Blog Posts

August 2010

• 2010-08-31

  Why I now have an email signature

  We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on. What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searching with Google or one of the other search engines.

  As I tell the story to many people, I summarize what I’ve learned by noting that it’s all more or less common sense, once you hear it. But for some reason common sense isn’t always so common. The source that I have learned the most from (and where I’ve learned to really appreciate educational podcasts is the ...

  Read more →

  #business
• 2010-08-29

  Branding: by Steve Jobs (my hero)

  [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmG9jzCHtSQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

  #business #computing
• 2010-08-27

  High Reactives

  What are high reactives? “Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.” (from ...

  Read more →

  #science
• 2010-08-26

  Do you remember “Twin Peaks”?

  “Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it,, don’t wait for it, just … let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee…”(Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks) Don’t ask me why, the quote just strikes me as funny!

  Originally posted on Apr 28, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

• 2010-08-22

  Scott Adams (Dilbert in real life) Writes about the future of the internet. Insightfully.

  Check out this post Chefs and Editors from Dilbert.com Blog: And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future. (from: Chefs and Editors)

  And in general, read Dilbert.com Blog!

• 2010-08-21

  Ray Kurzweil Responds

  You may not have followed the discussion that ensued when Ray Kurzweil was reported to ‘not understand the brain‘, but it’s pretty fascinating. Here’s what PZ Meyers said: “There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.” (from PZ eyers)

  Ouch!

  Here’s a ty...

  Read more →

  #ai
• 2010-08-20

  Rogert Ebert: Ten things I know about the mosque

  I bet many of you didn’t realize that Roger Ebert is still writing a fantastic column, with movie reviews yes, but also some excellent written commentary. For example, check this fine post Ten things I know about the mosque from Roger Ebert’s Journal: 1. America missed a golden opportunity to showcase its Constitutional freedoms. The instinctive response of Americans should have been the same as President Obama’s: Muslims have every right to build there. Where one religion can build a church, so can all religions. (from: Ten things I know about the mosque)

  #politics
• 2010-08-15

  Fun article about faux-physical UI metaphors

  Ok, that’s my own curious headline for this interesting article in the New York Times: “What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.” (from The New York Times)

  #design #computing
• 2010-08-13

  Android Inventor – not ready for prime time

  The other day I wrote a post where I mentioned Google’s App Inventor, and I mentioned it with some skepticism. Today, a column in the New York Times that covers Google’s App Inventor in more detail, and comes to more or less the same conclusion:

  “I’m happy for App Inventor. I wish it a long and exciting life. Surely it will have one in schools and computer classes, among other niches.

  But for nonprogrammers on their own? Forget it. Android Hype Inventor is more like it.” (from the New York Times)

  #computing #culture
• 2010-08-11

  Little children’s drawings turned into art – COOL!

  Check this link out, there are lots of really fun drawings. The artists take a little kid’s drawing and turns it into something amazing. Here’s a taste:

  Originally posted on May 04, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

  #culture
• 2010-08-08

  iPhones record everything you do?

  Check this post iPhones Help Cops Solve Crimes By Capturing Everything You Type, Do from The Consumerist: Cops love finding iPhones at crime scenes because the phones carry so much priceless data about your usage habits, or as the cops call it, evidence. That email you typed months back about feeling stabby when you drink? It’s still there because there because the iPhone captures everything you type to help fuel its spellcheck abilities—even emails you thought you deleted. And that’s not all. (from: ...

  Read more →

  #computing
• 2010-08-07

  Rhapsody vs. iTunes

  I think I might be entering a new phase in my music listening. I listen to a ton of music, on my iPhone, on my computer, in my car, all the time. And up to now it’s always been downloaded (purchased) music that I organize manually within iTunes. From time to time I’ve had subscriptions to eMusic and similar services. As a result I have a huge number of tracks on my computer and on my iPhone. And as my music taste develops, and I discover new artists and composers, lots of those tracks are listened to rarely.

  The alternative services like Rhapsody, which has been around for a while. But I ...

