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Websites that change to fit the cognitive style of the user could be more effective at selling products online.

In this featured session from the Rich Web Experience Confrence, Scott Davis shows us how to use YUI with Grails. Scott’s presentations are always insightful. The Rich Web Experience will be back again this year with an East Coast event September 4th-6th and a West Coast event September 8th - 10th.

Here’s a great LEGO based Turing machine, Denis writes -

I chose to implement in Lego a slightly different version of the original Turing machine. Instead of having a bi directional tape, it uses a stack. When the symbol beneath the stack is read (and removed), the machine changes “states” and can add zero, one or two symbols on top of the stack.

This variation is maybe very different yet it is possible to show that this simple machine has the same capabilities than a Turing machine. Among other things, it can emulate a Turing machine placed on the stack.

I programmed a small interface (through an Access database so Microsoft Access must be installed on your computer) to enter an test simple Automaton With Append (AWA or AAA in French). Follow this link to download the demo: AAA.zip.

One reason to build the automaton with append instead of the original Turing machine was that I avoided building a bi directional (near) infinite tape.

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In response to community pressure, Microsoft has removed project Sandcastle from their CodePlex website. This is a temporary move while they contemplate Sandcastles future.
Sandcastle is Microsoft’s answer to JavaDoc. Though in active use at Microsoft for several years, it is still a very rough project and appears to be no where near ready for general deployment. Prior to the release of .NET 2.0 and the announcement of Sandcastle the standard tool was the much more mature NDoc. Unfortunately NDoc is no longer being maintained

The Fan programming language is one I’ve been watching for a couple of months since it first launched its website. Its statically typed like Java and Scala, although there are some dynamic features.

NewTeeVee: ISPs shut down Usenet to save children and cash.
NewTeeVee: Cat lovers may get their video fix with secret Cheezburger Video Project.
Earth2Tech: SF Mayor says City’s Solar Program by July 2008.
WebWorkerDaily: The importance of pursuing offline interests.
NewTeeVee Station: A conversation with Rocketboom creator, Andrew Baron.

These days, we are deluged with data, and as a result we’re confusing noise with information, and information with useful information. But what many companies fail to realize is that what matters is what you do with that data — and as a result, they are missing out on a tremendous opportunity.

MySql Lite Administrator is a php web application that will help you insert and update stuff in your MySQL Database. MySql is probably the most used database for web application. There are many web tools that interact with MySQL, PHPMyAdmin is a great example. But the problem is they are very complex for non expert user. That is why I decided to create user friendly web application for basic management of MySQL.

Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, "want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace." Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a "featured app" - said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt - he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) - the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

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The daily list still remains high: Peter McGrattan(3), Lee(3), Dave Relyea with a Dialog Class, Michael Sync raffling off eBooks, Karen Corby’s TechEd material, Pete Brown with a streaming upload work-around, 6 Webcasts by Lindsay Rutter, and Koen Zwikstra on his P2P Library.