links
Recently-encountered interesting links.
This is the link-blog part of my usual website, tecznotes.
Subscribe to 
a feed.
May 17, 2008
Some thoughts on concurrency
found: 04:52pm
May 17, 2008
Concurrent programming as it relates to Twisted Python and a little Erlang.
Center Holds
found: 12:58pm
May 17, 2008
"Perhaps she is distrustful of the center even when the center is pretty darn and increasingly alternative. But the tragic possibility is that she is addicted to the margin, even after the creative center of things has moved to the center. In which case, she is as the English would say, yesterday's woman, a person who just somehow can't grasp that the world has changed."
MapTube
found: 12:44pm
May 17, 2008
"MapTube is a free resource for viewing, sharing, mixing and mashing maps online. Created by UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, users can select any number of maps to overlay and view."
Time Off From Programming
found: 11:45am
May 17, 2008
"It's no surprise that a programmer who took a programming hiatus as a manager says he suffered as a result, and a programmer who took time off to draw says he improved.
...the most we can say is that time off as a manager affects your opinion of your programming skill poorly, and time off as an artist affects your opinion of your programming skill well."
Got the data. Now what?
found: 11:37am
May 17, 2008
Yeah:
"But I'd to hate make all that data - all that potentially rich data - go to waste in some simple mashup map. Problem is, beyond number-crunching trend stories ... I'm kind of at a loss on what that's going to be. I guess I'm really trying to avoid having 50-some pinpoints on a Google Map and leaving it at that."
Google Maps Editing
found: 11:31am
May 17, 2008
Reasonably good drawing interaction that avoids keyboard modifiers: "To draw on the map, click on one of the buttons and then click on the map. Double-click to stop drawing a line or shape. Click on an element to change color. To edit a line or shape, mouse over it and drag the points. Click on a point to delete it."
ANTI VJ
found: 11:19am
May 17, 2008
A label for visuals ... the building window intervention towards the end of this otherwise lifeless video is OMG amazing, reminiscent of Krzysztof Wodiczko.
May 15, 2008
Cyclists Take to L.A. Freeways
found: 02:30pm
May 15, 2008
"...when your freeways are gridlocked, bikes are better. About 30 cyclists rode onto the Santa Monica Freeway (I-10) at the height of Friday's rush-hour commute and went east to the San Diego Freeway (I-405), where they rode north to the Santa Monica Boulevard exit, moving easily through traffic."
May 14, 2008
Design Against Crime
found: 06:37pm
May 14, 2008
Seems to be a bunch of poka-yokes to prevent bags and such from being stolen. Crime prevention through design or lipstick on a pig?
Control Theory
found: 04:26pm
May 14, 2008
Two totally separate references to this field in one day, from web operations to people management. "Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics, that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems."
Re-evaluating Gill Sans
found: 01:11pm
May 14, 2008
"As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin.
...
So to pick an argument with something that is akin to a typographic national monument might appear unwise; it is so very much 'ours'. But it is a flawed masterpiece. How flawed? Well, monumentally flawed, in fact."
Mud Stencils
found: 12:21pm
May 14, 2008
"Jesse Graves stencils with mud. It washes off and is a lot less toxic than spraypaint. It also makes a perfect medium for writing about farming or the environment."
Eric Rodenbeck, Map Fetishist
found: 10:24am
May 14, 2008
Inquirer interview with Eric about Stamen.
May 13, 2008
Dynamic Languages Strike Back
found: 10:06am
May 13, 2008
Steve Yegge: "So these tricks I'm telling you about, they're just the beginning of it. And if we come out of this talk with one thing, it's that it's cool to optimize dynamic languages again! 'Cool' in the sense of getting venture funding, right? You know, and research grants... 'Cool' in the sense of making meaningful differences to all those people writing Super Mario clones in JavaScript."
May 12, 2008
Grasping Social Patterns
found: 06:03pm
May 12, 2008
Christian Crumlish's excellent talk slides on patterns and anti-patterns in social software.
May 11, 2008
Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit
found: 06:26pm
May 11, 2008
"Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing..."
May 10, 2008
Trac GitPlugin
found: 10:09am
May 10, 2008
"This is yet another plugin for Trac 0.10/0.11 which enables GIT to be used instead of Subversion for the Trac versioning system backend."
