• Screeny.app is free for the rest of the day! – Nice little lightweight mac app for recording screen casts.
• Tokyo Police Club covering Mylie Cyrus
• Windows Phone 7, it’s waterproof.

For months now, my geek sensibilities have been nagging me about these futuristic looking pixel blocks. I’ve had some trouble narrowing down exactly what it is. It’s not the poor implementation that is so rampant (pro tip: they do not need to be black-on-white or isolated from your design); it’s not the fact that the average person is too lazy to figure out what a QR code is and how to use it. These are minor roadblocks for a technology that is actually fairly useful.

This morning on my bus ride in to work, it finally dawned on me.

QR codes are an out-dated placeholder technology. A technology designed for devices which are not powerful enough to do proper image recognition (quickly and reliably). In reality, we have already surpassed this technological limitation.

Take a look at this Aursuma. It’s essentially able to turn any print media into a rich-media presentation via an iPhone app (without the use of a machine-readable marker):

I cannot see any reason similar image recognition technology couldn’t be used for the simpler applications we currently user QR codes for.

Am I missing something?

• Fish stick sandwich burrito
• Vegan Black Metal Chef: Pad Thai
• The most efficient way to chop wood ever

In Canada you can you can text ASIA to 30333 to donate $5 to the Redcross.
Also,
WORLD VISION CANADA
www.worldvision.ca
SAVE THE CHILDREN FUND
www.savethechildren.ca/2011-japan-tsunami
OXFAM CANADA
www.oxfam.ca
FOREIGN AFFAIRS CANADA
1-800-387-3124
sos@international.gc.ca

And don’t forget about Google’s people finder.

Also Shaw has made calling to Japan free for the time being, as well as opening up NHK (channel 514) for most customers.

To keep up to date on the situation I highly recommend /r/worldnews and if you want to see the videos the news will be talking about in a few hours, check /r/videos.

PS. Image is by Jacob Cass

This is great news! But the fight is not over.

Lost in all the reddit posts and media buzz is the fact that there is currently nothing stopping any ISP from charging their retail customers bandwidth overages.

The fight is not over, but hopefully the dialogue will continue and real competition can be fostered (west of Ontario even!).

• Audible Ajax – Infrequently updated. Interviews with key figures in the world of AJAX. 3.3/5
• Buzz Out Loud – Daily. Easily the best tech news podcast. 5/5
• CBC Radio 3 Podcast – Weekly. An hour of good Canadian music. 3.5/5
• Best of As It Happens – Daily. CBC Radio long running (40+years?) current events show in podcast digest. Mon – Thurs it’s the best segment of the day. Friday it’s a weekly recap. Listening to this makes me feel old. 3/5
• Diggnation – Weekly. Video. You really should already know about this show. It’s getting a little old, I’m only going to give it 3.8 out of 5.
• ExtraLife Radio – Weekly. Comics and nerd culture. 3.9/5
• Gadgettes – Weekly. CNET podcast where ladies (+ Jason Howell) talk about tech. 3/5
• The Instance – Weekly. World of Warcraft podcast, still listen to it even though I haven’t played in months. 4/5
• Mailbag – Weekly. Video. CNET’s Molly Wood reads funny emails. 3.7/5
• net@night – Weekly. Leo Laporte and Amber Mac talk about the internet, I’ve found out about MANY great Web 2.0 startups through this podcast. 4/5
• Quirks & Quarks – Weekly. CBC Radio’s long running science show, in podcast format. 3.5/5
• RCRD LBL – Weekly. Roundup of the best music on RCRDLBL.com. 4/5
• Search Engine – On Hiatus/Canceled. CBC Radio’s EXCELLENT show about the internet. Even if it doesn’t come back on the air, the back episodes are worth a list. 5/5
• Spark - Weekly/On Hiatus. CBC Radio show about culture surrounding the internet. Frequent contributions from Cory Doctorow and Merlin Mann. 5/5
• tech5 - Daily. John C Dvorak’s take on the day’s tech news. 4.5/5
• This Week in Tech – Weekly. Leo Laporte and friends discuss the week’s tech news. The guests are often really lame and it tends to drag on. But when it’s good, it’s great! 3.3/5
• The 404 - Daily. The best way to discribe tihs is A Tech Morning Show. Usually hillarious. 4.8/5
• White Coat, Black Art – Weekly/Currently on repeats. CBC Radio’s show about the Health Care Industry/System in Canada. Always interesting, sometimes a little dry. 3.7/5
• Xbox Live’s Major Nelson Radio – Weekly. Xbox live’s Director of Programming provides an inside look into what’s going on with the xbox 360, with a good dose of general gaming banter. 3/5

Joyent published an article a month or so ago about how they scaled a facebook application to support millions of hits. The application, BumperSticker, simply serves out customized images to users – online bumper stickers. It’s not hard, not complex and processes around 20 to 27 million page views a day. That’s a good number by anyone’s standards.

But, this dinky little Ruby on Rails app required the following architecture to do it

• 13 Application servers.
• 8 Static content asset servers
• 4 MySql databases

Thats a staggering 25 servers just to serve a bunch of images at a rate of no more than 320 hits per second.