Blog Posts

November 2004

• 2004-11-06

  [OOPSLA] Where Wikis come from

  I was lucky enough to meet and spend some time with **Ward Cunningham **at OOPSLAthis year. I also heard him present in a big hall. If you are a Wikifan then you know that Ward is the one who invented the concept. What seems to be a little less well known is how the idea evolved, where it came from. I am sure it’s written up somewhere. but I thought I’d write down my own idiosynchratic understanding of the story.

  Ward was involved in the early days of the Design Patternsmovement, which seems t...

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• 2004-11-06

  Podcasting less important than “IT Conversations”

  I was working out, listening an IT Conversationsinterview with Joel Spolsky. It was interesting and passed the time. It’s wonderful that Doug Kaye interviewed Joel Spolsky, and it’s wonderful that Joel was fun to listen to, it was wonderful that this MP3 was available on the internet, and that I had iPodder to automatically download it to me iPod, and of course, my iPod is wonderful.

  But I realized this: I had been doing this “by hand”before Podcasting or iPodder existed. The far bigger deal...

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• 2004-11-06

  At least we have the Redsox

  Ok, I am adjusting to the new reality of the lost election. The amount of coverage in the blogs I frequent is huge so I won’t add to the noise, except to offer a few graphics that I found interesting.

  #politics

October 2004

• 2004-10-28

  Red Sox Moon

  In honor of the Red Sox, the moon will turn red tonight. It will start melting into the dark sky around 9.15. Between 10.23 and 11.44, it will be some shade of red, like Curt Schilling’s sock. After that, with the Red Sox hopefully having achieved their mission, the moon will regain its composure and return to light up the sky, just as these players have lightened up our Fall.

  Take a look: about due South, about 45 degrees up.

  (from Ben Gomes-Casseres)

• 2004-10-26

  You have an MP3 and I have an IPod

  You have an MP3 and I have an IPod. I want to listen to that MP3 while driving, walking, or working out. Anything that will facilitate and make it more convenient for me to achieve that is valuable. End of story. Before anyone coined the term Podcasting, and before there were enclosures in RSS, this real-life problem existed and was seeking a solution. Substitute any portable player for IPod, substitute any digital media type for MP3, and you can see that this is a far broader problem than is being argued about and discussed.

  The technical approach will not make people want my mp3 any less or more. And people who don’t have a need to consume their digital media while disconnected from the net won’t care. And certainly there may be more efficient approaches for getting the media from here to there (BitTorrent).

  But I don’t see how anyone can argue Podcasting is not a great step forward.

  #computing
• 2004-10-25

  [OOPSLA] Watching the World Series in a mirror

  Just got to Vancouver for OOPSLA. Just checked into my hotel room, and am doing email while watching baseball. Because of the way the room is set up, I am able to watch the game through a mirror. You know what’s weird? Runners seem to be running from home to third to second to first. Left field is right field. The world is upside down! Well actually leftside right.

  Watching baseball through a mirror. **Funny. **

• 2004-10-21

  Best Red Sox Headline

  Isn’t it sweet! Did you know you could get a big collection of front pages of newspapers at the Newseum? Here’s by far the funniest I saw:

  

  Late update — Additional funny headlines: ** “The Empire Strikes Out!”

  “Yank This!”**

• 2004-10-18

  Some arcana about how BlogStarz! work

  Believe me when I say that this will only be interesting to you if you are curious about the thinking about the Starz rating system that we’ve built into BlogBridge. If you don’t have a burning curiosity, trust me, it will put you to sleep 🙂 The basic idea for the BlogStarz! mechanism is simple but the UI at this point is still confusing practically everyone. I will explain it here and describe changes we are planning.

  The idea is that the BlogStarz! are generated by BlogBridge and are meant to be a summary rating that ought to match how interesting this particular blog would be to the user, based on several factors.

  Currently 4 factors are implemented: your personal rating...

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  #blogging
• 2004-10-15

  Talking points memo: who’s obsessed now?

  I’m a huge fan of Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall’s blog. In fact it’s my exhibit #1 for people who ask me for a good blog to read (assuming they are “liberal.” If they are not I point them to Instapundit.) Anyway just a few words about Josh Marshall’s complaint about how the spinmeisters positioned Kerry’s comment about Cheney’s daughter the other night. They called it “A crass, below-the-belt political strategy to attach the president’s daughter.”

  Well, my reaction was the same as Mr. Marshall’s – how can they call what Kerry said an attack? You can call it a lot of thin...

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  #politics
• 2004-10-15

  Am I cranky today?

  Here I go again, picking a out quote from a blogger who I really likeand dissecting it. I don’t know, maybe I am cranky. Robert Scoble, of Microsoft and Scobelizer fame, reports on a conversation he had with Kim Polese. All in all a fascinating bit, and I hope Kim realized that Scoble was going to blog the whole dang thing. Buried somewhere in the middle, Scoble says: “It was not possible until there was friction free collaboration (blogs, RSS, Wikis, IRC chat), and a large number of open source components.”

  Maybe it’s because I come from the world of collaboration, b...

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  #business
• 2004-10-15

  BlogBridge makes top 10 List!