May 9, 2008
Birth Clock
found: 05:01pm
May 9, 2008
"The 'Birth Clock' is a fragile glass object containing a digital clock that is not working; it is designed to help you to come to a decision when you're stuck at a specific point in life. Smash the glass, and the clock will start to work, leaving you with the broken object as a reminder of your dramatic decision."
Chris Woebken: The Future of Money
found: 10:32am
May 9, 2008
Excellent video prototypes of card-reading hardware for different behaviors. Also melting down an Oyster card.
Ten Tweetable Scripts
found: 10:19am
May 9, 2008
Nat Friedman: "a contest to create the best one-line program that would fit inside Twitter's 140-character buffer." Includes /bin/sh mindbenders.
The Future of Subversion
found: 10:10am
May 9, 2008
Slashdot thread on the relative merits of centralized vs. distributed revision control. Stamen switched from CVS to SVN a few years ago just to get Trac - what do Git or Mercurial have in this vein?
666, The Number of the Brand
found: 09:56am
May 9, 2008
"Hollywood and centuries of viral marketing have already tainted the equity. Even a person who would never consider themselves a 'Bible Believer' would probably pass on getting '666' applied to their hand or forehead. Being a creatively curious person I decided to spend half an hour and see if I could create a brand logo for Satan."
May 8, 2008
The Faumaxion North
found: 02:39pm
May 8, 2008
"Was playing with Mike's Fauxmaxion map and was struck with how it presents the extreme north 'shore' of the globe as the bounded, contested territory we're now finding it's becoming..." (Matt Jones)
Muni on the rise
found: 01:50pm
May 8, 2008
"What will it take for San Francisco to get the transit system it deserves? SPUR takes a hard look at the SFMTA's Transit Effectiveness Project, the first major upgrade proposed for Muni in nearly 30 years."
NEETS
found: 09:51am
May 8, 2008
"The Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS) was developed for use by personnel in many electrical and electronic related Navy ratings. Written by, and with the advice of, senior technicians in these ratings, this series provides beginners with fundamental electrical and electronic concepts through self-study."
May 7, 2008
The Truth Is Rendered
found: 10:53pm
May 7, 2008
"But would anyone have read it? Renderings make us fall in love with half-baked ideas: that ambiguous, heart-pumping Excalibur spire piercing the clouds, the slick, glowing biomimetic blob perched on a darkened table. But they don't get you 671 Diggs worth of attention unless they're happening."
Bay Area Winds
found: 09:42pm
May 7, 2008
"This applet uses a particle system to visualize wind patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, using observed wind data and a computed vector field based on these data."
"No Good, I'm Afraid"
found: 11:04am
May 7, 2008
"So whose fault is it -- the Americans' or the Iraqis'? I think both. I also think that the Iraq experience has set back the cause of idealism in American foreign policy and the willingness of Western countries to intervene for humanitarian reasons. Take Darfur: I think it's because of Iraq that nobody wants to intervene there."
Routing Not Aggregation
found: 08:54am
May 7, 2008
"All by way of saying, I made one of my rare visits to FriendFeed this evening, and I was reminded that I consistently regret it. Breaking down those contextual walls means I consistently like the people I find there less then I did when I was able to interact with them in isolated manners; fire walling the aesthetic from the technical from the political from the personal."
May 5, 2008
Abstract Pointillist Powerpoint Toolkit
found: 11:17pm
May 5, 2008
"20 slides that can be used for any presentation. Cut, paste, copy, crop the slides to create an abstract of your ideas that you can then talk to and through."
Information Design Patterns
found: 10:26am
May 5, 2008
Der_mo's thesis project. Agree with Tom that there's really no good reason for this to be trapped in a Flash UI - put it in HTML, make it possible to link to stuff.
Making Your Own Clock
found: 10:19am
May 5, 2008
"The Meaning of Time is a brilliant clock concept perfect for all those crafty people out there. It supplies the mechanism to keep time, you supply the hour and minute hands. You can use just about anything as long as it fits thru the holes."
May 4, 2008
LEGO Universe Details
found: 06:57pm
May 4, 2008
"The more you play, the more you get to build things
...
there will be a fully fledged LEGO building system in the game, and that users will even be able to order their creations and have the actual plastic kit delivered to their door."
