The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group (MMI-WG) is pleased to announce the second webinar on "Developing Portable Mobile Applications with Compelling User Experience using the W3C MMI Architecture", to be held on September 24, 2013, at 11:00 a.m. ET.

Prior to this second webinar, the MMI-WG held the W3C Workshop on Rich Multimodal Application Development on July 22-23 in New York Metropolitan Area, US, and identified that distributed/dynamic applications depend on the ability of devices and environments to find each other and learn what modalities they support. Therefore this second webinar will focus on the topic of device/service discovery to handle Modality Components of the MMI Architecture dynamically.

The discussion during the webinar will interest anyone who wants to take advantage of the dramatic increase in new interaction modes, whether for health care, financial services, broadcasting, automotive, gaming, or consumer devices.

Several experts from the industry and analyst communities will share their experiences and views on the explosive growth of opportunities for the development of applications that provide enhanced multimodal user-experiences. Read more and register for the webinar. Learn more about Multimodal Interaction at W3C.

As some of you may have realized, Friday morning at about 10:00am, our site was not operable for 2 hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and wanted to explain to you why this happened.

Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was having networking issues. This affected our app servers, app load balancer, and redis boxes. Some of you may have noticed a 503 error, which was thrown by our CDN (content delivery network). During these two hours, we are able to restore the site, but because of the networking issues, the site was very slow. At 12:07 Amazon Web Services restored the issue, and the site was back up and running as normal. Because this was a networking issue, no content or progress was lost.

Again we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this downtime. Unfortunately this particular issue was out of our control. We're investigating ways we can add greater redundancy to Codecademy to help ensure we're protected from similar issues in the future.

See what we posted on twitter Friday morning.

As some of you may have realized, Friday morning at about 10:00am, our site was not operable for 2 hours. We apologize for the inconvenience and wanted to explain to you why this happened.

Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was having networking issues. This affected our app servers, app load balancer, and redis boxes. Some of you may have noticed a 503 error, which was thrown by our CDN (content delivery network). During these two hours, we are able to restore the site, but because of the networking issues, the site was very slow. At 12:07 Amazon Web Services restored the issue, and the site was back up and running as normal. Because this was a networking issue, no content or progress was lost.

Again we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this downtime. Unfortunately this particular issue was out of our control. We're investigating ways we can add greater redundancy to Codecademy to help ensure we're protected from similar issues in the future.

See what we posted on twitter Friday morning.

Many developers are now making use of HTML5 for game development. As with any technology, you need to make sure you use it correctly. In this article we look at several of the steps you need to take with game development.

Mathematics professor Manil Suri has made quite an impact with a fresh New York Times op-ed ed that re-introduces readers to mathematics through an approach based in the humanities.

In “How to Fall in Love with Math” Suri writes, “Despite what most people suppose, many profound mathematical ideas don’t require advanced skills to appreciate.” One idea that he finds often intrigues people is the origin of numbers.

He writes, “Think of it as a magic trick: harnessing emptiness to create the number zero, then demonstrating how from any whole number, one can create its successor. One from zero, two from one, three from two — a chain reaction of numbers erupting into existence. I still remember when I first experienced this Big Bang of numbers. The walls of my Bombay classroom seemed to blow away, as nascent cardinals streaked through space. Creatio ex nihilo, as compelling as any offered by physics or religion.”

The op-ed received the maximum of 360 comments in its first day online and quickly became the #1 most emailed article of the day. Read the full op-ed on The New York Times website and stay tuned for recaps of Suri’s upcoming radio interviews on the beauty, power and mass appeal of math.

Update: After Suri’s New York Times op-ed appeared in print, he was invited to interviews with Joy Cardin on Wisconsin Public Radio (listen) and Michael Cohen on 1320 WILS radio in Lansing, Michigan (listen). Suri’s Times piece remains the #4 most emailed article of the month.