  Read more →

  #culture #computing #business
• 2010-08-05

  David Weinberger has flat feet: Programming

  Check this post The flatfooted learning society from Joho the Blog: But, I am a flatfooted “programmer” and always will be. I have limitations that would have kept me from ever becoming a professional. I have an odd inability to handle indirect relationships, e.g., pointers; I did fine with C, but bombed at C++. I have problems with recursion, so although I once did a fair bit of hobbyist Lisp “programming” (I once wrote a beginner’s guide to Lisp as a document extension language), I can’t handle the self-reflexive capabilities that turn Lisp into a super-tool for Paul Grah...

  Read more →

  #programming
• 2010-08-05

  Wave goodbye to Google Wave

  Google leaves products in Beta forever, they say. Not Google Wave. They actually announced Wave’s impending cancellation.

  “But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.” (from Google Blog)

  This really stinks, Google. I’ve begun to really on rely and evangelize Wave. It’s true that it took me a long time to understand it and had to do a good deal of convincing of other people to use it. For me it has been great.

  Will I be able to live without it? Sure, nothing is irreplaceable. Google Buzz, on the other hand, lasted about 2 weeks with me. It was truly useless.

• 2010-08-04

  [GEEKY] Too much authentication goodness

  It seems like nowadays, to be a cool, 21st century kind of application, you need to allow me to use my facebook, or google, or yahoo, or twitter, or … account to access a site. Ok, sounds like a fine idea, don’t you think? Here’s the problem. I go to one of the zillions of sites out there that I use, and it asks me to log in. Now, not only do I have to remember a username / email, a password, but I also have to remember if I used Google, Facebook, OpenId, or whatnot, to get in.

  I guess I should set a policy for myself to never use anything other than the built in username/password. That’s probably a better policy for security as well.

• 2010-08-03

  Blackberry network is far more secure!

  I never realized this and I am surprised that BlackBerry and Research In Motion advertising have not made a big deal out of it. According to this article BlackBerry communications travel over a highly encrypted channel, not the open internet: “Other smartphones, like the Apple iPhone, are not tied to one e-mail service. In general, that means e-mail to and from the devices mostly travels over the open Internet and can be relatively easily monitored.

  But the BlackBerry uses highly encrypted data that is received by wireless carriers’ towers and is immediately routed through a closed, global network operated by the company. To enforce the ban, the carriers will stop forwarding that data.” (from New York Times)

• 2010-08-02

  Why are you reading?

  If you are a hardcore blog reader like I am, and like BlogBridge fans are, it’s worth giving a little thought to what this article is saying: “I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he’s right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.” (from 43 Folders)

  Read the whole article: it challenges assumptions about why we read (and write) our blogs so diligently.

  Originally posted on Dec 18, 2007. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

July 2010

• 2010-07-28

  Wikileaks: Some good further links

  Continuing the post from the other day about Wikileaks, I found some excellent further links that might interest you:

  The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World’s First Stateless News Organization – Article in PressThink

  No Secrets – Profile in the New Yorker Magazine

  #politics
• 2010-07-27

  Behind the scenes @ Wikileaks

  There’s a lot of buzz right now about the leaked documents related to the war in Afghanistan. I am not clear myself whether they teach us anything new– they may or may not. Also I have not seen any reports claiming that they were fake or not authentic. However in view of the very recent flap about our credulity of anything we see online (see Sherrod, Shirley) I am interested that I have not yet seen any deep exposé or reporting about the reliability of Wikileaks, whatever or whoever that is. This thought came to be because, by coincidence, a few weeks ag...

  Read more →

  #politics
• 2010-07-26

  How the world changes (Was: Is the world ready for a replacement to Outlook?)

  Now that I’ve been blogging for a while, it’s fun and instructive sometimes to see some of the older stuff that I wrote to see how fast our tech world changes and how I myself change…Everyone loves to beat up on Microsoft’s Outlook. Including me! See Outlook Haters Anyone? and Outlook 2003 Rant. It is true that Outlook is a bit of an abomination. It’s large, slow, and as of the latest release, the user interface has gotten that much worse.

  Even Microsoft execs agree according to Rafe Needleman (...

  Read more →