May 3, 2008
Fox
found: 05:26pm
May 3, 2008
"I will stick up for Fox's First Amendment rights for as long as is needed, but it does make me wonder what kind of evidence would be needed to demonstrate the level of coordination needed to treat Foxnews's reporting as a monetary contribution within the ambit of the campaign finance laws."
May 2, 2008
The Strange Career of the Ringelmann Smoke Chart
found: 07:21pm
May 2, 2008
"However, the popularity of the Ringelmann chart stood in stark contrast to its lack of precision, which smoke abatement experts recognized and discussed among themselves. However, the critique of the Ringelmann scale rarely left the circle of experts and never jeopardized its use. This article discusses the reasons for this striking phenomenon, pointing out that the Ringelmann chart had strong practical and symbolic advantages: it allowed smoke abatement to be conducted in a public and transparent way. With that, the history of the Ringelmann smoke chart is an instructive model for the social construction of measuring techniques."
Lost in Abstraction (What Went Wrong with GML)
found: 06:21pm
May 2, 2008
"The ability to create custom data models is an anti-feature that makes integration between different computer systems impossible because it assumes that those systems can actually understand the data.
...
To hit the sweet spot you must come up with a standard, simple format that every system can use."
SUMMON
found: 09:49am
May 2, 2008
"SUMMON is a python extension module that provides rapid prototyping of 2D visualizations. By heavily relying on the python scripting language, SUMMON allows the user to rapidly prototype a custom visualization for their data, without the overhead of designing a graphical user interface or recompiling native code. By simplifying the task of designing a visualization, users can spend more time on understanding their data."
Open GPS Tracker
found: 09:47am
May 2, 2008
"The Open GPS Tracker is a small device which plugs into a $20 prepaid mobile phone to make a GPS tracker. The Tracker responds to text message commands, detects motion, and sends you its exact position, ready for Google Maps or your mapping software. The Tracker firmware is open source and user-customizable."
May 1, 2008
Unicode In 5 Minutes
found: 12:23am
May 1, 2008
GLAGOLITIC CAPITAL LETTER SPIDERY HA
More on Architecture Astronauts
found: 12:19am
May 1, 2008
"... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us."
Apr 30, 2008
Pre-experience Design
found: 01:53pm
April 30, 2008
"This ad is a gorgeous example of 'pre-experience design', seeing this will alter your experience of driving a Golf at night. Yet I would be absolutely staggered if the creators of the ad had collaborated with, or even seriously talked to the creators of the vehicle about night-driving. But imagine what they could have done if they had."
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming
found: 11:31am
April 30, 2008
Tantalizing, lengthy.
"As a professor at the Spanish university that offered that country's first master's degree in video game creation, author Daniel Sanchez-Crespo recognizes that there's a core programming curriculum every game designer should be well versed in-and he's outlined it in these pages."
Ejecting Laptop People
found: 10:49am
April 30, 2008
"Part of the issue with laptops being perceived as anti-social is that it is a black box - you could be engaged in a task that takes 5 minutes or 5 hours, an uncertainty that creates tension."
Digg: Extracting Comments
found: 08:49am
April 30, 2008
Good topic coverage for Digg API beginners.
Apr 29, 2008
Baltimore Map Festival
found: 10:52pm
April 29, 2008
How close to NYC is Baltimore, because...
"34 area arts and cultural organizations present activities exploring the rich history and contemporary interpretations of maps and the mapping process."
Windmill Shattering
found: 09:14am
April 29, 2008
Electricity-generating windmill spinning faster and faster until...
Apr 28, 2008
BACK DOOR
found: 11:13pm
April 28, 2008
I also suffer from a fear that I will not be able to correctly exit a bus or tram when I'm in an unfamiliar town. "Muni's magic doors suffer from a lack of perceived-affordances. Without bars or handles, passengers lack any obvious cues as to what to do in order to get the doors to open."
The Address Book Desk
found: 08:02pm
April 28, 2008
"Underneath the desk I have stuck a grid of RFID tags, and on the top surface, the same grid of post-it notes. With the standard Nokia Service Discovery application it is possible to call people, send pre-defined SMSes or load URLs by touching the phone to each post-it on the desk."
Multi-Inflection-Point Alert
found: 08:01pm
April 28, 2008
"Near as I can tell, we're simultaneously at inflection points in programming languages and databases and network programming and processor architectures and Web development and IT business models and desktop environments. Did I miss anything? What's bigger news is that we might be inflection-point mode pretty steadily for the next few years."
