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April 21, 2007
Twelve Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them
Many of my readers are consultants, but even if you're not, you may find some useful insights in FreelanceSwitch's article on theTwelve Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them. The author breaks things out this way: the Low Tech Client, the Uninterested Client, the Hands-On Client, the Paranoid Client, the Appreciative Client, the Get-A-Good-Deal Client, the I’ll-Know-It -When-I-See-It Client, the Always-Urgent Client, the Design-By-Committee Client, the Doormat Client, the Budget Client, and the You-Should-Be-So-Lucky Client. As a client, do you see yourself in there somewhere? What would the breeds of consultants be?
YouTube - NBA on CBS 1985 NBA Draft Lottery - COMPLETE VERSION
bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by djacobs to dj-reblog basketball - more about this bookmark...
China's response to the Virginia Tech Shooting
China Digital Times has a great post that says the Virigina Tech massacre has prompted a discussion among Chinese netizens, comparing China's ban to US's non-existing ban on guns.
This really is a topic of interest to the Chinese - one of the first question Beijing cabbies ask me after they find out I am an American citizen, is if I see people with guns everywhere in the US. At first I was totally shocked by that stereotype of the States. But after watching the news in Beijing, I noticed there were always several reports per week of American citizens killing other citizens with guns. After a few conversations with other Beijingers, I realized that this was a common view of Americans - and it's not a racialized view either - they think that whites and blacks all carry guns around. They also think that guns are readily available and everyone owns one. The latter view is not accurate, however unfortunately, the former view is more accurate.
I wrote my personal thoughts about reaction among the Asian American community to Virginia Tech on my personal blog. This photo was taken by one of my favorite photographers, Stuart Isett.
-tricia
Technorati Tags: american, ban, beijing , china, control, gun , massacre, policy, stuart isett, virginia tech
HandBrake v0.8.5b1 for OS X
New features and a MediaFork-look make up the latest version of HandBrake.
Taste of Chinatown Today!
It's a gorgeous day out (high of 76 degrees!), so we're going to echo our earlier suggestion for an outside Saturday event. Head to Chinatown for the Taste of Chinatown, where you can try a number of different Asian foods for $1-2. According to a menu, the dishes include "Peking Duck, Shrimp Salad, Green Curry Chicken, Thai Spring Roll, Papaya Salad, Banana Sticky Rice, Thai Iced Tea, BBQ Pork/Duck/Ribs, Fried Squid, Grilled Beef Papaya Salad, Lobster Balls, Vegetarian BBQ "Roast Pork," Shark Fin Soup, Oyster Flavored Jerky, Vietnamese Sandwich, Mango Pudding." The event is between noon and 6PM - here's a map (PDF) - there are tables on streets from Baxter to Bowery, between Canal and Chatham Square. Photograph from last spring's Taste of Chinatown (when it was rainy) by Tien Mao
MeFi and Me
For those of you who might not know, Metafilter is a community weblog where members discuss stuff they've found online. Matt started the site in 1999, and I signed up as a member at some point in the early days. (I'm user 191.) I only participated a little at the site during the first couple of years.
Matt and I worked together at Pyra (makers of Blogger), and during that time Metafilter lived on a single desktop tower under Matt's desk. A lot of the early members of Metafilter were also early bloggers, and it became sort of a central "hang out" for people interested in weblogs. Often it was one of the only sources covering and discussing what was happening with blog-related topics. At Pyra, we often asked ourselves, how will Metafilter react? when contemplating changes—because we knew any announcement would show up on the site.
Matt's been running and growing Metafilter ever since, with the addition of several Metafilter sites including the insanely useful and popular Ask Metafilter. I've been a regular reader and fan of the site despite my lack of conversing there, and I've gotten to know various MeFites, both through the site and through conversations with Matt. The community there is definitely unique (in a good way), and I'm constantly surprised at the depth of knowledge members have on any given topic. Though every site has its share of arguments and name-calling, I'm also continually surprised by the level of civility for such an open community. (Which I think is a reflection of the crack MeFi moderation squad, and the community norms that have been established.)
For the past year I've been working with Matt on Metafilter behind the scenes one day/week. I helped Matt launch MeFi Music, Metafilter Jobs, and some new features across the site. It's been great working with Matt regularly, and having instant, massive feedback to changes from lots of, erm, passionate users was a good change of pace from writing books.
