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gueno
Member Since: 5/4/2008 2:12:02 AMLast Seen: 6/5/2008 5:21:54 AM
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Posted 5/15/2008 5:35:35 PM
More (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers May 15th, 2008 in Graphics | 26 Comments * Random post * del.icio.us * digg Advertisement Desktop wallpapers are always nice to look at and to draw inspiration from. They may provide with some fresh perspective and offer you some eye-candy for tedious coffee breaks. We are regularly hunting for free high-quality icons, fonts and wallpapers and present them to you, so you dont need to search for them. As long as we find something beautiful, interesting or useful, we let you know in our posts. And now its time for some sweet wallpapers designers toolbox. In this post we present more (really) stunning desktop wallpapers related to typography, photography, illustrations, HDR as well as some abstract and fantasy-related wallpapers. Hopefully, everybody will find something interesting for his or her desktop. All wallpapers can be downloaded for free. You can also scan through the following posts: * (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers * (Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos * 35 Fantastic HDR Pictures Dont forget: until 21th of May you can participate in Smashing Texture Contest, take a photo, send it to us and win a professional digital camera. We have received over 200 entries so far. Wallpapers La Femme An artwork by James White, available in resolutions 19001200px, 16801050px, 1440900px and 12801024px as well as in an iPhone version. Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpaper of the Week #3 The Minimalistic Sky Available in resolutions 16801050px, 1440900px and 1280800px. Awesome Wallpapers - The Minimalistic Sky Summer wallpaper Light, bright and beautiful; available in various resolutions. Awesome Wallpapers Ethereal Bloom A nebula wallpaper available in resolution 16001200px. Designed in Adobe Photoshop by Sam Mulqueen from New Zealand. Awesome Wallpapers - Ethereal Bloom by =sumopiggy Preiades Star Cluster A set of wallpapers from Crestock: together with 12 further wallpapers, this one is available in 8 resolutions. Both wide screen and full screen versions are available for free download. Awesome Wallpapers - 13 Fantastic Free Wallpaper Images | Crestock.com Blog Design is retro Designed by Ankur Patar from Chandigarh, India. Resolution: only 12801024px. Awesome Wallpapers - 2470152774_2c15edc5ba_o Argyle Stylie Impressive pattern with an Apple sticker on the left. Created by sunb1rd. High-resolution version should be available soon. Awesome Wallpapers - Argyle Stylie by ~sunb1rd Grids Are Good For The Soul A series of typographic wallpapers by Antonio Carusone from AisleOne. Dont like the typeface below? Try Helvetica. Resolution: 19201200px. Awesome Wallpapers - AisleOne - Wallpapers CMYK Lovers Designed by Guilherme Marconi and available in resolutions 19001200px, 16801050px, 1440900px and 12801024px as well as an iPhone version. Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpaper of the Week #1 365wallpapers Gosquared offerse a variety of creative artistic wallpapers. The ones below are available in 9 desktop resolutions. Awesome Wallpapers - 2560x1600.jpg (JPEG-Grafik, 2560x1600 Pixel) Awesome Wallpapers - 365wallpapers - 05_08_06 Nebulae Wallpaper When it comes to beauty, nothing can beat nature. Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpaper - Nebulae Wallpaper Blue Dock Available in the resolution 19001200px. Awesome Wallpapers - Blue Dock by ~dimage Apple & Co. Apple, think different Awesome Wallpapers - All size wallpapers: Apple, think different Apple Stitched Awesome Wallpapers - Apple Stitched Mac Os Blue Awesome Wallpapers - Mac Os blue by ~MrPouya Apple Color Awesome Wallpapers - Apple Color Retro Apple Awesome Wallpapers - Retro Apple by `-kol Think Tiki Awesome Wallpapers - Think Tiki by ~Vaxra Blue Tie Awesome Wallpapers - Blue Tie by ~sunb1rd Ubuntu Tie Awesome Wallpapers - Ubuntu Tie by ~sixty8doors Abstract Smoke One flash at 1/2 power from the left, reflector on the right, black background. Rotated image and painted the smoke in Photoshop with brush in overlay mode. Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper Angel Strom Abstract work in Photoshop. Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper Infinity Blue Awesome Wallpapers - Infinity Blue Swimming Swimming by *Thelma1 is a beautiful, flowing, delicate reminder that things often conjured from reality are fragile and ready to crumble at the touch. This is delicate work reminiscant of the marine life, that is sure to make a wonderfull backdrop to anyones desktop. Awesome Wallpapers - Swimming by *Thelma1 Fiery Decent To download the wallpaper you need to download the software provided by Desktoptopia. While this is definitely obtrusive, some wallpapers are just beautiful. Awesome Wallpapers - ☆ Desktoptopia ☆ Awesome Wallpapers - ☆ Desktoptopia ☆ Blue Dynamic Background Offered for free download by Crestock.com. 8 resolutions, both wide screen and full screen. Awesome Wallpapers - 14 New High Resolution Desktop Wallpapers | Crestock.com Blog Travel - Sky Awesome Wallpapers - Travel - Sky by *petercui Solar System Space is one of the topics I find very inspiring to illustrate. Here is my vision of solar system. All proportions are very approximate! Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper Clean Arrows A series of abstract wallpapers, designed by Seventh Street Studio. Awesome Wallpapers - .: Clean Arrows 1900 x 1267 :. Awesome Wallpapers - .: SS Signs 1900 x 1258 :. Awesome Wallpapers - .: SS Signs 2 1900 x 1188 :. Photography Mystic_Wolf Awesome Wallpapers - All size wallpapers: Mystic_Wolf wide&full screen wallpapers SocksOff Wallpapers A high-quality collection of high-resolution wallpapers which are free for personal use only. Screenshot Screenshot Dramatic Sky This shot shows the wonderful early autumn sky here at the French riviera. I shot this picture with a Nikon D80 with a Sigma 10-20mm lens. Put together as HDR in Dynamic Photo HDR. Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper Lazy Days Springtime is the best. Simple scene created in Vue. Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper A Beautiful Day Available in resolutions 800600, 1024768, 1151864, 1151921, 1280800, 1280960, 12801024, 14001050, 1440900, 16801050 and 19201200. Awesome Wallpapers - A Beautiful Day - WP Pack by =little-stock Desert Car Crash Wide screen resolutions only. 19201200, 16801050, 1440900, 1280800. Awesome Wallpapers - Desert Car Crash Reality Bites Awesome Wallpapers - Reality Bites.... Version 4 by *grafixeye Federal Territory Mosque, Malaysia Awesome Wallpapers - Federal Territory Mosque, Malaysia Eager Beaver Only 12801024. Awesome Wallpapers - 2470152774_2c15edc5ba_o Soft Wallpaper Pack This pack contains 48 various wallpapers in resolutions 1024768, 12801024, 1440900, 16001200 and 16801050. Impressive photography. Awesome Wallpapers - wallcoo.com Four Poles A 30 second exposure taken just after sunset at Onehunga Harbour, Auckland. The photo is taken by Chris Gin. Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper Lion and trainer in circus Awesome Wallpapers - All size wallpapers: Lion and trainer in circus A Dreamy World 63rd Awesome Wallpapers - A Dreamy World 63rd by *grafixeye The Farmhouse Awesome Wallpapers - InterfaceLIFT: Widescreen Wallpaper Fantasy Wolf alone Awesome Wallpapers - 200809055130-7795.jpg (JPEG-Grafik, 1680x1050 Pixel) The sea Awesome Wallpapers - 华丽合成风景壁纸 - 电脑合成风景 - 猫猫壁纸酷 wallcoo.com Awesome Wallpapers - 华丽合成风景壁纸 - 电脑合成风景 - 猫猫壁纸酷 wallcoo.com The Falls Awesome Wallpapers - The Falls by `-kol Illustrations and Artwork 20 Cool Car Wallpapers A selection of car wallpapers by YouTheDesigner.com. Below is the VW Beetle Sport Concept. Awesome Wallpapers - 20 Cool Car Wallpapers | You the Designer Airplane Art Painting - Art Air Combat A huge collection of wallpapers related to airplane art painting. Awesome Wallpapers - Airplane Art Painting - Art Air Combat (part 03) - wallcoo.net Graphic Design of Hybrid These ones look tasty. Simple but incredible. Awesome Wallpapers - Graphic Design of Hybrid - wallcoo.net Awesome Wallpapers - Graphic Design of Hybrid - wallcoo.net Awesome Wallpapers - Graphic Design of Hybrid - wallcoo.net Awesome Wallpapers - Graphic Design of Hybrid - wallcoo.net Awesome Wallpapers - Graphic Design of Hybrid - wallcoo.net Fantasy Landscapes Awesome Wallpapers - wallcoo.com Awesome Wallpapers - wallcoo.com Awesome Wallpapers - wallcoo.com Awesome Wallpapers - wallcoo.com Awesome Wallpapers - wallcoo.com Alien and Chameleon Awesome Wallpapers - Alien and Chameleon | Vladstudio.com - Wallpaper in hoher Auflösung sowie für Dual-Monitore und Widescreens, Webdesign und -entwicklung, iPhone wallpaper Best of Wallpapers Made in Russia Awesome Wallpapers - DYT Choice: Best of Wallpapers Made in Russia | Design You Trust™. Open Design Blog & Community. Abduzeedo wallpaper Adhemas Batista mixes photos and vectors. Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpaper of the Week #2 Lady Bug Awesome Wallpapers - ladybug.ver.wallpaper by ~Feni-x Wide screen wallpapers This wide screen wallpapers pack contains 20 wallpapers in a variety of resolutions. Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpapers - widescreen pack 5 by ether - Customize.org Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpapers - widescreen pack 5 by ether - Customize.org Awesome Wallpapers - Wallpapers - widescreen pack 5 by ether - Customize.org Resources * 1818 Excellent Wallpapers A remarkable collection of desktop wallpapers from various sources and in various resolutions. * HDRwalls HDRWalls offers 349 desktop backgrounds in widescreen and standard format. High Dynamic Range only. * WallCoo This Japanese site has numerous collection of artistic high-quality desktop wallpapers. In various resolution. Problem: you need to follow the links blindly in order to find wallpapers you are looking for. * Social Wallpapering A public effort to classify, rank, and distribute high-resolution images for use as desktop wallpaper. A high-quality collection of high-quality wallpapers. * Published in Graphics, May 15th, 2008 * Tags: creative, desktop, photos, pictures, wallpapers
