They definitely paid a visit to my neighbors. Go Texas! - Carla Thompson
Wow, Colorado is significantly lower than all the others. Any ideas why? - Jim Norris
This was posted separately and there was quite a bit of discussion about it. The Coloradans basically said that outdoor physical activity is a major part of the culture there. - ⓞnor
I say the thin air squeezes the fat out of them. - Steve Craft
Mean elevation: CO 6800ft, UT 6100ft, NM 5692ft, MT 3396ft, MS 300ft... - ⓞnor
This is obese - I don't even want to see "overweight." Colorado is the only state where it's not a granted that 1 out of 5 is obese (though by the looks of things, the average is 1 out of 4). Does this include children? Pre-edit: clicked on the article - the overweight numbers are amazing. I'm certainly in these categories - I must disclose. - Vince DeGeorge
cool chart - looks like our primary home (ct) is #3 & secondary (vt) is #5 :) - mike "glemak" dunn
Like we always said back in Arkansas, thank god for Mississippi and Louisiana or we'd always finish last! - Jesse Hattabaugh
I loved visiting Japan, where people seem to be healthily thin. It's very sad the changes since I was in high school. At a pediatric obesity presentation at Stanford, they showed a slideshow of obesity/state over the past 25 years, and it was really sad to see the whole country become fatter & fatter. An Economist issue from the past year shows that it's a worldwide trend - poor & rich countries... People were so much thinner when I was in high school. :-( - Mitchell Tsai
This also looks like a "Battleship" tournament... Kevin, in fact, appears to be making the "you sank my battleship!" gesture. - Chris Reed
Great to see a company firing on all cylinders - Mike Doeff
Josh: the key is extremely large screens so you can't actually see the person in front of you. - Bret Taylor
Man, do people get sent to sit by the bathroom and public writeboard as punishment? - Stepan Mazurov
I brought a t-shirt to change into after biking to work, but I didn't bother. I might have made a different choice if I'd known it would be blogged... :-) - Kevin Fox
@Kevin: You match the rug and lamp so it's working. :) - Tsega D
Awesome window into FF Bret. Really like the transparency and willingness to speak openly with the community and those who are critical of FF. Enjoyed that Qik inteview by what's his name... - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Wow you guys have really grown and your office looks more colorful than the "garden variety" Google office space! - Bindu Reddy
Keep up the good work. You'll all have corner offices soon :) - Andrew Smith
i hope one of those people is working on the "page 11" bug! - Nick
I'm with Josh - I'd probably go crazy, no matter how large the screen. - Ontario Emperor
Wait, there's somebody on the other side of my monitor? - Casey Muller
im all up in paul's code now! and that guy in the orange really sits up straight - Allen Stern
I want to go and meet Bret, Paul, Dave, and the gang!! - Susan Beebe
I see nobody will finish off that Old Time Candy. As your mothers likely told you, you can't have more until you finish what you already have! - Louis Gray
Louis: we ate all of our favorites. Apparently no one wants to eat the wax lips. That was the best gift we have ever gotten, by the way. You rock, Louis. - Bret Taylor
Bret, but shouldn't the interns _have_ to wear the wax lips as some form of initiation? - Louis Gray
So that's where all my attention went! :-) - Robert Scoble
Thanks Kishore. Is this running on old archived data? - Mitchell Tsai
@ Mitchell - It _seems_ that I can only get the recent 30 entries (new and/or updated). Am getting these every hour and adding to the table.. - Kishore Balakrishnan
I'm seeing mostly entries from Wed & Thu. No recent ones... - Mitchell Tsai
Pls provide an example. It is sorted descending by likes + comments - So recent ones will/could be in the bottom of the list - Search.. - Kishore Balakrishnan
On 30th June 2008, I asked on the FriendFeed Feedback room “Is display messages (in any view: public, me, room) sorted descending by likes possible?” - Am very happy to announce this FriendFeed Feedback stats - Mitchell Tsai
One of the best male dance choreographers. He's danced in three of Michael Jackson's music videos: "Black or White", "Jam" and "Heal the World", and choreographed for Brittany Spears. First saw Wade teach at the Edge http://edgepac.com when he was 16, when all the young girls had a "crush" on him. Unfortunately when I looked in 2007, most of the Wade videos on YouTube sucked. This Millenium class was the only recent one I've liked so far. - Mitchell Tsai via Bookmarklet
mitchell, i see you're heavy on the b-boying thing today. you should check out a dance from tenessee called buckin' on youtube when you get a a chance . here's a great sample vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... - Cee Bee
I used to subscribe to everyone who subscribed to me... but it became too many people :( Then I don't get to see what my real friends are saying because it's buried between the hundreds of others. - Alana Taylor
I hear ya Alana. That's one of the big drawbacks of following a lot of people, if one of your friends updates something and they don't have many people following *them*, their update disappears unless you visit their profile page. I wonder if there is a greasemonkey script to make 'tabs' of the people you want to keep an eye on. - J. Phil
“So many people say that PHP applications cannot scale up properly. But isn't lack of proper scaling more the developer's fault than the language's fault?”
