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2006

  • 1 min read

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Check out [this

post](http://www.dzone.com/rsslinks/free_book_on_algorithms_highly_recommended.html) from dzone.com: latest front page:

[

](http://www.dzone.com/rsslinks/free_book_on_algorithms_highly_recommended.html)I just finished a fantastic book called "Algorithms", by Sanjoy
Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani. Even better: this
book is free and can be downloaded in PDF form from the authors' web
site.

(from: Free
book on "Algorithms" highly recommended)

  • 1 min read

fire at one broadway

My buddies at wis.dm had a real scare

today as our offices and the rest of the building was evacuated in a big
rush due to a terrible and terrifying explosion in the
basement. I was in California at the time and got word of this when
Brian called my cell phone while I was in a meeting. All the wis.dm folks are back home and ok now, but some actually had to go to the hospital for some treatment. Scary stuff…

Here is the post
from Brian Del Vecchio's blog:

Today at about 11:00am the alarm went off in our building at One
Broadway in Kendall Square. This was followed by a panicky PA
announcement from the security desk that there was an emergency in the
building and everyone must evacuate. As we made our way down through the
crowded stairwells, thick smoke filled the tight space with that acrid
smell of burning electronics.

(from: fire at one
broadway)

  • 1 min read

2006 Fall Leadership Forum

I am at the 2006 Fall Leadership Forum in Sonoma, CA. Wine is everywhere, even a free bottle in the hotel room. And all that wine and wine information is kind of squandered on me. So I won't talk about wine, but here are some tidbits from the conference…

  • Check out PicLens, a Safari-only (so far) plug-in. It adds a very cool photo browsing experience to sites like Flickr.
  • Check out Mashery, a service that front ends other services that offer web APIs. It adds functionality for registering users, issueing API keys, etc. It is a service that would be offered to other companies that want to provide a web services API to get them off the ground more easily.
  • Check out IBLOKS a cool web site to create mix videos using your media files (images, videos, music.) I played with it for a couple of minutes and it looks quite interesting.
  • Check out Zoho.com a pretty amazing online, web based, 'office suite' that actually goes a good deal beyond 'Office' including things like Project Management, CRM and other stuff. I am impressed!
  • Finally, take a look at Jangl, "Communicate with anyone using your mobile phone, without ever exchanging phone numbers," now that's a good tag line because it explains clearly what it is.
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Good article about idiomatic Ruby

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I've been learning Ruby and Rails in my copious spare time. I found this
post instructive on how to write idiomatic Ruby instread of Ruby as C:
Idiomatic
Ruby.

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Hacking Reputation in MySpace and Facebook

Check out [this

post](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/hacking_reputat.html) from Schneier on Security:

"I'll be the first to admit it: I know next to nothing about MySpace or Facebook. I do know that they're social networking sites, and that -- at least to some extent -- your reputation is based on who are your "friends" and what they say about you.

Which means that this follows, like day follows night. "Fake Your Space" is a site where you can "hire" fake friends to leave their pictures and personalized comments on your page." (from: Hacking Reputation in MySpace and Facebook)

Read the whole thing: Hacking
Reputation in MySpace and Facebook

  • 1 min read

What’s a meme and how fast does it travel?

Some clever scientists are trying to measure how fast meme's travel on the web. My contribution to the experiment is to add a link to their article to my article.

What's a meme, anyway? Think of ideas as little organisms that live in a person's mind (metaphorically.) And think of how good, meaningful ideas will tend to infect other minds, almost in a biological sense. And how some ideas are so powerful that they travel incredibly fast until everyone understands and thinks in those terms.

In this kind of scenario, the idea that travels is said to be a meme. (Self referentially, the idea of a meme as I described it here is itself a meme.) So I suppose Democracy is a meme that has infected and spread for a long time and very broadly. And the internet as a superhighway is a meme that had some uptake but has since died out.

More recently, the idea of a meme has morphed (mutated?) I think now it's used much more to refer to a clever phrase which sticks and is quoted all over the place. For example, the pun "Plug and Pray" (for plug and play) and the word "wikiality" are both memes in the new sense.

So the study that we are assisting with this post is one that is measuring the speed of the spread of the second kind of meme across the internet using the propagation of links as the measure.