  Hey, this is really cool. BlogBridge made a “Top 10 Java Web Start Apps” list. I ran across it on “Cardsharp on Software”, a blog written by Kurt Williams. “7. BlogBridge. Wicked cool RSS Client”

  That alone led to lots of downloads and hits on the site. And then it got picked up by Java Desktop as a Featured Blog, which led to even more traction.

  Wicked cool, as they say!

  #blogging
• 2004-10-13

  Why don’t you check your email?

  A very interesting piece about how people are beginning to use Instant Messaging instead of email. It’s quite counterintuitive, but it does seem to correlate in one particular college student I know pretty well. “Youth use email to talk with parents and authorities (including corporate emails like from Xanga); it’s where they get the functional stuff. They check email once a day. They get notices there, but they’re **mostly disregarded. **

  IM is where the action is. Youth see this as their digital centerpiece, where they communicate with their friends, thereby maintaining th...

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• 2004-10-12

  Too Many Toolbars!

  Everyone wants to give me a toolbar! I’ve successfully fought back Yahoo’s and am a happy user of Google’s Toolbar. Now A9 has a toolbar too.

  Have you checked out A9? It’s Amazon’s Search Service. What does Amazon want with a Search Service? Don’t ask me! Does the world need another one?

  I guess I am all for trying to improve on what exists. But in the case of A9, they license Google results and then “add value.” For me the value isn’t persuasive yet.

  But geez, do I have to decide now between the Google toolbar and the A9 Toolbar? Puleez!

  But here’s a tidbit for you: if you use A9 then you get a little discounton your Anazon book order. It’s only 1.5% (or so 🙂 but still if you order a lot of books, it could add up!

• 2004-10-06

  BlogBridge Podcasting?

  There’s a site called IT Conversations that has a collection of interviews, recorded on mp3s with some very interesting people. Also included are lectures, debates and panels. It is an excellent site, I recommend it. For a while now, I’ve been, manually, downloading those onto my PC and transferring them to my iPod for listening while I work out. Very useful and very manual.

  It turns out that there’s a new term floating around, PodCasting, that describes the 21st century version of what I’ve been doing. Conceptually, you pick the interviews you are interested in from a list, and they get automatically get downloaded to your iPod. ...

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  #blogging
• 2004-10-06

  [GEEK] Undrestanding and getting around EDT

  No, not Eastern Daylight Time, the Swing Event Dispatch Thread. Duh. If the abbreviation EDT doesn’t send shivers up your spine you’re not really a Java Geek. Or maybe you are an uber-geek. Anyway, I came across this clear and short articleexplaining the big traps and how to avoid them. It is the SPIN project which implements a way-esoteric-PhD-level technique to make it easier to work with the EDT.

  #programming
• 2004-10-05

  Magic Links

  Here’s a really cool idea (via Boing Boing– see their story) – Creating a web site, identical to an existing one, except that certain words have been changed to links. A very powerful idea. Read the articleand see the site. In BlogBridgewe already have automatic highlights of keywords. That is, you can specify a set of words or phrases y...

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  #blogging

September 2004

• 2004-09-30

  Find what you care about with BlogBridge

  We just got a totally cool new BlogBridge feature working, which actually was suggested by a user a few months ago: keyword highlighting. It’s quite simple: The user supplies a set of keywords they care about (in my case: “Bush Kerry Microsoft eRoom Curacao and Pito”)

  In turn, whenever blogs are displayed, wgere hose keywords occur, they are highlighted, like so:

  Click on the image to enlarge it and note how the words Kerry and Bush are highlighted.

  That’s not all. Keyword matches also figure in the scoring of feeds, so when you want to look only at your highest rated feeds, those with matches will be rated more highly (actually this is configurable.)

  WDYT?

  #blogging
• 2004-09-29

  Web Services gone wild

  Here’s a cool idea: using the web services of Google and Technorati together to find other, related blogs. Here’s the idea: One of the things I am trying to do with BlogBridgeis to help users discover new blogs that they would be interested in. Let’s say I am interested in finding other blogs which are related to or similar to one of my favorites, Scripting News.

  First we ask Google for other sites ‘related to’ Scripting news (click here to see result.)

  Starting at the second entry, we ask Technorati whether the re...

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  #programming #blogging
• 2004-09-29

  Why Google is great

  I’ve written about this before, I think, but I am once again pleasantly amazed by Google. I momentarily blanked out on the name of the ‘other’ conservative blogger – other than Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) that is.

  So I asked Google, what sites are related to Instapundit? And here’s what it says. Number 2 on the list: Andrew Sullivan. Yup, right answer!

  Cool or what?

• 2004-09-27

  Mars Rover tracks seen from space

  You know I am a fan of the cool little Mars Rovers. Here’s an interesting little bit from Nasa: “Mars Orbiter Sees Rover Tracks Among Thousands of New Images

  NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, starting its third mission extension this week after seven years of orbiting Mars, is using an innovative technique to capture pictures even sharper than most of the more than 170,000 it has already produced.

  One dramatic example from the spacecraft’s Mars Orbiter Camera shows wheel tracks of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and the rover itself. Another tells scientists that no boulders bigger than about 1 to 2 meters (3 to 7 feet) are exposed in giant ripples created by a catastrophic flood.
  ...

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  #science