In about a week, I'm going to be spending most of my time on Metafilter. I'm excited about this change, and I'm looking forward to helping Metafilter grow with a more sustained effort. Matt has some cool stuff coming up for the site, and it's going to be great to help him build it. The only remaining question for me is, how will Metafilter react?
Tesla's tooth is coming!
As you know, every time Tesla had inexplicable fits of crying, I thought it was teething...but the reality was a tooth never came. Maybe the process takes that long...a little discomfort then it subsides over and over. It's been months though, and younger babies already have multiple teeth. Tesla was sure taking her time, but we knew it would be any day.
Sure enough, I came home yesterday and Telsa's granny said, "guess what! There's a tooth!" I never imagined I would be as excited and proud, and even a tad sad about one tooth. Excited and proud that I'll be seeing my girl with teeth, imaging how that leads to eating different foods and talking. Wow, she did it! Sad because my baby is growing up. No more gummy smiles, and our bond with breast-feeding slowly changing. A mixture of emotions indeed, but I was so happy to hug and hold her as I tried unsuccessfully to open her mouth and get her tongue out of the way so I could see. You actually can't see the tooth yet, but there is a distinct breakage in her lower front left gum. And you can feel it.
I continue to be amazed at watching her grow, and the deep feelings of love I feel for her. A tooth! How am I going to contain myself when she starts walking and talking?
The milestones are arriving. At times with a sense of relief, at times with nostalgia. You see, Tesla is also reaching another new phase. We think she's ready to sleep in her own room. I didn't want to do this too early and expected to have her with us for a full year, but we've discovered she actually sleeps better on her own. We co-slept until after 6 months when she started sleeping in her crib that was right next to our bed. Then she came to bed only when I fed her during the night. Otherwise, she pretty much slept in her crib. However, she's aware that I'm right by her, which makes her wake up more to demand for me. It appears she sleeps better when I'm not that close, and it's a natural time to put her in her own room - for the first time. Boy, I'm gonna miss her!
What Computers Can’t Do (We Can Do Better)
This book, “What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence” written in 1963 by Hubert L. Dreyfus is an interesting debate on the future of AI and how computers could not possibly engage with the daily human cognitive, emotional, and physical needs and tendencies we have as a species. Some of his hypotheses however, since this book was written in 1963, have been overcome through the years by software and hardware development and increased capabilities that were probably never even imagined when Dreyfus sat down to write this. Even the annoying “Clippy” paperclip in MSWord is a testament to that fact, as its dumb intelligence goes way beyond the “limits” outlined in this book. Anyways, it’s an interesting read to discover what abilities people thought computers were capable of and how the evolution of AI has really challenged this assumption over the years.
The Bloggotangle
"Here we have a hyperbolic display of blogs using both the WWE and the ICWSM 2007 data sets.
Green links are one way; blue links are reciprocal. LJ is over the eastern horizon, DailyKos is in the middle, Boing Boing is northeast, and porn is in Japan.
Peso Servicing Lucy
Isha, This Is For You
This is dedicated to my best friend who recently had a baby aka my Godson. Isha, since you might not "catch" this video, I am posting it here. Please call me and tell me what you think. I am a bit disappointed by this new Maroon 5 song. Is it disco? Is it not? I don't know. Anyway, since you are not a big blog commenter, call me and tell me your thoughts.
(Other folks can comment too. Don't be shy.)
More Firefox Mapping Extensions
Mapz: A GIS Librarian takes another look at Firefox mapping extensions -- all 16 of them, ranging from geotagged photos to online map viewing. Previously: Firefox Mapping Extensions....
Signposts for the Week ending April 20, 2007
Woowee! It’s been two weeks since our last signposts, so here’s a bunch for you all:
We want one of these do-it-yourself mobile testing cams!
Jan Chipchase on What You Carry and Why It Matters
Enough with the lists, try objects for mobile. And speaking of mobile, here’s what mobile executives really want: a phone form 7 years ago
Make me care about your design, says Andy Rutledge
Youtube, Myspace, Flickr and blogging, they are, in many ways, a massive infrastructure that breeds and feeds an unhealthy level of narcissism, claims Rich Ziade
Leisa Reichelt describes The Four Kinds of Failure
Jason Freid would rather be Microsoft than Yahoo
We’re digging the content on the new TED site
Mac hacked for $10,000
A 0-day exploit involving Safari was revealed at a security conference.
