November 28, 2008 – 7:40 pm
Selection paralysis I got to thinking lately about how I wish I had a wiki on my personal web site, because I want to do some quick’n’dirty semi-structured and richly linked writing to share with others so I can get feedback and input. I spent some time catching up on what wiki systems are best [...]
November 20, 2008 – 8:05 pm
I get bitten all the time with minimum username length requirements. The most common number that I bump up against is 6 characters, probably because my usual username is 5 characters so I wouldn’t hear about requirements of 4 or 5, and it’s obvious to everyone that requiring 7 or 8 characters is silly. But [...]
November 17, 2008 – 8:04 pm
Read about the new movie recommendation engine Jinni on Techcrunch earlier today. I’ve done a few queries, and love the particularly rich axes along which they slice and dice the catalog of movies. They call their taxonomy the Movie Genome Project, and admit that it aims to do for movies what the Music Genome Project [...]
November 13, 2008 – 1:44 am
During the wrap-up circle at today’s IIW2008b (which is the acronym for this fall’s Internet Identity Workshop), Phil Windley said that this may not have been the best IIW ever, but that it was the best in a while. I admit that I didn’t start attending until IIW2007a, but this was definitely the best IIW [...]
October 20, 2008 – 11:10 am
The latest Apple vs. Microsoft ads are hilarious even if there are a few folks pointing out the hypocrisy in the first ad. Regarding spending money on advertising Regarding getting back to simple naming
September 30, 2008 – 6:21 pm
It’s been a very long time since my last blog post, and an incredible amount of stuff has changed since then. My wife, plus our cats and a blueberry bush moved to Portland, OR along with the rest of Vidoop on a road trip that we called the Oregon Trail (the day 4 video is [...]
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 [...]