The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is confirming Amazon.com’s controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.

link: Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam

On closer inspection, our measurements told us that pages were primarily slow because of network and render time. Our generation time definitely had (and still has) significant room to improve but it wouldn’t provide the same bang for the buck. So we devoted most of our engineering effort towards two goals: drastically cutting down the bytes of cookies, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript required by a Facebook page while also developing new frameworks and methodologies that would allow the browser to show content to the user as quickly as possible.

link: Facebook | Making Facebook 2x Faster

Some quick, back of napkin calculations suggest that they have reduced their overall bandwidth used for page transfer by 37%. If this is the case, using their published 200 million logins per day and 60 million status updates, they have reduced their bandwidth cost by over a half a million dollars. In other words, they actually get a return on that investment in year 1. Easy to justify that project. It makes you wonder why they waited so long.

Here are my back of napkin calcs:

Impressive Text Effect

See More at: The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009 : Speckyboy Design Magazine

//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to ‘optimize’ this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 16
//

link: Think Creative: Programmers humor

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

The two big releases from Paypal have been Adaptive Payments and Adaptive Accounts, Adaptive Payments is a collection of methods of payments that changes the way you do business online (at least that’s what the marketing department at Paypal said I still think they are pretty useful though) while Adaptive Accounts will allow you to generate your customers with Paypal accounts on the fly (yes you read that right) This article I’m going to focus on Adaptive Payments and in particular split payments, though fear not I will be talking about the other features over the next few weeks and months.

link: Split and Chained – Looking at Paypal Adaptive Payments • Tim Nash “stuff” Blog

…is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.

link: The Duct Tape Programmer – Joel on Software

To me, it is about making things that work. It is an engineering perspective.…

SECOND-STAGE REVIEWS BY DEADLINE: — U.S. software maker Oracle Corp to acquire the whole of computer hardware maker Sun Microsystems Inc (notified Aug. 3/deadline Sept. 3/in-depth investigation opened on Sept. 3/new deadline Jan. 19, 2010)

link: EU mergers and takeovers (Oct 9) – Forbes.com

The java world has been very quiet lately. I can only assume it is because they are trying to get the deal done. When is the last time we heard something about javafx, June?

You have to wonder if Sun(or it’s assets) can survive being out of the blogosphere for this long. I sure hope that we don’t have to wait until January to get updates (or additional oracle funding). With this prolonged period of uncertainty, it is hard to imagine that Sun is successfully hanging on to it’s talent. Maybe someone in the EU has it in for Sun. Or, maybe their bureaucracy is worse than ours(US). Either way, January is a long time away.