Steve Martin leaves an awesome list of demands for venue staff when he’s on tour, including BEVERAGE SERVICE must include a thoughtful assortment of meads and bendy straws. IMPORTANT NOTE: Bendy straws must be strong enough to be able to be used as blowguns. ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT NOTE: Local paramedic aid may be required. Read the…
Month: June 2010
For anyone trying to get up to speed on the technology side of non-traditional databases, including NoSQL concepts and not-your-father’s-XML, this webinar looks like a good start. Tuesday June 29, 2pm EST, 11am PST. -m
I have a batch of chocolate mead that’s been brewing since 2007. Mead bulk ages well, but this is a new personal record. Today, I started siphoning it into the bottling bucket when I noticed that it wasn’t completely clear. I use a mineral called sparkalloid which causes any haze/protein/particulate to settle to the bottom,…
This came from a comment on the prior post, and it’s worth a shout of its own. Don Norman on the importance of command lines, including the ubiquitous search box, in modern UI. -m
Thought experiment: are there any commonly-expressed semantic queries–the kind of queries you’d run over a triple store, or perhaps a SearchMonkey-annotated web site–expressible in common type-in-a-searchbox query grammar? As a refresher, here’s some things that Google and other search engines can handle. The square brackets represent the search box into which the queries are typed,…
I’m enjoying the results of this Python project from Music Hack Day way too much. It analyzes an audio clip to detect the beats, then uses time stretching and compression techniques (that don’t alter the pitch) to rearrange each measure into a “swung” groove. Fantastic. I wish they’d take more requests! -m Try this one…
If you dig a bit, there’s all kinds of interesting background material about the terrible disaster ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico. For example, a map of the thousands of rigs and tens-of-thousands of miles of pipelines. Some of the best infographics are from BP itself. And for when you can no longer stand the…