Apr 27, 2008
Leaks and Such
found: 11:38pm
April 27, 2008
Excellent slice (in the comments) of a debate around blogging, the press, and access. Touches on something like an "expensive microphone" theory of journalism.
"The underlying assumption that confuses you is the equation of closed to the press and off the record. In your worldview, it is the presence of the press that mediates the difference between the public and the private."
Jane Jacobs on Diversity
found: 05:23pm
April 27, 2008
"First, we must undertsand that self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure.
Second, we must understand the the process is a continuation of the same economic processes that led to the success itself, and were indispensable to it."
Continuum Crowds
found: 04:58pm
April 27, 2008
"... a dynamic potential field simultaneously integrates global navigation with moving obstacles such as other people, efficiently solving for the motion of large crowds without the need for explicit collision avoidance.
...
Large amounts of discomfort and speed are projected in front of the UFO."
Auto-Tutor (1964)
found: 01:15am
April 27, 2008
"AUTOMATED SCHOOLMARM: The Autotutor, a U.S. Industries teaching machine, is tried out by visitors to the Hall of Education. It can even teach workers to use other automated machines."
Apr 26, 2008
Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers
found: 11:25pm
April 26, 2008
Finally read through this, what a wonderful mini-mindfuck of a Python presentation.
Gulab Jamun
found: 10:17pm
April 26, 2008
Indian desert ball things.
Literate Programming
found: 10:57am
April 26, 2008
"Literate Programming interleaves the documentation (written in TeX, naturally) and code into a single document. You then run that (Web) document through one of two processors (Tangle or Weave) to produce code or documentation respectively. The code is then compiled, and the documentation built with your TeX distribution. The documentation includes the nicely formatted source code within."
home * is killing *
found: 10:01am
April 26, 2008
Snowclone!
Gin, Television, Social Surplus
found: 09:09am
April 26, 2008
Transcript of Clay Shirky's Web 2.0 talk for Here Comes Everybody. Cognitive surplus is a great metaphor, as well as a bit of basic accounting for how much is out there in the form of television-watching.
Apr 25, 2008
Map Simplification Program
found: 03:29pm
April 25, 2008
Reduces points in vector maps without breaking adjoining polylines.
Interesting2008
found: 09:29am
April 25, 2008
The Right Way To Think About It:
"So, before you buy your ticket, remember it's just going to be some random people talking about random stuff and you don't even know who it's going to be yet. ... It's highly likely that there'll be awkward pauses when something goes wrong and if any of it is useful in any way to your career then we'll have failed."
Apr 24, 2008
Greenfield on Jones & Coates
found: 10:48am
April 24, 2008
"Just how do everyday urban activities generate data, and how is that data represented? How, specifically, is such data captured by the notional 'cloud,' passed between services within it, and then offered back to individual users? How questions like these ultimately get answered will make all the difference between cities that work for the people who live and dream in them, and ones which afford experiences of hassle, dismay and danger."
Timeframe
found: 12:16am
April 24, 2008
MIT-licensed Javascript calendar widget.
Datamob
found: 12:16am
April 24, 2008
"Datamob highlights the connection between public data posted by governments and public institutions and the interfaces people are building to explore that data. Read all about it."
Apr 22, 2008
The Paving Of America
found: 04:24pm
April 22, 2008
"Under current law, the federal government usually covers about 80-90 percent of the costs for a new highway project, compared with only 50 percent of the costs for a transit system. Local communities have to pick up most of the rest of the tab for public transportation, with state governments chipping in what's left." Lots of good in the comments including material on sight lines.
Fugger Letters
found: 12:34am
April 22, 2008
"Quality was important, accuracy essential, an ability to interpret and amuse definitely part of the deal. Everything a pro journalist would want an employer to demand, except for one thing. The letters were not intended for public distribution. There was no public then, and 'public opinion' was not a phrase in common political use. The news was valuable, at that early data point, because it was current, reliable, relevant to decision-making and because it did not circulate widely - to competitors, for example. The Fugger Letters were a private system of newsgathering within the wealthy House of Fugger. They were hand-written."
Apr 21, 2008
The Uncanny
found: 06:07pm
April 21, 2008
"The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, 'unhomely') is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange."