"PHP applications cannot scale up properly" , I wonder what is this argument based on? - Hassan Ibraheem
They can of course, many yahoo's and even google things are made with php. Look at mozilla addons site, it's a php one. What lacks in php is threading for example. I hate its syntax and many other things but I won't insult its users and devs :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
The problem is the way that PHP was hacked together. It's not true to say that PHP does not scale however, Yahoo and Facebook do it. But they have the means to go above and beyond to make it so. - Bjorn Tipling
I'm not going to pretend to be able to provide real science as to why PHP doesn't scale, but from a managerial point of view: PHP allows bad habits to form in the ways apps can be developed, creating a talent pool of mediocre developers who don't understand scalability. Yeah, there are some superstar PHP developers, but you're more likely to find developers in your budget range who are mediocre. It's not just PHP's fault: most superstar developers move onto the next big thing, and that's no longer PHP. - Mark Trapp
Wordpress blogs also have scaled well to sudden bursts in popularity, with the right plugins and options set. - Bjorn Tipling
So if not PHP, what other flavors are better suited to scale? Python? Java? I've been playing the Java game for 8+ years in the enterprise space. Seems to scale for most of our customers' needs. I'd just rather be coding in something other than Java right now. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Mark, and what's the next big thing, Java? The exact same argument you made can be made about Java. I've seen it all too often. Lazy developers are lazy developers, no matter the language. This is why all developers aren't system architects. Competent system architects understand the strengths and weaknesses of various platforms. Proper scaling is a function of system design, experience, and execution. Activities that are commonly overlooked in the "build it and they will come" world of social media. - Bwana McCall
Bwana: Lazy developers are the BEST ones, believe me :) I agree with the rest of what you've said, though java is known to be the new cobol http://stuffthathappens.com/bl... (oh! I just said Cobol !) :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
I agree Bwana. I think there are great new benefits to be found in pairing up virtualization with cloud computing as the real foundation for a social computing platform that can scale to meet the demands users are placing on most of all of these shiny new socnets we frequent. I've seen countless attempts at building scalable systems / architectures, but have yet to see any one win. yet. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Bwana, yeah, but for nearly every project, even large scale ones like Facebook or Twitter, the choice of language and platform comes down to the talent pool you have available to you. If your team is .NET, you're writing your app in .NET, not retraining or rehiring the team. Same for PHP, Python, Java, or whatever other language or platform you want. All things being equal (cost, scale, featureset), I've found Java and Python development teams have their shit together more often than PHP development teams. - Mark Trapp
I generally agree Mark. I've worked with the same core team of 5 Java devs for 8+ years now and they never cease to amaze me. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Not in my experience Mark. The choice of language and platform comes from the business needs, the system and data architects, and analysts. Now I'm talking Fortune 500 companies, I can't speak for Facebook, Twitter, and these laughable systems that are getting funded. - Bwana McCall
Regarding Java, my experience has been the opposite. A great majority of performance issues came from Java/J2EE frameworks where they needed low level instrumentation and system level performance testing to find root cause. But my job wasn't to praise good systems, it was to fix the bad ones. I'll never claim that Java can't scale, because it can..but there were a ton of BAD Java developers who didn't understand memory management and would kill the system during garbage collection - Bwana McCall
Lot of crap being built since 1993. I used to tell my non-tech VC friends, the quality of most tech teams is _worse_ than the quality of the business plans you guys are reading. Good programmers, designers, etc... are rare and hard to find. One programming god used to get $1,500+/hr. Former Oracle "Green Beret" team member. He's the guy that the Oracle "Green Beret" team called when they couldn't get something to work... - Mitchell Tsai
Twitter is "laughable". Like building a tent in the backyard & expecting to use it as an office-building... - Mitchell Tsai
