Blog Posts

July 2009

• 2009-07-20

  Transparency is the new objectivity: Really good post from David Weinberger

  Check this excerpt from a post by David Weinberger called Transparency is the new objectivity from Joho the Blog: “A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” […snip…]”

  “Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it t...

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  #blogging
• 2009-07-16

  Sibelius and the meaning of ‘available’

  There aren’t many good options for Music notation software. Sibelius is in my opinion the best, which as this software goes is not saying all that much. For it’s functionality it’s quite good, as a piece of elegant and usable software, it gets a “B” at best. Over a month ago Sibelius announced their Version 6. Like any software company they made a much bigger deal of it than the changes would justify. Still there were a few things in it that I wanted.

  They started taking orders over a month ago. They have a not very generous deal for upgraders (I already have version 5) but still I...

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  #culture
• 2009-07-15

  [GEEKY] Interesting article about code leaks

  Check out this interesting case study of how one awful memory leak was tracked down and killed: “It’s every developer’s worse nightmare. You’ve bet the farm on a development framework, spent thousands of person-hours developing your application and then find a memory leak. Worse yet, you’ve got a memory leak in an interpreted scripting environment where you have little to no control over how memory is allocated and managed at runtime.” (from Tracking a memory leak in Rails)

  Technorati Tags: rails, memoryleak, geeky, programming

  #programming
• 2009-07-09

  Modesty or ego?

  Check this post Food for thought from Paul Krugman: According to a new site called Mediaite, Mark Bittman of the Times is the 8th most influential columnist in America, ahead of Arianna Huffington. It’s also noteworthy that Glenn Greenwald of Salon is #10. On the other hand, Christopher Hitchens is #5. Why would God allow that? And the less said about #1, the better … (from: Food for thought)

  Is he being modest by not titling his post, "I am #1" or is this a clever way of leading all of us to go look at the list and seeing that he’s "#1" without needing to say it?

• 2009-07-09

  Interesting bit in Risks Digest about Air France Crash

  Check out “More Focus on Computers in the Air France Crash”.

• 2009-07-08

  Anti-paprazzi clutch bag gives pushy shutterbugs a taste of their own medicine

  Not that I care about Paprazzi countermeasures, but this is just c-l-e-v-e-r! Check this post Anti-paprazzi clutch bag gives pushy shutterbugs a taste of their own medicine from Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine: Celebrities looking for a way to combat those pesky paparazzi that doesn’t involve fisticuffs and a less than flattering mug shot will want to hope this new "anti-paparazzi device" makes the jump from concept to commercial availability. The concept is basically an LED flash built into a clutch purse that emits a photo ruining flash of its own when it detects the flash from a camera. ..

• 2009-07-08

  Pandora is saved!

  Pandora is one of my favorite music sites. It’s a quick way to get an infinite play list built around a song that you give it to start with. I’ve become a fan of several artists that I heard on Pandora for the first time. I hear that their catalog of music isn’t nearly as large as some other well known music sites, but I could never tell any lack of grat music. So Pandora is pretty excellent… except they were in danger of going under due royalty rates that they were being charged. Well here’s the good news: “Pandora (And other internet radio) Has Officially Been Saved!”

  #culture
• 2009-07-07

  iPhone 3GS – Questions

  Ok so I’ve had the new iPhone for a little while now. This is my first ever iPhone and I have some questions. Maybe you can help me?

  iPhone knows how to announce the album name and artist (using the voice recognition “what song is that” command.) Then why can’t I enable it to automatically announce each and every song? Why is it so dang hard to convert a DVD I own to iPhone format? I tried a bunch of ‘solutions’ using software I already have, as well as 2 or 3 utilities I downloaded. None finished successfully. All took forever. Isn’t there an easy way?

  Any experts out there who want to comment?

  Technorati Tags: iphone

  #computing

June 2009

• 2009-06-24

  Can ‘Electronic Voting Machines’ be ‘Trusted’?

  Leaving aside what exactly an Electronic Voting Machine is, the New York Times weighed in with this editorial the other day: “Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted. In 2008, more than one-third of the states, including New Jersey and Texas, still did not require all votes to be recorded on paper. Representative Rush Holt has introduced a good bill that would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections. Congress should pass it while there is still time to get ready for 2010 ...

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  #politics
• 2009-06-19

  [Geeky] RMagick and memory leaks

  A recent post talked about creating a “Domain Specific Language” for image processing of ballots. I’ve made a lot of progress on that project and wanted to give an update. One commenter (my pal Aleks) said to ‘watch out for RMagick as it has major memory leaks. I talked to him further and he recommended using MiniMagick instead. I investigated.

  It turns out indeed that my RMagick app was gobbling up tons of memory.

  Both RMagick and ...

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  #programming
• 2009-06-16

  What is the ‘true’ result of an election?

  With what’s going on in Iran right now, many commentators are wondering whether the elections were fair. That is to say, do the reported results correspond to reality, to how people actually voted? “In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said the United States is “deeply troubled” by the unrest in Iran and is concerned about allegations of ballot fraud. But he stopped short of condemning the Iran security forces for cracking down on demonstrators and said Washington does not know whether the allegations of fraud are, in fact, true.” (from “...

