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2006

  • 1 min read

Help with movable type spam?

Both this blog and the BlogBridge have been getting spammed more and with both comment and trackback spam. It's becoming a real pain. I've poked around my Movable Type settings looking for solutions but I am sure someone who knows MT well could tune my configuration with ease. Anyone out there want to lend a hand? Please email me! Technorati Tags: movabletype

  • 1 min read

[GEEK] OPML Camp was a lot of fun!

OPML Camp was yesterday and today, so it's over now. We had good attendance and some really good discussions and interesting demos. Here are some highlights:

  • We talked about tools, both brand new, not yet written, and existing

  • These tools do all kinds of interesting OPML related processing

  • Grazr - A really cool web page widget to view and traverse an OPML structure

  • OPMLSearch - Google for OPML files across the web

  • OPML Workstation - A library of OPML files, plus an editor to create and edit them

  • OPML Editor - Another tool for editing and hosting OPML structures, and publishing them

  • iJot - Another tool for editing and hosting OPML, and publishing them

  • Attensa - A web based, attention-oriented feed aggregator

  • Adam Green really cool Techmeme/OPML Mashup (here's the result)

  • We talked about OPML 2.0 and what is new there

  • We talked about the role of namespaces in extending XML and OPML

  • We talked about RSS namespaces that exist. Mike Kowalchick showed a really interesting analysis of the RSS namespaces that appear 'in the wild' (watch his blog for more details)

  • We talked about RDF and tried to figure out it's relationship to OPML

It was a very useful and enjoyable meeting. Sorry you missed it! Technorati Tags: OPML, opmlcamp

  • 2 min read

Noah and Tabblo (Water in Arlington Mass)

Picture 1-34As you may have heard, we've had torrential (and I mean torrential) downpours here in Massachusetts. I happen to live on a little isthmus (look it up) between the upper and lower Mystic Lakes in Arlington Massachusetts. Miscellaneous Water 885513216303 0 BgEvery 5 or 10 years the Upper Mystic Lake decides that it wants to shake hands with the Lower Mystic Lake and basically water flows right through someone's back yard. Well it happened again this time, and a neighbor collected some amazing pictures of the excitement. As you can see, for the first time ever I think, the National Guard was called in to help deal with the situation. Quite exciting. Tabblo: Water Equally exciting is that I took the opportunity to play with a new product called Tabblo and built this page in exactly 5 minutes using the images as raw material. Very nicely done! Here's the caption:

We live in a neighborhood in Arlington Mass that sits right between the upper and lower Mystic Lakes. As happens once every five or 10 years, with enough rain the upper and lower Mystic lakes link up, unfortunately right through somebody's yard. Here are some excellent pictures of that experience! … See my Tabblo>

Technorati Tags: arlingtonmass, flood

  • 1 min read

All you never wanted to know about colonoscopies

Our friend Dave Weinberger shares: "I had my first colonoscopy today. They didn't find anything, except a piece of fruitcake I ate in 1978. But I figured if Katie Couric can show her colon on national TV to encourage people to get checked, then I should too." The only surprise is that this is his first colonoscopy. David, what took you so long? (I guess my second surprise is that he didn't link to Wikipedia's definition of Colonoscopy.) Technorati Tags: medical

  • 1 min read

Amusing: “Where’s George”

Bill Paths Check out this odd little site, "Where's George", especially for people with time on their hands. People enter in the serial number of a dollar bill, and the site tries to track it's travel through the country. The power of the net. Interestingly, in this (and several other) article, they say that using the patterns detected by Where's George (they call it a game) scientists actually have learned useful new things about the spread of infectious diseases in the USA, a very "au courant" topic.

"We were confident that we could learn a lot from the data collected at the www.wheresgeorge.com bill-tracking website, but the results turned out far beyond our expectations," said Lars Hufnagel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-author of an article describing the research in the January 26 issue of the journal Nature" (from Science Blog)

Technorati Tags: interesting

  • 2 min read

Coffee Series, Part 3: Trade offs

First I was an instant coffee guy. Then I got into brewing whole pots, which led to my wasting a lot of coffee. Then, my friend Charlie started working at Keurig, and so I got exposed to that machine and how wonderful it was, and one year I got it as a Christmas gift. We still use the Keurig a lot, but truth is that we've been going through about 10 K-Cups per Day! I was starting to notice that this wasn't a good deal. Not to speak of the Starbucks card which I'd been reloading from time to time. So you can see, I've worked myself up (or down) the evolutionary tree. Anyway, when I got interested in Espresso, I visited Williams- Sonoma several times to look at the different machines. The brand I had heard the most about was Capresso. Without even getting into the outrageous price, I was eyeing the Capresso Impressa F9, F8 and so on. All fully automatic , meaning you put whole beans and water in one end and espresso comes out the other end. Wonderful. However, being Keurig fans, we had gotten used to being able to choose from cup to cup whether it was going to be caf, decaf, flavored or what not. A key obstacle with these fully automatics for me was that you more or less had to commit to one kind of bean. It's true that in addition to the canister of beans there's a chute that bypasses all that and lets you send in ground coffee of any kind. But that kind of defeats the whole idea and didn't satisfy me. Plus, there was the outrageous price. So I discovered the Capresso Ultima. One way to think of this is that it's just like the fully automatic F9, but without the coffee grinding mechanism. Now that I've used the Ultima a bit it's also clear that it's a much simpler device both mechanically and electronically. And by the way it's way way cheaper. So in the end what swayed me:

  1. Less money

  2. Smaller

  3. Able to change coffee type on the fly

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