No Free Lunch
found: 05:45pm
April 21, 2008
"The candidates treat CO2 emissions as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world, barring a massive buildup of nuclear plants, reducing carbon dioxide emissions means /consuming less energy/ and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with a tax or indirectly with a cap-and-trade permitting system."
Apr 20, 2008
Michael Pollan on climate change and carbon footprints
found: 11:43am
April 20, 2008
Tying the environment and behavior to cheap energy.
"...the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle - of character, even.
...
For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we're living our lives suggests we're not really serious about changing - something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do."
5 Reasons Visualization Is Not More Prevalent
found: 11:25am
April 20, 2008
"Why do I have to look so hard to find good data visualization examples? Why do so few tech companies devote resources to visualization (Google’s the obvious exception)? Why are there relatively few job postings for visualization, with many of those there are actually requiring graphic design skills and not data visualization skills?"
List of self-sufficient webcomics
found: 11:22am
April 20, 2008
The following self-sufficient webcomics are known to produce the primary income of their artists and/or writers. This income typically is derived from on-site advertising, web comic merchandising, collections of strips in book form, art commissions, subscription fees, reader donations or a combination of these means.
Is Information Architecture worth saving?
found: 12:37am
April 20, 2008
"Part of my presentation dealt with my perspective that Information Architecture is an incomplete discipline; Information Architects are great at creating structure, but aren't adept in the act of 'unstructuring' things. In my opinion, most IA's aren't up to speed when it comes to designing web environments that have emergent properties."
John Boyd (military strategist)
found: 12:34am
April 20, 2008
"...two ways to be free: to become rich, or to cut your needs to the bone..."
Tearing Itself Down
found: 12:21am
April 20, 2008
"Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest.
City planners, normally keen to promote the building of homes, factories and roads, are responding to a double demographic crisis..."
Apr 19, 2008
Organic Swarm
found: 11:26pm
April 19, 2008
Animated display of organic food company acquisitions.
The Great Binge
found: 10:56pm
April 19, 2008
The "Great Binge" is a term used by historians to describe the period between 1870 and 1914 when various drugs were developed and widely consumed, alongside strong alcoholic drinks, without prohibition and in quantities that nowadays are considered excessive.
Apr 17, 2008
Smallpower
found: 05:31pm
April 17, 2008
"Smallpower is making music videos, TV shows, and short films in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our work is crafted to promote realistic beliefs about disease and violence and to encourage viewers to make informed choices about their health and well being."
Unwanted Music
found: 09:23am
April 17, 2008
"The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer."
Apr 16, 2008
Web robot names considered, and rejected
found: 11:08am
April 16, 2008
"It makes sense have a friendly robot user agent, so nervous webmasters won't ban it. You don't want to call your crawler 'sitejacker' or something...
Unfortunately my favorite candidates were:
1) Crawlhammer
2) Webraker
3) Lurchy
4) Client9.
'Oh no! It's CrawlHammer!!'"
Transport informatics
found: 08:47am
April 16, 2008
Dan Hill's "quick survey of new informational approaches to transport, hinging on individual behaviour and engagement via public data. We'll travel from wifi on buses to designs for timetables embedded in the fabric of stations, stopping off at trams in Google Maps and proposals for roboscooter sharing schemes."
WHAT IM SEEING dot com
found: 12:02am
April 16, 2008
In the comments of an otherwise ridiculous post:
"The only good thing about people who feel like San Francisco is their own personal Disyneyland, never to be tampered with, is that they aren't around forever."
Apr 15, 2008
Pyramidal Parametrics
found: 11:39pm
April 15, 2008
Lance Williams' seminal 1983 paper introducing the mipmap.
Schelling Point
found: 09:27am
April 15, 2008
"In game theory, a Schelling point (also called focal point) is a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them. The concept was introduced by the Nobel Prize winning American economist Thomas Schelling in his book The Strategy of Conflict (1960). In this book (at p. 57), Schelling describes 'focal point[s] for each person's expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do.'"
Apr 13, 2008
Monocle: Design Notes
found: 11:02am
April 13, 2008
"I thought I'd pause to reflect on some of the design and strategy choices I made with Monocle.com and share them here. I've often tried to be 'transparent' about the work done on projects here, in the hope that it stimulates useful thought or conversation in other projects elsewhere, and partly to facilitate my own reflections on work. None of what follows is rocket science, and it's not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics."