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Posted 5/14/2008 2:46:00 PM
UP BLOG GOOGLE!
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Posted 5/13/2008 2:58:15 PM
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU by blu 4 days ago 4 days ago: Fri, May 9, 2008 11:03am blu's videos (7) + * You're at the beginning * MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU by blu * la quiete by blu Newer Newer Older Older 1 - 2 of 7 videos Channels / Albums (8) + * Accentfeed * ocp * VIDEO ART * Stop.... Motion! * Vimeo Staff's Choice Picks! * Everything Animated * Videomix,vjing * Beautiful Disorder Please Join Vimeo or Log In to add videos to a channel. Channel Name or cancel Add to a channel Please Join Vimeo or Log In to add videos to an album. The new short film by Blu an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. Made in Buenos Aires and in Baden (fantoche) blublu.org/ blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm music by Andrea Martignoni produced by Mercurio Film assistant: Sibe
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Posted 5/13/2008 2:55:32 PM
Grocery List Templates For Healthy People If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates. Thanks for visiting! UltimateGroceryListV (Preview).jpg Download: Excel or PDF The trouble with existing grocery store templates is that they all include foods that are off the radar for us smarter-fitter folk. No offense to lovers of fish sticks and soda pop, its just that people like me dont want this stuff on our grocery lists. The problem isnt that we dont eat corn chips or tater tots. Its that we dont want to be reminded that corn chips and tater tots are within an aisles reach, and so are sour cream, shredded cheese, ketchup and mayonnaise. To save you time, calories and money, I bring you the Super Ultimate Grocery List Template. This grocery list will help you to * Stay fit by shopping for healthy, whole food * Keep track of the foods you need * Make shopping faster * Make sure you never forget an item * Save money by avoiding impulse purchases and expensive, pre-packaged processed food UltimateGroceryListVeggieStyle_A4.xls.jpgIts available as a PDF and Excel spreadsheet. All cells are editable, so just add and delete items as you see fit. Then keep a copy on the fridge or in your wallet and use it to track the items you need so youll never forget to buy tomatoes, or be reminded to visit the Easy Cheese aisle. Download the Super Ultimate Grocery List Template below: US Letter: Excel or PDF A4: Excel or PDF Note: I made this list with me in mind, so you wont find any meat here. Is this a problem? Any other thoughts or suggestions? Let me know what you think in the comments. Related posts: 1. The Ultimate Grocery List? 2. Greetings to Template-Hungry Lifehackers 3. Menu Planner Templates 4. Whats on your grocery list? 5. Link Love: Health Snacks, Frozen Food, and Nutritionism Tags: grocery, lifehack, list, template Email this Save to del.icio.us (85 saves, tagged: food health shopping) Digg This! (9 Diggs) Stumble It! (2 Reviews) This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 4:35 pm by monica and is filed under Diet, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. 13 Responses to Grocery List Templates For Healthy People 1. Jason Says: May 12th, 2008 at 11:08 pm I like it. I would add a checkbox beside each one so I could print off a few dozen of them and stick them all to the fridge like a big post-it note stack. Then I could see which items I was actually out of versus whats not, but all while seeing the whole list so I could choose to buy more milk even if I wasnt out. And not have to see Cheese-its on the list. And not have to print another for a while. 2. Real Estate Graphic Design Says: May 12th, 2008 at 11:09 pm Ive been meaning to make one of these forever. Thanks! 3. My Life In a Cube Says: May 13th, 2008 at 4:48 am Unfortunately my diet only consists of items bought from my office vending machine. 4. johnac Says: May 13th, 2008 at 6:02 am Would be good if this list was seasonal as well. 5. monica Says: May 13th, 2008 at 9:29 am @Jason - good idea on the checkboxes, Ill work on that and let you know when its done. Ditto for me on the Cheeze-Its. Man, I used to be addicted to those things. @Real - youre welcome! @Cube - Unfortunately? Depends on the vending machine. @johnac - Now THATs an AWESOME idea. I bit of a bigger project but I love it. Ill do it. Stay tuned! 6. Felix bast Says: May 13th, 2008 at 10:26 am Drinking beer healthy? Chocolate is missing! 7. monica Says: May 13th, 2008 at 11:36 am @Felix - Drinking one beer a day can be healthy! =) Of course, if I buy a six-pack, its gonna be hard to have just one. Especially if its a six pack of Real Ale Firemans #4. Good point about the chocolate. Mmmmm. 8. ML Harris Says: May 13th, 2008 at 2:41 pm Soy is healthy and beef is not? I have stumbled upon vegetarians, vegans and raw foodists. More power to you, but is there a low carb, protein power version? 