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The Magpie Developer
Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer. |
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Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry.
(Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that. |
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Drinking stories that put yours to shame
Via Keith
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood. |
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making vodka pills in 24 hours
Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms. |
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Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz. |
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(Monday, November 28)
Post Sting
Another year, another 51 weeks of Tech reminding us about basketball season.
You know, that game was almost as close as the UGA Vs Auburn game, but it was just a boring ass game. At the risk of alienating myself from my alumni and dawg fan status, even though we lost to Auburn, I enjoyed the Auburn game 10x more. Auburn was an exciting game. The Tech game was boring as hell until the last 10 mins. Don't get me wrong Richt was right in the end for playing conservative and waiting for a special teams breakout, but man, it got stale. If I heard the James Taylor Farm Bureau insurance ad one more time in between Munson calls I was gonna shoot myself. I do have to say that replay worked very well, and I am glad (especially with this specific rivalry's history of craptacular calls) it went well.
One thing I always love about the Dawgs winning is the crap coverage the AJC gives them. It never fails that if the Jackets win they get a keep sake full page cover with the highlights. At least UGA got some coverage on the front page this year. Here are some steller quotes from an AJC article this year:
LSU couldn't stop Tennessee when it mattered, however, so now all that matters is the Sugar Bowl berth given to the winner of this week's game. The loser, at least if it is Georgia, more than likely will end up in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl.
It's two vastly different bowl games, in terms of payout and stature, for teams that appear to be exactly the same.
I bolded the SEC love.
even the Title:
Drained Bulldogs turn focus to LSU
Ah well. There is a taint to everything. And everything has a taint.
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(Wednesday, November 23)
Google Base and the loss of need for Web Spidering
So I keep up with a decent amount of search engine optimization techniques and one of the best places on the web to do that is WebMasterWorld.com. The site is owned (?) and ran by Brett Tabke, who is a large icon in the SEO realm already. A few days ago Brett decided that due to the ever increasing traffic from rogue spiders crawling his forums en mass (and thus increasing his already large bandwidth) costs for the site, he decided to block all spiders from crawling the forums. When I say all spiders, that also includes Google/Yahoo/MSN and other large search engine spiders. While I am sure this WILL cut down on the bandwidth in one fell swoop, it will also result in the site being dropped from all the search engines on anything it ranked for using those pages that were previously being crawled. I personally did not understand why he would be giving up all those spots, I thought what if he had another method to submit his content to the other major search engines without having them crawl the content.
Then it hit me.
He does. At least for Google he does. He could break the content up into bite sized chunks and submit it to Google Base.
Now, I am completely speculating here (which also includes the Google Base submission as speculation) but if he did this would bring up 2 interesting and scary ideas:
1.) If this were to be given to Google Base and indexed, this for one gives G the monopoly on his data. This, in my opinion, is a VERY bad thing. Yes it might be nice for his users (what if Google designs a certain page in Base for his subscribers to utilize for searching his site only?) This does help his user base find the information they need faster, but this lends to a scary idea. What if webmasters package up their data and send it to Google (via Google Base)? This eliminates the need for Google to crawl the site, but it also gives Google a monopoly on the search ability of the end user on that data. I, from a search engine user/consumer perspective, do not like that idea. As soon as we eliminate the ability for other search engines to compete then we all lose. Even if you don't utilize Y! or MSN, their inherent value of just existing in the same market is a major bonus to Search Engine users anywhere. It MAKES Google innovate.
2.) If he were to submit this information specifically via Google Base, this might also have the effect of Webmasters and other SEO individuals having to go to Google base to search Webmasterworld (thus increasing the visibility of the site to webmasters hopefully drawing their data into the fold). This goes back to #1.
Also, there has been a lot of talk about Google and if they are going to give people (application developers from other companies) the ability to crawl Google base for their own means. This is a tricky situation for Google, if they collect all this data (submitted by users not crawled) and they lay claim to it (and don't let people crawl it) then they will be perceived as evil and to a point hypocritical because they built a business of crawling, indexing, organizing other people's data)
I am eager to see how they play the 'Is-GoogleBase-Crawlable' card and what they do with it.