Bwana, in my experience, cost and time to market are the two most important factors of a web product. You never get the decision maker to worry about system architecture: it's not their problem to worry about. They deal in "I can only spend X dollars and it needs to be live in Y months." So given that, trust in a team and bang-for-buck becomes the most important factors in choosing a development team. And I've found you're taking less of a risk with Java and Python teams. - Mark Trapp
The business drives what the system should do, hence it becomes a feeder to architecture. Of course cost and time to market are major drivers, which is why meeting the goals of the business are critical and crucial. You miss the business goals, cost goes up, and time to market increases. I've seen cost driven projects miss their deadline or fail to meet business objectives because it became an afterthought. We met cost, we met time to market, but we built a cave instead of a house. - Bwana McCall
Hmm, Yahoo has some of the highest traffic on the internet, and they use, wait for it... PHP. But hey, if that's not good enough for you, read what Ola Bini has to say about scaling as a feature of programming languages http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2... - Jason Wehmhoener
The issues I'm trying to get at are these: 1) your development team, unless you're Yahoo, isn't going to be made of Yahoo developers. 2) Cost and time to market are very real factors, meaning you can't spend an unlimited amount of resources in time and money finding or training the perfect development team on the perfect platform for a project. 3) Nobody works in ideal situations. In an ideal world, the choice of platform does not matter: because your perfect development team will know exactly what they need to do to get exactly what they want. In the real world, you work with what you have: average, one standard deviation teams. 4) Average PHP developers are capable of some really stupid development practices because of the way PHP has evolved 5) Given average samples of various development teams, and everything else being equal, you're taking more of a risk by picking a PHP development team than other platforms. - Mark Trapp
Your experience doesn't match mine. I'll agree to disagree. - Bwana McCall
Yahoo deals with this by having some very simple rules that reinforce a shared-nothing BCP approach. In other words, if you want to work for that company, you have to follow best practices. Best practices are not unique to Yahoo or PHP, they're simply best practices. There's no reason any company couldn't potentially scale any product using any language if they hire development leads that understand how to train junior developers. - Jason Wehmhoener
Don't hire "average" developers. They'll screw up in any language for any company. - Jason Wehmhoener
Jason, if you're addressing what I said, we're arguing past each other: I completely agree with you on that. There isn't any reason why any development team, regardless of what their speciality is, couldn't scale any product. I'm talking about the probability of hiring a PHP team that understands large scale projects, and the relative cost as compared to other alternatives. And that's based on my own experience: Bwana has had a different experience on that. - Mark Trapp
Jason, you get what you pay for. The vast majority of development projects out there aren't attached unlimited resources and multiple rounds of VC funding and no timetables. You can't preclude the rest of the world just because Yahoo or Google or random overvalued startup does something one way. - Mark Trapp
Mark: it's true, we're all going to have different experiences based on our own background and the people we know. Those things have more to do with success than a specific choice of language. I'm not going to claim there's more or less ___ language programmers with appropriate skill, because it's less important than the specific people I know and what we are capable of creating together. - Jason Wehmhoener
If only it were all about the presentation layer :) - Bwana McCall
So I think at least we can all agree the answer to possible248's original question is, "yes?" :-P - Mark Trapp
Mark, yes, the answer is "yes". Bwana: C works. - Jason Wehmhoener
Jason, I love C...don't get me started :) - Bwana McCall
Honestly, I'd choose Brainfuck over C for the presentation layer. Just saying, is all. - Mark Trapp
Well, I'm a System Architect, and I happen to be working on a Twitter-clone with a good architecture that enables linear scalability, so I'll break it down along a simple litmus test: If your critical path for handling an event / message involves writing to single resource, like a shared database, then your system will not scale to the level required. Resource contention kills scalability. What is needed is a partitioned shared-nothing architecture where your processing and data are both linearly scalable and co-located, so that data does not have to be shipped around the cluster. Platforms and languages which support this are scalable, those which cannot are not. - Jason Carreira
Boogaloo Storm from the Fantastic Poppers. Classic street dance from the guys who taught Michael Jackson the moon walk. These guys still cut a mean dance in their 60s! - Mitchell Tsai via Bookmarklet