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  #politics
• 2009-06-13

  Check out TheRentables.com

  I was shown a promising new site called TheRentables, for people (I know at least 3) who are looking to rent an apartment. They say: “The Rentables takes a fundamentally different approach to rental property listings to deliver the most relevant, accurate and comprehensive housing information to anyone at any time.” (from About TheRentables)

  I looked in Brooklyn, New York, and there were no listings (they are in the very early stages) But in Boston there were some listings. The site looks useful. Now the trick is to get landlords to enter their information.Technorati Tags: realestate, therentables, startups

  #business
• 2009-06-12

  Election day in Benton, New Hampshire

  My post about Barack Obama’s election was getting a bit long, so I thought I’d break it up and get some more blog miles out of the story. First of all, check out this election map from Google. A few things to notice. First of all,the outcome shows (as I said in the previous post) that Obama got a mere 9 votes less than McCain.

  Given the comment that ‘this is McCain country’ we were pretty surprised and really gratified to see this.

  There were other signs though. One of the poll workers offered to hold our sign while we went inside to get off our feet ...

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  #politics
• 2009-06-10

  Just when I was thinking about stopping my NetFlix subscription

  TIVO keeps on getting cooler and cooler: “Netflix said it will begin testing a service Thursday that lets users with TiVo’s latest DVR models access movies and television shows from an online library of 12,000 Netflix titles. The service will be available at no additional charge to subscribers of Netflix’s DVD rental service, as long as the Netflix customers are on rental plans that cost at least $8.99 a month.” (from WSJ)

  Odd, and sad for Netflix that somehow in my mind I am giving psychological credit for this new benefit to Tivo.

  Odd also that essentially this says I am willing to spend an EXTRA $9 on my monthly Tivo bill to get at this huge collection of movies. Wait, am I, really???

  Originally posted on Oct 31, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.

• 2009-06-09

  [GEEKY] Check out Ruby Best Practices book (not yet out ! :)

  As you know from a previous post, I’ve been working on a “domain specific language” for election ballot processing. In my search for information I got a pointer to a book called: Ruby Best Practices. It’s not out yet, but it looks like it will be excellent. You can get a sample chapter (which contained lots of information relevant to my domain specific language work) here.

  In it you will “[… snip] look at a ...

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  #programming
• 2009-06-08

  Exploding head scene

  An amusing article in Newsweek about Peter Arnell, self-styled renaissance man, inventor of the “Peapod“, a “a mix of Darth Vader, a bullet train, and a Citroën deux chevaux”: “[snip…] With no air conditioning and a top speed of 25 miles per hour, the $12,500 Peapod is basically a fancy golf cart. Arnell hopes people will buy them for doing errands around town. He wants to call customers “peaple” and has designed a line of accessories: pens, flashlights, T shirts, baseball caps, shopping carts, picnic bas...

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• 2009-06-08

  Open Government: Remixing Government Data

  I found this article to be a good primer on what’s going on with open government data. Remixing Government Data: Through mashups and Web apps, third parties are making innovative use of agencies’ information… This is part of the impetus and inspiration for two projects I am working on, “Decentralized Data Discovery” and “Government SDK“.

  

  #politics
• 2009-06-03

  [GEEKY] A DSL for Image Analysis

  I have been working quite a lot on Election Reform over the last few weeks, at least from the technology side. To be honest there is just so much I could be blogging about in this narrow specialized space that my cup overfloweth, but also it has been an impediment, not knowing where to start. There’s so much background and new new learning (for me anyway) that it’s been daunting.

  Herewith the start of my attempts to further document what I am up to.

  One task I’ve taken on is prototyping a “post election audit” system (more on this soon.) Basically at the heart of that beast is a bi...

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  #programming
• 2009-06-01

  Wandering through Asia

  My friend Amy just recently arrived from an incredible trip through Asia. If you are curious, check out Amy’s blog: “My travels in Southern Laos were indeed more successful in terms of being able to get out and see things than my time in the capital. I took an overnight bus with beds down to Pakse. This sounds like a really nice way to travel but as we found our beds, the only other westerner on the bus and I realized that these twin size mattresses were for two people, not one. We asked to be put together but there were no changes allowed so we spent the evening sleeping with strangers. This is not a recommended bus experience but we a...

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  #places

May 2009

• 2009-05-18

  Maldives looking for new land

  A while back I wrote a post saying that it was “Official: The Maldives is the most beautiful place on earth.” So you know I have a warm spot for it (or is it them?). An article ran in the New York Times Magazine recently, saying:

  “[…]Last November, when Nasheed proposed moving all 300,000 Maldivians to safer territory, he named India, Sri Lanka and Australia as possible destinations and described a plan that would use tourism revenues from the present to establish a sovereign wealth fund with which he could buy a new country — or at least part of one — in the future. “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own, and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” Nasheed said in November.[…]” (from “A new home for my country”)

  Wow.