see what timeout did to a bbc homepage. After 60 seconds or so, page eventually loaded, but was missing banners:

On our recent project, we didn't liked the fact that ad server is slowing our page render time by 300-500%. OpenAds didn't update their banner publishing scheme for at least 5 years so we did a little trick.

There is a placeholder that holds layout and displays "loading..." msg where banner should appear. Then we load the banner at the bottom of the page and once the banner is loaded we append it to the placeholder on top of the page .

This technique works well but can't be used in every configuration. Btw, if you are using jQuery, just be sure to use v1.2 since appendTo later on contains a bug. Eventually you could patch your current with this fix.

This won't solve all of your problems, and will off course introduce new ones but will help your page render time slightly and make your visitors not so annoyed. You should reconsider how to solve bottleneck to your ad server by making a farm or something.