Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 blog has a very interesting post that wonders if Facebook Connect might prevent OpenID adoption. I think he’s vastly oversimplifying the ecology of turning a good idea into a monopoly when it’s surrounded by interoperable alternatives. I have no doubt at all that Facebook will get significant traction with this (Dick’s [...]
I’ve seen an interesting, and maybe alarming, trend of using a person’s twitter username prefixed with an ‘@’ to refer to a person almost everywhere on the web. Granted, this is only happening in the highly interconnected early adopter circles that both blog and are well-known tweeters. But that’s the sort of thing, and the [...]
A couple weekends ago, Jennifer and I went to Denver for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. I ended up enjoying it overall, but I got off to a difficult start mentally. In retrospect, my mental journey through the extended weekend o’ puzzles & games has taught me a lot about managing mental [...]
Mathematicians are hackers, too. And by “hackers”, I don’t mean like the young Angelina Jolie movie. I mean much more like the Steven Levy book (which by the way is one of my favorites of all time–you really must read it). Or even as in the definition from The Hacker’s Dictionary: “One who enjoys the [...]
Despite how obnoxious they make the airport security experience, I try extremely hard to give the Transportation Security Administration a fair shake–I remind myself they’re mostly normal people who get searched when they fly just like the rest of us, I read their well-written and mostly credible propaganda blog, and I sit on my rants [...]
At the NPL convention today, there was an experts panel that spoke about trivia: what makes a good question, how do you research questions, what about pub trivia, trivia in crosswords, and some stories from researching for Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I figured I’d post my notes for those who couldn’t be present [...]
I first heard about the world of online competitive software development from an announcement on Slashdot back in 2003. It guided me over to TopCoder to sign up for the second annual Google Code Jam . I think I missed (by mere minutes) the registration deadline for actually competing in Code Jam, but since that [...]
Jennifer and I arrived into Denver this afternoon for the annual convention of the National Puzzlers’ League. We missed a picnic hosted by Mike Selinker (or at least he provided the entertainment). I don’t know exactly what the entertainment consisted of, but I know that it was based loosely on a game of his, Link [...]
One of my bosses at Microsoft told me about some advice that a Software Engineering professor of his gave him: Once you’ve estimated how long a particular work item will take, you have to pick a fudge factor. Multiply by ‘e’ if you’re confident in your estimate, or ‘pi’ if you’re not.
Roy Leban blogs about stupid password policies over at his thisUser blog. I’ve got some good news for Roy and his readers: I’m currently making a living turning all of the things that he rants about into relics of the unenlightened past. And while I have to concede that it’s a slow uphill climb, there [...]