tedg on The Black Dahlia
Been awaiting IMDb critic tedg's review of The Black Dahlia, since he "gets" De Palma and it doesn't disappoint. Many commentaries (including this one) talked about the "discovery of the body" scene and the casting of Mia Kirshner but tedg explains them best. First the body:About 22 minutes into this there is a wonderful crane shot, probably done without artificial assistance, beginning five minutes which is the heart of the overly complex story. It sets up two apparently unrelated threads in the story that interweave from this point. It is of the front of a building where later there will be a shooting, moves up and over the building to look at a vacant lot behind where we see a woman making a gruesome discovery. She runs to the street alongside the building where we see the car of our two cops coming to park in front and engage in a shooting. We move in front of the car to a bicyclist, who plays no role in the story. He brings us to a couple walking down the sidewalk approaching the front of the building where they will encounter our cops. We come down to street height and listen in on their conversation.And Kirshner:
Its masterful. Even if you think everything that follows is a mess, its a glorious mess made glorious by our setting of the knitting needles.But there's another joy here too. The story — no surprise — features a film within the film. It's the whole story, there, with elements of that internal film overlapping the main story in three or four significant ways. The star of this inner film, who also is our bisected victim is a character played by Mia Kirshner. She's so much more alive and real than anyone else in the main story, I can only assume it was deliberate and a truly thrilling risk. If you follow film, you'll know her very similar and hugely complex role in "Exotica," a landmark film.
Tainted pet food reaches human fare - The Boston Globe
WASHINGTON -- An industrial chemical linked to kidney failure in dogs and cats has found its way into the human food supply chain. California officials quarantined 1,500 animals at the American Hog Farm and are tracking who purchased nearly 100 hogs from the farm this month, when the animals' feed included pet food that had been tainted with melamine .
April 20, 2007
We have done it ourselves
Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.-- Lao Tzu
From Wally
Swallowing a sewing needle
Jenny posted about our cat swallowing Cassandra's sewing needle during last Sunday's knitting circle over at tooboo (Tie one on, Bind one off).
It's apparently really common. I called my dad's girlfriend, a librarian and former cat-owner and she found us a 24 hour cat ER in NYC in about 30 seconds flat. We called and they explained that ingesting sewing needles was probably not a big deal, but that we should get him in quickly for X-Rays and surgery. Luckily the needle made its way to him stomach without lodging in his esophagus or ripping up anything on the way. They gave him emergency surgery-- really... we were up waiting for the results until 1am! Here's one of his X-Rays.
As soon as we got him home, he started playing with my drawstring pajamas! His yarn/ string addiction is impossible.
W. Bradford Paley: Charting and Graphic Work
"I couldn't find a simple enough calendar to draw on to manage possibly conflicting travel and conference dates, so I typeset one for myself. It's intentionally very plain looking to allow the scribbles, circlings, and annotations that will give it its functionality and visual life."
US lawmakers rail against KBR, former Halliburton unit, for alleged abuses on $20B contract - International Herald Tribune
U.S. lawmakers on Thursday railed against senior U.S. Army officials and defense contractor KBR Inc. over persistent allegations of fraud and contract abuse on a multibillion-dollar deal to provide food and shelter to American troops in Iraq. "Profiteering during wartime is inexcusable," said Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, testifying at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "This is the most significant waste, fraud and abuse we have ever seen in this country." Side Note: But Bush says the government really care about our troops.
Who'dat?™
Sometimes, when a celebrity that you have seen one billion times over the course of many years suddenly stops being a part of your world, you totally forget that they ever existed. It's weird.
To play today's edition of Who'dat?™, look at the celebrity below and try to guess who it is. Click on the picture to see if you are right.
I still can't decide if it's nice to see her again or not (no clicking until you've guessed!)
written by Amy
A Magazine You Can Read in Your Underwear
I've been spammed for a lot of things that I neither need nor want. Out of all the junk I've received, however, I can think of nothing I want less than Blogger Podcaster magazine. Finally, a print magazine worth leaving my computer for! And it is apparently part of a trend, as I received this email on the same day that Boing Boing wrote about dubious net-to-paper daily Boston Now. I don't think that I can top the Boing Boing commenter who wrote their slogan should be 'Bringing you yesterday's news tomorrow. BP—why not give them a snappy acronym—says that...
A history of mealtimes
Because people use to go to sleep around sundown, the biggest meal of the day once centered around noon. As candles and lamps became more common, mealtime shifted. By the 1800s, the upper class would have supper at 2 AM and stay up until dawn. Who knew the history of mealtime could be so interesting? [thanks Jason]
Jake's featuring a photo today of some NYC street art...
