Dear Yahoo, What’s the deal? Shortly after FireSheep was announced on Oct 24, 2010, you should have had an emergency security all-hands meeting. You should have had an edict passed down from the “Paranoids” group to get secure or else. Maybe these things happened–I have no way of knowing. But it is clear that it’s…
Year: 2010
I’ve seen lots of discussion for and against link shorteners, but not specifically this line of argument: Let me grab a random shortened link from Twitter. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back. http://bit.ly/b1fYi1 OK, that’s six characters in the domain, a slash, and six more characters. 50 years from now, if bit.ly is still…
I want to write a program that uses TurKit to pass the Turing Test. Cheating, sure, but should be doable (other than time lag issues), right? -m
Whenever I undertake something big and challenging enough to be worthwhile, whether editing a W3C specification, running a more demanding distance, a new software project, or something else, I notice a similar trajectory of progress: Ready to start: Full of adrenaline and excitement. Audacious goals seem readily reachable. 5-10% through: Whoa, this is difficult! And…
Good news for big data fans. The FCC has released APIs to several large databases involving broadband statistics, spectrum licenses, and some related topics. I haven’t had a chance for a close look yet, perhaps we can do that together. Link. -m
This epic posting on MVC helped me better understand the pattern, and all the variants that have flowed outward from the original design. One interesting observation is that the earlier designs used Views primarily as output-only, and Controllers primarily as input-only, and as a consequence the Controller was the one true path for getting data…
This is indeed a sad day for all of us, for on October 1, a great app will be gone. Though we hardly had enough time during his short life to get to know him, like the grass that withers and fades, this monkey will finish his earthly course. I know he left many things…
Found this article interesting. Not too many hundreds of years ago, cutting-edge scientific research involved watching balls roll down ramps. Making fundamental discoveries seems to be slowing down, or at least getting harder. As a consequence, we should expect more big discoveries from the sciences where the relevant technology follows a Moore’s-Law-like exponential growth trajectory….
At David Lee’s nocturne about XML and JSON round-trippimg, several folks were talking about a site that listed several “off-the-shelf” conversion methods, but nobody could remember the site. Late that night, with 15 minutes of battery remaining, I found it. The operative search term is XSLTJSON. -m
The opening day of the conference was not Balisage proper, but a separate symosium on “XML for the long haul”. Some interesting tidbits overheard, in no particular order… “it is not necessarily clear that this approach would capture the difference between the ridiculous and the merely implausible.” Complexity — what is the relationship betwen complexity…
I wanted to say something snarky about Microsoft’s new slogan, but the comments on the linked article did a pretty good job already. Ahh snark, the unthinking-man’s eloquence. -m
Join me for another Meade Classe at the Los Altos MoreFlavor brew shop. Saturday, Aug. 7, 2010 2:00 – 4:00 pm MoreFlavor 991 N. San Antonio Road Los Altos, CA 94022 We will taste some meads, focusing on sensory evaluation, then walk through the steps of brewing up a batch. As usual, seating is limited,…
Thrilled, THRILLED to announce that I’ve been accepted to the 2010 Viable Paradise workshop. I sent in the first 8000 words of a manuscript that about half of the 7 readers of this blog have looked at. You know, the one that is Science Fiction–literally, fiction about science. So I’ll be spending some time in…
My personal machine is ailing. It freezes up for 30 seconds at a time–even iTunes stops playing. FireFox crashes before it’s done launching. I’m scared to reboot for fear the machine won’t come back up. SMARTReporter lists an operating age of 15k hours, a suspicious Power-Off_Retract_Count of over 25 billion–whatever this represents, it’s happened an…
As the world of web apps gets more framework-y, I need to get up to speed on contemporary automation testing tools. One of the most popular ones right now is the open source Selenium project. From the look of it, that project is going through an awkward adolescent phase. For example: Selenium IDE lets you…
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…
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…
I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long…
I first ran in to Martin‘s work in back-issues of Scientific American. He stopped writing his Mathematical Games column in 1981, but my mentor Virgil Matheson had all the older issues and had a free hand in lending them out, albeit one-at-a-time. From my mentor, I also got the best math book I’ve ever read,…
Facebook (v): to deliberately create an impenetrable computer user interface for purposes of manipulating users. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
Brief note: The W3C XProc specification, edited by my partner-in-crime Norm Walsh, has advanced to Recommendation status. Now go use it. -m
According to this article, a recent terror suspect almost got on a plane despite being recently added to the no-fly list. Why is it so difficult to administer a no-fly list? The CAP Theorem has answers. (Disclaimer: as always, this blog is apolitical–this isn’t about whether no-fly lists are a good idea or not, only…
The new MarkLogic developer site is up, cleaner, better organized, and more social. Even cooler, it’s an XSLT-heavy application running on a pre-release version of MarkLogic. The new blog gives some of the details of the new site and transition. So, if you’re already a MarkLogic developer, this is a great resource. And if you’re…
The 60th anniversary of the creation of Bananas Foster is around the corner, and the project I started this weekend should be ready just in time. I’m keeping the recipe under wraps for now, but it involves ripe bananas, a particularly buttery variety of honey, brown sugar, homemade caramel, vanilla, and cinnamon. This should turn…