Season Xu's Profile

2. The only coded character set that the Version 1.0 Kindle supports is the 8-bit coded character set for Western European languages, the character set that is variously known as "Latin-1" or "ISO 8859 Part 1." You cannot use it to display Chinese (or Japanese, or Korean) characters. It will display characters used in Western European languages such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Danish, etc. -- but not Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.

Jennifer Pahlka, general manager and conference co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo, said the expo has moved from the initial giddy stage to an event more focused on serious business issues. One topic she expects will generate interest is the proliferation of Web infrastructure options, such as Google's recently launched Google App Engine.

"The other really big question is open versus closed, and to what degree to you call something 'open'," Pahlka said. One speaker that will address this question, she said, is Jonathan Zittrain, chair in Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and author of "The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It." Another speaker on this topic, she said, is Aristotle Balogh, CTO at Yahoo.

Design patterns for brochureware and editorial sites are well-established. In fact, they’re so simple and formulaic that even waterfall development processes can churn them out. A producer has an idea, a designer mocks it up in Photoshop, and then client-side types and engineers go all agile on its ass.

One man, one very long powerpoint. Still interesting facts and stories can overcome the inefficiencies of 8 gillion words on each slide.