9. leslie Says: May 13th, 2008 at 2:43 pm This would be more convenient posted as a Google Docs Spreadsheet. 10. Natalie Says: May 13th, 2008 at 4:26 pm I like it, *sigh* but I cant afford fresh food outside of some bananas or apples each week. Its ok though, having a bare cupboard tends to make me realise I dont REALLY need something to eat most of the time. 11. miah Says: May 13th, 2008 at 5:06 pm Why not print out then laminate then use a dry-erase marker and reuse the list? 12. matthew melnick Says: May 13th, 2008 at 5:34 pm deodorant is spelled wrong 13. dave Says: May 13th, 2008 at 7:20 pm Ok, Ill admit that I will never, ever, ever use this list as is. Yeah, its the lack of meat on the list (and tempeh, I had to look that one up). But! This is a good idea that I hadnt thought of before. I think Ill follow Leslies advice and make it a Google Doc so my wife and I can make our own list together while at our respective workplaces.
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Posted 5/13/2008 2:53:10 PM
Twitter and the Architectural Challenges of Life Streaming Applications Written by Alex Iskold / May 12, 2008 4:00 PM / 17 Comments Because Twitter is getting more popular, every glitch in the service is now felt more acutely. Going without Twitter for many people is even harder than going without email, and so outages lead to complaints. Complaints pile up and become debates, asking questions like: should Twitter be converted into a protocol and become decentralized? Is that the way to scale Twitter and make it more reliable? If not, how can that goal be accomplished? To me, the answer to decentralization is a firm no. First of all technically it won't solve the problem. At least not in any way that Twitter folks can't solve it themselves. The whole question actually misses the main point. We love Twitter as an application, and its strength is the fact that people know where to find it, people love the What are you doing now? question. Amongst a sea of copycats, it was Twitter that took off and that's why we know and love it. Twitter is Twitter and it should not be anything else. The question that people should be asking, though, is how to properly scale Twitter and, for that matter, the whole slew of other life streaming applications. Clearly these applications are trying to break new ground by merging streams of your friends' activity together and presenting you with a single view of that information. All of these applications are facing similar challenges and they could all architecturally benefit from the same pattern. So what is it? How should these applications be designed so that they scale to meet the demand? What is the Problem? To understand the challenge facing Twitter and other life streaming applications look at the diagram below. A node in the center is an individual user and the the nodes around it are the users that follow or subscribe to this user. The blue nodes are subscribers and red ones, U1 and U2, are publishers in this diagram. The yellow node, R1, is a receiver that gets updates from both U1 and U2. The yellow note shows that the stream of R1 contains updates from both U1 and U2. How to manage all of this is pretty obvious until one starts thinking about how to generate the stream for R1. The answer that comes to mind right away is - on demand. That is, when the user R1 checks his Twitter page or via one of the many Twitter clients, the stream is computed and delivered on the fly. Unfortunately, and this is true with distributed large-scale systems in general, the first answer is likely to be wrong. If the user subscribes to say 100 other people, to pull together 100 streams and merge them so that they are in the right time order is likely to take seconds if not minutes. Who is going to want to wait this long? If the user view can not be computed on the fly, then the only other answer is that it is pre-generated. That is, whether the user checks or does not check the stream, it is there and available as soon as possible. This answer also seems wrong, because this approach is quite wasteful. Pre-generating all these views without anyone looking at them is going to cost a lot of wasted space and compute power. Yet, of the two approaches, this is the one that delivers a better user experience and so this is the one that is likely to succeed. Relational Database - Likely the Wrong Way We wrote about scalability challenges with relational databases in our post about Amazon Dynamo. Yet relational databases should not be dismissed. First, lets look at how relational database can be used to engineer a solution. A simple approach is to have three tables USER, FRIENDS, and MESSAGES; the tables would look like this: This is very simple, and of course it does not scale. As the tables grow, even if everything is indexed, doing all the look ups via this set of tables can not work. What kills this solution is that all information of all users is sitting in these tables. What if there was a way to split all this information into many databases? If this was possible then the