February 28, 2009 – 10:59 am
The 12th quasi-annual Microsoft Puzzle Hunt just kicked off. Biggest changes so far are that each team can choose one of two groups to participate in: COMPETITIVE or RECREATIONAL. Teams who choose to be COMPETITIVE get the experience most like historical hunts: COMPETITIVE teams will have an experience consistent with past Microsoft Puzzle Hunts. Puzzle [...]
February 27, 2009 – 2:41 pm
You’ve all heard me say before that every web site benefits from a data API. A corollary to that claim is that every site’s users benefit from a data API, and there are few domains where that corollary applies more than in Government. The good news is that we lowly citizens have some strong coalitions [...]
February 26, 2009 – 1:51 pm
My mom was in town visiting this weekend, and when I went to demo Freebase for her, I asked her to name a famous person. She suggested Pope John Paul II, so we looked him up. Most of the information that you would expect Freebase to know about him, it did. But there was one [...]
February 26, 2009 – 11:54 am
You no longer have to live in fear of the day that your application built on Google’s App Engine (GAE) actually becomes successful. Until now, if your application exceeded its daily quotas, your users would simply be turned away. You had no option to migrate off of GAE because of its completely custom execution environment [...]
February 23, 2009 – 2:23 pm
@StevenWalling points out a quick write-up on Online Journalism Blog about a really slick real estate mash-up, Suburbified, that has been built using the New York Times Article Search API. To me, the coolest part about this isn’t the mash-up itself—it’s that a blog about jornalism news understands the significance of an old-school media company [...]
February 23, 2009 – 8:00 am
Those of you who read this blog (and my more technical blog API Guy) regularly know that I’m a huge fan of the open collaborative database Freebase.com. This weekend, I recruited my mom (who is currently visiting from out of state) and my wife to ride along with me on the 6 hour drive (each [...]
February 16, 2009 – 8:00 am
I really think Microsoft is onto something with their retro t-shirt line. The shirts evoke feelings from an era before you learned to hate Microsoft. This post isn’t about one of those shirts. This post is about the current era. The one where many of you have decided to take sides with Justin Long. Well, [...]
February 12, 2009 – 12:03 am
You each have a Twitter account (you should follow me), and unless you’re a card carrying member of the Paranoiac party, you’ve almost certainly given out your twitter password to some dumb site that, let’s face it, was so simple to write it could have been written by that nice gentleman from Nigeria that emails [...]
February 11, 2009 – 11:25 pm
Hey, everybody. I’ve been torn lately between tweaking my blog habits to provide more relevant content for my technical blog audience and tweaking it to provide less of the nuts and bolts technical content for my non-technical friends and family. I ultimately decided that I have enough content in me to sustain both, but that [...]
February 11, 2009 – 2:34 pm
Shinteki has chosen dates for Decathlon 5. From their announcement: Shinteki Decathlon, a 12 hour puzzling adventure in the San Francisco Bay Area, returns in 2009 for players of all experience levels. Decathlon 5 will be run on Saturday, May 30 and again on Saturday, June 6. We’ll send out notification when signups go live.