Jake's featuring a photo today of some NYC street art by Bloke, who does paper-plane pieces. I'm a sucker for dashed lines.
Update: More stuff by Bloke here. (thx, daniel) (link)
Cynical-C is keeping track of what the media is blaming...
Cynical-C is keeping track of what the media is blaming for the Virginia Tech murders. So far, the list runs to more than 30 items, including South Korea, Bill Gates, the second amendment, violent video games, and cowardly students. (link)
DJ Vadim Contest Extended
The DJ Vadim remix contest currently under way at ccMixter ran afoul of server outages and other shenanigans yesterday so we decided to extend the deadline 48 hours to accommodate entries that could not access the site yesterday. The new deadline is 9 PM PDT Saturday April 21 (4 AM GMT Sunday April 22).
The contest has been a huge boon to the site bringing great new talent and bringing out the best in old-timers. We look forward to working with BBE Records again.
Catalyst Tip: Don't pollute!
Currently, your "MyApp.pm" file is both your application class and your context class (NB: this is expected to change in 5.8000). We've been slowing suggesting that people move things out of th context/app class so as not to pollute it with an abundance of mehods which may occasionally have unwanted consequences -- for example "login : Global {}" conflicting with the Authentication plugin's login() method.
This tip is broken into two parts:
- It's been said time and time again (c.f. this and this [phaylon++]), not everthing has to be a plugin! If the sum total of your plugin is this:
You should reconsider. Either use the module directly, or make a controller base class. That should handle most cases.package Catalyst::Plugin::Foo;
use Foo;
sub foo {
my( $c, @rest ) = @_;
return Foo->new( @rest );
}- Be careful what you import into MyApp.pm! Some modules will export methods (and other symbols) by default, and sometimes you'll do it manually. Consider explicitly importing nothing:
before:
after:package MyApp;
use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex); # MyApp now has the md5_hex method
sub foo {
#...
return md5_hex( $string );
}
If you want a quick-n-easy cleanup, try namespace::clean.package MyApp;
use Digest::MD5 (); # no imports
sub foo {
#...
return Digest::MD5::md5_hex( $string );
}
Following up on my post about gender diversity at web...
Following up on my post about gender diversity at web conferences, Jeffrey Zeldman of An Event Apart commissioned a study by hiring "researchers at The New York Public Library to find out everything that is actually known about the percentage of women in our field, and their positions relative to their male colleagues". "There is no data on web design and web designers. Web design is twelve years old, employs hundreds of thousands (if not millions), and generates billions, so you'd think there would be some basic research data available on it, but there ain't." I found the same thing when poking around for a bit back in February. They do have stats for IT workers in general...men outnumber women by over 3-to-1 and that gap is growing. (link)
Some fantastic Bushisms from the Huffington Post: "There Are Jobs Americans Aren't Doing…If You've Got A Chicken Factory, A Chicken-Plucking Factory, Or Whatever You Call Them, You Know What I'm Talking About"… "Everybody Wants To Be Loved...Not Everybody"… "There Are Some Similarities, Of Course [Between Iraq And Vietnam]. Death Is Terrible"… "I've Been In Politics Long Enough To Know That Polls Just Go Poof At Times"...
I want my rBGH
Stephen Colbert explained rBGH the other night on "The Colbert Report." So if you're still in the dark about this milk additive, perhaps the amusing clip will help you understand the issue more clearly. [via The Ethicurian]
Are Belong to U.S.
Are Belong to U.S.. A good collection of links to maps, essays, and statistics on the number, scope, and significance of U.S. military bases around the world.
Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less Healthy Than Parents - washingtonpost.com
As the first wave of baby boomers edges toward retirement, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may be the first generation to enter their golden years in worse health than their parents. While not definitive, the data sketch a startlingly different picture than the popular image of health-obsessed workout fanatics who know their antioxidants from their trans fats and look 10 years younger than their age.
Google Web History - Good and Scary
Many years ago, when the web was a simpler place, one of the scariest monsters conjured up to describe the privacy threats that lurked on the Internet was the DoubleClick cookie, used for tying your ad-viewing behavior on the web to your real-world identity. USA Today said it was Orwellian, and set off a half-decade of worries for web surfers, many of whom didn't even have the foggiest notion what they were worried about.