system would scale. So lets say we took all the users that start with letter 'a' and put them into one database and then all the users that start with letter 'b' into another and so on. There are systems that can benefit from such partitioning. For example, MyBlogLog can be partitioned so that all data is stored around individual blogs. Unfortunately, in case of Twitter and other life streaming applications such partitioning does not work. The reason is that we can not predict who is going to follow who. So there is no way to cluster the data so that all the necessary messages end up in the same database. And cross-database queries are very costly - not a way to go. So the reason a relational database does not work is because a single database system does not scale and the data is not amicable to partitioning into multiple databases. Data and Compute Cloud - Possibly the Right Way Increasingly more and more companies, particularly in the consumer space, are turning to cloud computing. The fundamental difference that the cloud approach takes vs. the relational database approach, is that with the cloud you split the data and split the computation on a massive grid and then make trade-offs. For example, in the relational database data duplication is a big no. Things need to be normalized. In the cloud world data duplication is okay, because a lot of views are pre-generated and a lot of them contain duplicate information. For example, a message from one user is duplicated into bins for everyone who subscribes. The second trade-off is consistency, which is kind of related to duplication. When we are talking about mission critical applications on Wall Street, data consistency is a top priority at all times. But does it matter if user A gets a message from user B and then it takes a few minutes to deliver the same message to user C? Of course not. Even in our real-time hungry culture this delay is acceptable. So the trade-off is to forgo consistency across the entire system but gain flexibility instead. The cloud version of the system is depicted above. For simplicity we have 26 machines on the grid - one for each letter. Each machine is identical and focused on users whose id starts with the corresponding letter. All information about a specific user is stored on the machine, including profile, list of people who follow this user, etc. The key thing is that the system maintains not only a list of messages generated by this user, it also immediately creates a list of messages for the user. It does that by processing updates from other machines. The whole thing is a peer-to-peer, completely connected ring system, where each machine is connected to all others. When a user types an update into the UI it is first sent to the machine that handles this user. That machine immediately updates the user's messages and then broadcasts those messages to other machines. For each other user who follows the one that just updated, the system constructs the message and sends it precisely to the machine that hosts that other user (it is known because users are split based on letters). So for each update the system sends out exactly the correct number of messages. Then as soon as the message is received on the other end, it is written directly into the stream of the receiving user. What is nice about the cloud solution is that it scales as the user set grows. The partitioning mechanism does not need to be based on letters, in fact it should really be based on a quick, uniform hash which would ensure that the users are distributed evenly around the grid. And there are many other details, of course, because what we described here is not the solution, but just the basic idea. Conclusion Software engineering as a discipline has evolved a set of design patterns. These are solutions that work across languages and across different systems. What we need is new design patterns for life streaming applications like Twitter. Instead of talking about breaking the service into distributed systems (which likely would perform worse and have more outages), we need to work through the best ways of building this kind of software. Google scales, Amazon scales, and as Stowe Boyd pointed out, so does AIM (although it has considerably less connections). And certainly there is a right architecture for Twitter, which would make it scale to meet the growing demand. So lets start right now! Please tell us what you think are the best ways to design life streaming applications? What trade-offs do you think should be made? And please tell us about your specific experiences building these systems. Posted in : * Features, * Trends Tags: * architecture, cloud computing, database design, lifestreaming, relational databases, twitter Related Entries * How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients * 35 Ways to Stream Your Life * 10 Ways Twitter Can Boost Your Social News Profile * Tom Coates: Web of Data * Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer
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Posted 5/13/2008 2:50:22 PM
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