Category Archives: Technology

A little bit of Stack Overflow irony

This isn’t all that important of a post, but the circumstances were a little bit shocking at first and then at least mildly entertaining to me, so I figure I’ll write down the story. Sometime in the last week or so, I crossed the 10k reputation threshold on Stack Overflow. I’ve had my eye on [...]

The need for wiki standardization

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 [...]

Minimum lengths for usernames. Wtf?!

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 [...]

Jinni needs better Netflix integration

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 [...]

Google Code Jam 2008 better than ever

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 [...]

Simple solutions to stupid password policies

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 [...]

All bytes created equal: net neutrality and SMS

A post on TechCrunch today about how incredibly much AT&T charges, per byte, for SMS messages reminded me to throw up my quick thoughts on my dream for a future where bytes aren’t discriminated against based on information about their content. Or at least not quite like they are today. While I have to tip [...]

The trust screen on an OpenID Provider

Nathan Bell blogs about how he wishes OpenID would just go away, or at least fade into the background so that users don’t have to know quite so much to use it. I really like how he’s thinking over there, and will take some time to write up my thoughts on most of it sometime [...]

Microsoft isn’t the same company it was 10, or even 5 years ago

I was at lunch today with Chris Messina and some others from Vidoop, and somehow as often happens with me, we got into a very interesting discussion about the way Microsoft does things. In particular, Chris indicated some frustration with a lack of traction that he’s gotten with Microsoft in the past regarding technologies that [...]

Universal OpenID Button

Following Clickpass‘s lead, there are 3 key scenarios that a Universal OpenID Button needs to enable in order to gain widespread use on the web: 1) new user sign up, 2) existing user sign in, and 3) merge existing Identity 1.0 user with a new or existing OpenID user. Despite the existing best practices for [...]