Gonzales Sees No Takers
found: 12:02am
April 13, 2008
"Alberto R. Gonzales, like many others recently unemployed, has discovered how difficult it can be to find a new job. Mr. Gonzales, the former attorney general, who was forced to resign last year, has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster, Washington lawyers and his associates said in recent interviews."
Apr 12, 2008
Stupid Million Dollar Crime Cameras
found: 10:51pm
April 12, 2008
San Francisco: "Murders went down within 250 feet of the cameras, but the reduction was completely offset by an increase 250 to 500 feet away, suggesting people moved down the block before killing each other."
"Pat. Pend."
found: 08:50pm
April 12, 2008
Need to check into better security for our conversations with Digg; these leaks are getting to be a problem.
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
found: 07:32pm
April 12, 2008
Re-read of an old Clay Shirky piece.
Three basic group patterns: sex talk, identification and vilification of external enemies, and religious veneration.
"People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice."
The Wrong Question
found: 07:02pm
April 12, 2008
"They ask, 'what is the secret of success' when they should be asking, 'what prevents me from learning here and now?' To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, 'am I a success or a failure' is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure."
Boys Keep Swinging
found: 06:52pm
April 12, 2008
David Bowie on Saturday Night Live, 1979. Strange, strange puppetwork, via AG.
Apr 10, 2008
RedBlue
found: 12:01pm
April 10, 2008
3D anaglyph Processing lib from Lee Byron - I happen to have 150 pairs of the right glasses sitting here.
Street Hacks
found: 10:21am
April 10, 2008
Slides and images from Jan Chipchase's talk at AP last night, which was excellent. I'm bummed I didn't get to stay to the bitter end. We have a lot to learn from his inclusive presentation style.
Apr 9, 2008
Twitter for 50 Cent
found: 11:20pm
April 9, 2008
"Ever see that picture of Fifty Cent hugging Bill Gates? Fifty Cent's friends split evenly down the line between ghetto fabulous and corporate thieves. In either case there's massive value for someone like Fifty Cent if he can get always-on near-instant micro-blogging via SMS with all his most crucial associates, but that value *only* exists if the network is private. Being able to make your updates private is not enough. The entire conversation needs to be contained.
Yeah but how much money could there be in building a Twitter for Fifty Cent?
How much money? How much fucking *money*? Have you seen MTV Cribs?"
Web Hypercard, finally
found: 11:18pm
April 9, 2008
An interesting take on Google's App Engine I hadn't considered. Doesn't mitigate the lock-in, or address the fact that Ning was also supposed to be Hypercard for the web.
Geek Politics FTL
found: 04:16pm
April 9, 2008
"To his credit, Guido (van Rossum) betrayed his employer's interests for the interests of his personal open source project. I think that was the right decision - or, at least, it's the right decision, if you've already made the wrong decision of getting into that kind of conflict of interest in the first place. At the very least, it's a decision I can respect, as it's obviously the act of a fellow pirate."
Apr 8, 2008
n+1: Interview With a Hedge Fund Manager
found: 11:53pm
April 8, 2008
Great take on diversity of experience, black boxes, meta-models, sub-prime mortgages, trust in experts, artificial demand, paradigms from anecdotes, etc.: "bad things happen when you divorce the people who take the risk from the people who understand the risk."
sound+
found: 11:41pm
April 8, 2008
So much music to snarf.
Yahoo! MapMixer
found: 11:40pm
April 8, 2008
Reminiscent of something Schuyler once did for MetaCarta Labs, and connected to some of my recent prods at old Oakland maps.
Optimization Algorithm Toolkit (OAT)
found: 11:39pm
April 8, 2008
"The Optimization Algorithm Toolkit (OAT) is a workbench and toolkit for developing, evaluating, experimenting, and playing with classical and state-of-the-art optimization algorithms on standard benchmark problem domains; including reference algorithm implementations (Java), graphing, visualizations and much more."
Apr 7, 2008
Second Week Project
found: 11:22pm
April 7, 2008
"Today, while chatting with such a friend, he mentioned something about a project which, if he had a 2-week vacation, he'd probably be able to get to. After spending a week sleeping, doing nothing, and puttering around, of course, he'd pick up the project in the second week.
...
I propose a term. This is a second week project."
Apr 6, 2008
Group Think
found: 01:20am
April 6, 2008
Steve found CI Foo disturbing, and here's why.