• "All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google
• Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Lessons From Advogato - Some very interesting insights on Trust Networks and specifically on Advogato, of course.
• The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less - An extremely counter-intuitive lecture on why more choices may make us more frustrated and depressed than ever and why 28% of Americans are willing to donate their organs when they die, versus to 90% of the Europeans.
• Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class
• Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL - I'm not sure that a pro DBA can learn much from this lecture, but I've certainly learned a lot and will probably revisit it sometimes.
• Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness - It's a unique lesson from a Buddhist teacher on happines and it paints a stark contrast between our society's bullshit that's ought to make us happy versus real inner peace and joy.
• Aspect Oriented Programming: Radical Research in Modularity - AOP is an interesting concept and I think it may have its benefits in case of larger systems, but I'm not convinced that it's viable due to the increased complexity that it adds to the system.
• Best Practices in Javascript Library Design - A lecture from John Resig himself.

It's a stellar article on usability defects that make user's and related parties' life hell. I was pretty conscious about all these mistakes except blaming error mesages.

I used a web based payment service of my ISP several months ago that asked me for the date on my last bill that I got from them. After inputting the date in yyyy.mm.dd. format as it was present on the bill and the validation failed, I tried it without the ending dot and I succeeded. I found 2 more similar usability errors related to their messy form and reported to them. I got no response ever since and eventually stopped using their payment service. They should fire their customer service.

Unfortunately, most developers don't have a clue on usability engineering and that's the reason why there are so many crappy applications, but in the above case one doesn't have to be a rocket scientist just to make such a straightforward input validation a little more flexible. I guess most geeks prefer relating to machines more than relating to people and that's why they suck at usability.

Not Invented Here

It's an interesting concept that can deeply affect the evolution of our technologies. Despite .NET coming from Microsoft, I think it's a great platform so I deliberately use Mono for various projects. I think Miguel knew that there will be a group of people that will pretty much dislike the whole idea because of its origins from Microsoft, but he took his chance and here Mono is. I was much more prone to Not Invented Here in the past, but I think there's really more to lose than to win if you apply it.

Empathy: Could It Be What You're Missing?

Do you suffer from epathy deficit disorder? Read this article to find out!

Here's a short, but very relevant post about this topic.

Based on my results, I chose the right profession. Good to know that. ;)