I have not posted about Google Base because personally I don't understand it. It is not that I don't understand it from a 'Why should I give Google my core data (sans the pretty navigation of my site)?' it is that I don't understand exactly where all this data is going to end up. I do think that Google has very good results compared to other search engines, but they are not ANYWHERE NEAR what I would call "good" results, all search engines still need TONS of work to really answer any non-subjective question I give them. In my opinion, Google (and all other SEs) still can't organize the information that is presented in the semi-stateful presentation method we call the web, why should I think that they can do it if I give them large chunks of it in xml?
I have no clue what Brett Tabke is going to do for organization and Search Engine presence for Webmasterworld.com, but I am actually really eager to see what happens. WMW is a huge site with a great following. Can it live (and continue to increase its membership base) without a mass amount of pages on G? I certainly hope so, for not just WMW users , but for anyone who uses a search engine. I also hope that Google Base (or anything like it from other Search Engines) is not going to be the run around to site spidering. I completely understand the bandwidth issues and his reasons, I am eager to see how it all pans out. It really is a brave thing to do and really is going to be neat to see what the ramifications are from it.
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The Next RSS
The Next RSS.
I have been using RSS for about 2 years now. It honeslty has made my day much more productive and also the passing of objects *unsecure* in my apps a little less tedious than throwing business objects and proxies around. It was so light weight that it is a breeze to implement in different apps as both provider and subscribers.
To my delight MS came out with a pretty sweet spec today about what I belive is the future of RSS or atleast a good direction. It is called SSE (wasn't there a processor instructure set with this handle before?). Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML. It is basically and addition add on to the extremely simple RSS form factor that will give basic queue redundancy via the Publisher/Subscriber model.
1 Overview
The objective of Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) is to define the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely-cooperating apps
1. to use RSS as the basis for item sharing � that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
2. to use OPML as the basis for outline sharing � that is, the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of outlines, such as RSS aggregators subscription lists
The first thing I thought of was with a Pub/Sub model who gets to be the winner in conflict (ie who has override powers the Pub or the Sub?) Well I have not really studied it in depth, but it looks like the Pub always wins (which makes sense) but the neat thing is that the Sub keeps a history on conflict resolution, which is a neat method for what I call "keeping up with the Joneses" when somthing has changed in the past few RSS items previous in a feed and must be updated and accounted for (if you have an rss reader, you may see this problem when people go back in and change a misspelling (I do a lot) on their feed title and it alters the feed entry title, and without a GUID or ID the reader has to only belive that the entry was updated and marks it as unread. Where as you sit there thinking it is a new article, when only it was a corrected mistake.
The REALLY interesting thing about this is that it comes out with a semi-familiar licence:
Microsoft's copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/.
I think it is great that they did it like this, but also you gotta think MS was long to embrace RSS (its just really comming with Vista/Longhorn) and to be fair, Google had the "ATOM" which both tried to capitalize on a proprietary format. It is good to see strides from MS that are keeping things open for everyone.
Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML
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Bowl Predictions 2k5 and Beyond
Me and the flux capacitor just got back at 88.8 form Jan 1st 2006. Although I didn't get an sports almanac for Biff, I am going to give everyone the spill on how the rest of this season pans out for college football fans:
And I go on record @ 1:05 am 11/21/2005 as saying the following is going to happen in college football starting next Sat:
First the big one:
USC loses to UCLA next Sat:
Sorry all you Bush lovers. its over next Sat. Take your 33 and go home. Don't get me wrong Bush will win the Heismen hands down. (Lienart will get caught making out with his surf board hoping to some day surf a 9 foot fart ripple from an older, wiser, more unibrow Casey Clausen in the Cali socal sun), but UCLA wins it. Fresno and other games have just been too close. UCLA by 7.
