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I like Flixster! It’s a nice community where I can find quickly what movies should I rent for the weekend, I can read stories about actors, I can easily find some pictures with some cool actress or just waste my time with other people. But I’m a developer and now I love Flixster. Why? Because they selected the MySQL Enterprise database to power their businesses.

Let me show you some numbers! In 2007 Flixster had a monthly average of 10 million visitors. Right now are more than 1.3 billion Continue Reading »

Last night I made some research on domain names major domains auction sites and I didn’t found many options. A lot of good domain names are parked and not for sale, but many domains are listed for thousands of dollars even the name is not a big deal apparently. The top bid on Sedo, for example is indian.com, with 150.ooo$ and doesn’t have 1000 unique visitors daily. You can reach this number easily on any domain name without professional search engine optimization in few weeks. On Afternic I found pchs.com listed with 5 million minimum offer. Now, this is a hilarious auction.

This article is not actually about “dot com” prices. If you want to spend thousands of dollars only for a domain, be my guest. I will try a different approach. Continue Reading »

On January 16, 2008, Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and President Sun Microsystems, Inc., made a big announcement: “we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP”. The most popular open source database is used by millions of users for small home-made projects, blogs or small websites and by thousands of companies for their enterprise solutions. Is enough to mention companies like Google, Nokia and Yahoo! and everybody will realize how important this acquisition is.

Sun spent more then 30% of their Cash & Cash Equivalents (of $2.7B) and Continue Reading »

Many web applications use ip2location for ads targeting, restrict content to a specific location or just because they need to know where the traffic comes from. The initial setup of ip2location database is very slow. Important seconds are lost because ip2location and because the programmer will write the query like this:

SELECT countrySHORT FROM ip2location WHERE ‘.$n_ip.’ BETWEEN ipFROM AND ipTO

This query is very bad because of its highly execution time. Let’s try a different approach: Continue Reading »

I try to find different kind of approaches when I have to design web interfaces even I am a developer and not a designer. Reading about how to design an interface, I found the “Human Computer Interaction” (HCI) term. My first research on this subject was about 2 years ago and I found a lot of useful informations since then, but I am very far away of having a clear and complete vision about the subject.

I don’t want to spend more time on talking about iteration styles and paradigms, but the following piece of theory is very useful. Basically, the HCI goal is to improve the interaction between humans and computers by increasing usability and receptiveness to the user’s needs. Another important field related to HCI is User Experience (UX). User Experience talks about user’s perception of a device or system and tries to improve the interaction between the user and the device or the system.

Next articles about Human-Computer Interaction will focus on web and software interfaces with good or bad examples, evolution of software development process and I will try to find the answer for the following question: “How to improve an interface design?” .