@Anna The girls rocked the house! There's much better street dance. Check out the "Choreographer's Ball" http://laweekly.com/stage/danc... in Los Angeles. Or classes at the Edge http://edgepac.com. Unfortunately, good YouTube videos are scarce as hen's teeth. I've tried looking for hours & hours with no luck. Most of the YouTube stuff is very crappy... - Mitchell Tsai
towards the end, I like how one gal threw a quasi back tuck. - Anna Haro
Don't feel bad, Aaron, because apparently hubby being a defense contractor doesn't make us rich, either. - Michelle Martinez
Welcome to the world of being an independent contractor. Save as much money as you can and, enjoy the ride. I thank God I don't live by myself some months. - Candace Holly
Ive been in a "temporary" living situation for close to 17 years now. Some day my ship will come in. THen I'll come pick y'all/ya'll up. - Adrienne Van Houten
Yeah, we're in a bad position. Going to talk to in-laws about moving in with them for awhile. This is *not* what I need at 31 years old. - Aaron Brazell
I feel for you, we're in that boat too many months ourselves. - Summer
Dude, everyone I know has been there. I'm in academia and had to leave my Ph.D. field at 37 to get a full-time job with benefits. - steplow
I feel your pain; I had to put off paying a hospital bill because other bills had eaten up whatever disposable income I had left from my paycheck. Fortunately, I was able to negotiate in good faith with the vendor at hand. I don't miss being a contractor in the least. - Helen
Sorry to hear that Aaron. I was between jobs myself just a couple of months ago, I know how you are feeling. - J. Phil
Anyone else have favorite fireworks shots? Didn't see any on July 4 due to really bad clouds in Berkeley, but they launched a few big ones in Oakland around 4-5 am. Wasn't sure why. They were huge (not the backyard kind). - Mitchell Tsai
![Rainbows and waterfalls (800x602) [ebitary, Pixdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/1215277267mWDRp7d.jpg "Rainbows and waterfalls (800x602) [ebitary, Pixdaus]")
![very unusual aerial shot - see tree shadows (840 x 840) [jchip8, PIxdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/1215280570BY1yXL4.jpg "very unusual aerial shot - see tree shadows (840 x 840) [jchip8, PIxdaus]")
![Wade Robson's master class (hip-hop) at Millenium Dance Studio, Los Angeles [wade2be, YouTube - 10/26/06]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/27f56968c74c0450a2c07ff5419570b7f30d6439 "Wade Robson's master class (hip-hop) at Millenium Dance Studio, Los Angeles [wade2be, YouTube - 10/26/06]")
![Fantastic Poppers Boog Storm Poppin Solo clip 2003 [licoricelloydd, YouTube - 9/4/06]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/ae2e600b4f9027c6c854552eb8b511776693b586 "Fantastic Poppers Boog Storm Poppin Solo clip 2003 [licoricelloydd, YouTube - 9/4/06]")
![Beat Up street dance contest - Brno 2007 - Czech Republic [carmenguerreiro, YouTube - 1/13/07]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/6811c2cf8b3551d42bf1dd5bbd1eac4fa006be0b "Beat Up street dance contest - Brno 2007 - Czech Republic [carmenguerreiro, YouTube - 1/13/07]")
![Street Dance Kemp & Cup 2006 [stingrik, YouTube - 2/2/07]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/534270950bf7175a780ab8ae3b493a75456c0eb1 "Street Dance Kemp & Cup 2006 [stingrik, YouTube - 2/2/07]")
![kenyan ipod (360 x 480) [Bombayite, Flickr - 11/11/05]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/29/62346578_2e143c2d93.jpg?v=0 "kenyan ipod (360 x 480) [Bombayite, Flickr - 11/11/05]")
![Best baby break dance [bdown, YouTube - 5/14/06]](http://friendfeed.s3.amazonaws.com/e83f7fa3f96629902b06e5db77f1c9fdc7250ad2 "Best baby break dance [bdown, YouTube - 5/14/06]")
![Victoria Harbour Fireworks (500 x 333) [len_skapp, Flickr - 7/1/07]](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1035/689592490_15d8660029.jpg "Victoria Harbour Fireworks (500 x 333) [len_skapp, Flickr - 7/1/07]")
![Horse "By dorotadziduch" (802×750) [poppy, Pixdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/1215291746fBAM3m4.jpg "Horse \"By dorotadziduch\" (802×750) [poppy, Pixdaus]")
!["Ronda is a city in the Spanish province of Andalucia, split in two by el Tajo gorge" (900×1350) [BellCurve, Pixdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/1215279997VuMDWzL.jpg "\"Ronda is a city in the Spanish province of Andalucia, split in two by el Tajo gorge\" (900×1350) [BellCurve, Pixdaus]")
![Lighthouse on a hilltop (900×630) [jchip8, Pixdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/1215278380xkXg1Q9.jpg "Lighthouse on a hilltop (900×630) [jchip8, Pixdaus]")
![Hummingbird and yellow flower "By BIL" (569×694) [poppy, Pixdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/1215291870wG5FMJF.jpg "Hummingbird and yellow flower \"By BIL\" (569×694) [poppy, Pixdaus]")
![Mama and baby penguins (300x450) [BellCurve, Pixdaus]](http://pixdaus.com/pics/12152803022cYEBuE.jpg "Mama and baby penguins (300x450) [BellCurve, Pixdaus]")