LSU runs over Arkansas:
No need to explain this one.
UGA trounces Ga Tech:
Everyone is expecting a hard game against Regie Ball (a good QB in his own right) and the "yeah-he-made-an-A-in-polymorphic-nanotechnology-101-but-he-ate-all-the-glue" GT defense, but it just doesnt happen. Miami win was Miami playing bad, not GT playing great. UGA by 17.
This Sets Up:
* SEC Champ- LSU Vs. Ga in Atl:
* Texas as only undefeated
LSU Vs UGA in Atl:
Quite a close game. This will be the best football that fans see all year in the SEC. This will be a hardcore game. UGA will prevail, but not without a semi-re-hurt-knee shockley limping off the field from the LSU Defense. UGA by 4, although everyone is worried about Shockley (and to a lesser extent Sean Baily [Sholder] and D.Ware [Turf Toe])
USC doesnt keep the BCS point to hang with Texas (another anti-BCS bitch fest for sports radio). Texas ends up playing Joe Pa in the big one. UGA takes on Vir Tech and mini-vick in the ATL for Sugar (with Mike Vick rooting against the red and black). ND plays UCLA. (USC was going to rematch UCLA but they deicded not too since the game was 2 weeks prior) so USC plays Miami (Auburn/OSU/Ducks all get by passed for a "Battle Royale of the Disney States").
And finally:
Cyanbane and wife get to go to the Ga Aquarium on his Annual Pass on Dec 4th.
(Have to get atleast one right)
I will hold off my predictions of the final bowl games until before Xmas.
Nobody calls me Yella.
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(Saturday, November 19)
PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart
"The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid."
Great Read on "GoogleNet"
I heard someone the other day mention that if the Internet were a country, then who would be scared of Google?
I know I already would. It is only going to get worse. The main thing that I don't like is not that I think Google is/will be evil, it is if something happened and Google no longer controlled their data (and the U.S. government did).
PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart
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(Thursday, November 17)
LOST: Season 2 Episode 7
A few things noted from this weeks show (which I belive ranks only 2nd as the best Lost episode of this season, only behind Episode 1 with the workout opening):
* this Episode really made Anna Lucia's character less of a biatch.
* Mr. Eko is the man. He is the Locke of the tail enders. Sets up conflict: Who is right, the man who puts faith in God, or the man who puts faith in the Island / Fate? (Only Bob Marley knows).
* I called the Ethan insertion early in the episode, but I agreed with Anna Lucia that it was the dude, who died not Goodwin.
* I called the radio transmition from season 1. Knew it was comming.
* I don't understand the symbolism of the Bible (I think Mr. Eko is Muslim). Nor do I understand the Glass Eye. It has to mean something. It played a big part.
* The Shrink chick on the tailenders is hot, educated and is blonde. I bet she hooks up with Jack.
* Teddy Bear kids are freakin me out. How did the jumpsuit girl (islander that anna lucia killed) get a US ARMY Pocket Knife?
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(Tuesday, November 15)
Honesty
Lets just be honest here for a second.
How Geekin' cool is this?
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(Friday, November 11)
Lost and the Hanso Foundation Memos
I have been sparse with my posting the last couple of weeks, just been real busy. I have a good lost post I am working on, but here are some juicy tidbits Joel passed along today that really open up a whole realm of possibilities. Did the drug dealers bring da sickness?
Picture shown above:
GHO Letter
Another Letter:
Hanso Life Extention Project Memo
Intersting Thread:
Neat Ideas/Thoughts
Somone asked me if I expecting Shannon's death?
The Answer: Not in a million years.
My wife brought up a good similarity in Boone and Shannon's deaths. It seems that the person who dies usually ends up being amended with their life's major problem before passing on (assuming Shannon is dead).
