• There are new forums for general learning discussions
• The 400th homework assignment was submitted
• A new class has been started: Owning the Internet

Things have been busy for me, so if you want to see what I’m up to, you’re best off checking out Curious Reef.

Introduction to Algorithms is starting on May 1st.  It’s a popular course at MIT, and all of the content is freely available on Open Course Ware.  You will have to buy the book, but it’s a highly recommended one for CS students.

Lots of other great classes too.  Here is the full list of all classes.

You can check it out from BitBucket:

http://bitbucket.org/kday/sahara

It’s a bit hard to read, but it says that CloudFront’s average response time is 164 ms, and S3’s response time is 338 ms.  The test pages I set up were small 60 byte HTML files.

There are technical factors that need to be considered when choosing one or the other, but it looks like you can shave off about 160 ms by choosing CloudFront instead of S3.

(waiting…)

It’s just so fun it makes me smile.

It’s made me rethink web design completely.  There’s so many cookie cutter websites that have a header w/logo, navigation links, content in one column, sidebar in another, blah blah blah.

There have to be more types of sites that can be gutted and redesigned in a way that’s both useful and fun.

This format also is great a great candidate for Chrome’s “save web page as app ” feature.  I now have an application icon that opens up thesixtyone in a chrome browser without a url bar.  Just like an application.  And it launches about 10x faster than Rhythmbox loads, which is a locally installed music app.

Right now I’m listening to My First Earthquake, “Cool in the Cool Way“:

They even have a link to a free download of the song, which is cool.

I’ve bought a couple other songs from Amazon MP3 from artists who don’t yet have downloads from t61.

Check it out and think about that design next time you put together a website layout.  I know I will.

For Crunch Course, I’ve taken my time setting up a robots.txt file. Partly because I didn’t think it would help much and partly because it takes a couple steps to do it in Django.

As a result, Google’s cache of Crunch Course is about a month old.

I finally got around to adding a robots.txt yesterday, and I’m now getting a bunch of 404 errors from the googlebot for old links that I’ve since changed the structure of. That’s indicating to me that it checks for a robots.txt frequently, but it is much more likely to actually crawl the site if it has the green light to do so. Of course it could also just be a coincidence, but that doesn’t make for a good blog post.

So there you have it, indisputable evidence from one data point that Google is more likely to crawl your site if you have a robots.txt than if you don’t.

We’re just starting to go through the book chapter by chapter on Crunch Course.  There’s more than 40 of us now, so you’ll have a lot of people to learn with.

You don’t have to be an expert in something to create a class. Just be willing to organize some material and gather others.

I’m the creator for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There’s seven people in it so far.

Check it out now. Join or create a class.

[Edit: thanks to reddit, it now has 567 members!  Incredible.]

That’s why I’m developing Launch Pulse, a new kind of contact management application.  It’s going to have about 1/20th of the features of all the other programs out there.  And yes, I am aware of Highrise by 37Signals.  Fewer features than even that.  I’m not sure yet if it anyone else will feel the same about it, but I like using it already in it’s alpha state.

How is it different? It won’t sync with your Outlook or Gmail contacts.   It isn’t tied to your email system at all.  But it is flexible.  I think the initial target audience will be people using Customer Development because it requires talking to a lot of people and managing responses and feedback.  However, I think it could later be expanded to manage contacts for weddings, job searches, and anything else.

It’s not available yet, but you can leave your email address on the website (no spam) to get notified first when it enters public beta.