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(Monday, November 7)
Hall of Bouncing Souls Podcast
So I decided to do a podcast. I hear so much music, that is just so good, and I really don't have a way to get people to listen to all of it. I have decided to put up 4 songs a week (or maybe bi-weekly) from here on out on a podcast with my thoughts about them. More than likely it will be from smaller artists, I want this to be publicity for these artists, not piracy. They are also encoded at 96kps which is kinda weak, so the quality is decent, but don't expect them to be CD quality recordings either. I am really hoping that it is just a good way to help get people exposed to music they might have passed over a few years ago, or just might not have had any friends who would have told them how good it was.
To listen via iTunes:
Go To Advanced
Drop down to 'Subscribe To Podcast' and enter the following URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/HallOfBouncingSoulsPodcast
If you just want to stream it, just follow the link above and click on 'Listen'.
Show 1 Features:
Rubyhorse
Eagles of Death Metal
Pete Yorn
Breedlove
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FOXSports.com - NFL- Panthers cheerleaders reportedly arrested
According to the Observer, the police report claims the two cheerleaders were having sex with each other in a stall at the bar when other patrons got angry they were taking so long in the bathroom. Then one of the cheerleaders and another person started arguing and the cheerleader hit that person in the face, according to the report.
I remember in middle school, our english teachers always talked about inferring details from the context of the paragraph. This is a great example:
Context: when other patrons got angry they were taking so long in the bathroom
Inference: They were certainly not drunk and using the bathroom in the men's restroom .
Rock On.
FOXSports.com - NFL- Panthers cheerleaders reportedly arrested
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(Thursday, November 3)
Amazon Mechanical Turk
For software developers, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of building applications that until now have not worked well because they lack human intelligence. Humans are much more effective than computers at solving some types of problems, like finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating beauty, or translating text. The idea of the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service is to give developers a programmable interface to a network of humans to solve these kinds of problems and incorporate this human intelligence into their applications.
"You too can be the man behind the man behind the man's computer, behind the man!
For those that don't quite understand what this is, basically there are things that code cannot be written for quite perfectly, yet. What Amazon has done is created a way that developers can submit these questions (sometimes subjective decisions?) to them and they will allow human operators (from anywhere I guess, even you!) to answer them. I don't really know how QA will be enforced, but it is a pretty neat idea. Basically anyone can logon and make a little flow answering questions posed by developers. All the while Amazon can tweak its 'personalized you-might-like-this widgets' by watching the answers that people provide and gleaming whatever info they can off the decision process. The developer will get his question answered [his H.I.T] (not sure to what degree of quality the answer will be) by someone, and the answerer gets paid. Interesting app. Would be neat to see how geographical position of the answerer would effect the quality of an answer becuase language/culture aspects of the decision maker.
"Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment." - Mustapha Mond
Amazon Mechanical Turk
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(Tuesday, November 1)
Google DVR (Does this make Tivo Ripe for purchase?)
On Slashdot:
"Ray writes 'Google may be creating their own branded digital television DVR / satellite service. A DVR that lets you 'Log In' with your Google Account before you begin your television watching would allow Google to serve up relevant ads based on: the program you are watching, your search history, the type of emails you have received in the past 24 hours (excluding spam hopefully), or anything else Google can track. Imagine the possibilities... You are watching Google Satellite TV through your 'internet ready' Google DVR.'"
I always said that the xbox was Microsoft's Trojan horse to get an MS controlled PC into every house. I never knew how Google was going to contend with it without some type of light weight (ie via the net) OS, well if this is true, this might be kinda a different turn. This actually would get a physical presense in every house that is Google controlled. I never would have thought of this.
Slashdot | Google DVRs and TV Advertising
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Travis - The Boy With No Name
Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho. |
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Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross)
One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake. |
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Feist - The Reminder
I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice. |
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Catan - Xbox Live Arcade
I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game. |
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Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare
No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say. |
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Beautiful Evidence (Tufte)
Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting.. |
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Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather
Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better. |
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Game of Thrones (Martin)
I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more. |
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
© Copyright 2003-2007, Eric Thompson |
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