Today, Google's released Google Web History. It's a brilliant, powerful, even insightful tool that will undoubtedly worry those who were concerned about privacy in the early days of the web's popularity. It doesn't help that Google now owns DoubleClick, and all those worries about cookies are amplified that Google actually stores all of this data on its computers, not yours, tied to an identity that might well also be linked to your email, office documents, your instant messages, and of course your browser history itself, courtesy of the browser toolbar.
Services For Your Web History
From a technical standpoint, Google Web History is one of those tools that's so well-executed it seems simple, or even obvious, the first time you see it. There's a basic timeline of your search history, with the ability to drill into specific search result histories for Google properties like web search, image search, news, Froogle (now renamed Google Product Search, though the UI for Web History shows the old name), Video, and Maps. There's even, astoundingly, a history of which AdSense Ads you've clicked on.
Some Google properties are missing -- Google Apps documents don't show up in your history, and the more loosely-connected services like Blogger, Reader, and Picasa are nowhere to be found. Plus, there's a peculiar disconnect with the Google Desktop Search tool's services -- the Timeline feature shared between both applications appears completely different, and your desktop history isn't integrated into the new service.
As you'd expect, there's a prominent and simple way to remove those scurrilous bits from your web history. And the improved presentation of an item as mundane as one's browser history reveals a recent strength of Google's: revealing data you already have access to. The Google Desktop Search tool on Windows made smart use of a disk indexing system that Microsoft had already built into Windows. In a similar way, the Web History service makes use of the Google Toolbar history to take old data and turn it into useful information through smart presentation.
There's a promising, but (for me, at least) still blank area titled "Interesting Items", and the reappearance of a feature that first showed up in the excellent Google Reader: Trends.
Now, Google's data for my own history is slightly skewed; I tend to use Blingo for a lot of basic searches on my computers, and Google's toolbar doesn't track that. But the fundamental underpinnings for a remarkably deep look into behavior on the web are already present.
The Real World
Outside of the world of users who gawk at every shiny new thing on the web, though, this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we're probably only used to getting from Microsoft. In fact, it's probably safe to say that no other major web company could release this product today; The backlash from the user community of players like Microsoft, Yahoo, or AOL would simply be too strong.
Google is still in a period where most users on the web feel they are a relatively benevolent company. And it helps that the new product is excellent, useful, and unique. But with the release of Web History, especially in the context of its recent acquisitions and announcements, Google may have crossed the line where regular users start to react with skepticism and caution instead of unabashed enthusiasm.
This product is all about web history. We've already learned some lessons from the history of the web about what happens to companies once users start to question their trust in the intentions or implications of new products. It may serve Google well to revisit those lessons.
Some Links
Here are a few useful links to add to your own web history:
- Eight years ago, concerns about privacy in a billion-dollar DoubleClick deal. A related story from the period in USA Today, as well as a contemporary warning from a privacy advocacy group.
- A comprehensive overview of Google Web History from Search Engine Land.
- Google's first mistake, which was a fairly naive post I wrote four years ago, back before it was as clear to outsiders how important AdWords and AdSense would be to Google. I think it was most useful in the context of refuting some understandably hyperbolic observations such as Google are building the Memex. Jason Kottke also chimed in with Google is not a search company a few weeks later.
- Fred Wilson's skepticism over Google's recent direction, in the context of their acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube, as well as the departure of Dodgeball's founders.
- And finally, Blingo, to whom I trade my search history in exchange for intermittent prizes which mostly consist of free movie tickets. Seems fair to me.
Ontario to ban inefficient lightbulbs
Sales of inefficient incandescent light bulbs will be outlawed in Ontario beginning in 2012, the provincial government announced Wednesday.
Ontario to ban inefficient lightbulbs
Sales of inefficient incandescent light bulbs will be outlawed in Ontario beginning in 2012, the provincial government announced Wednesday.
Upcoming Reading At Get Lost Books
On Wednesday, April 25 I will be giving a short reading from Argentina on Two Steaks A Day at Get Lost Books in San Francisco. The event starts at 7 PM and features a number of writers from this Travelers’ Tales anthology:
Nearby readers of this site are invited to come down and we can retreat together afterwards to a local beer hall. No vegans, please.
April 19, 2007
Links for 2007-04-19
My thoughts on Virgina Tech, Asians, Condolescences, Racism and etc - Tricia Wang's blog
"This is one of the reasons why I find it difficult to work with Asian-American orgs -- because ultimately it is too often that Asian activists who fight against discrimination and for representation, are only fighting for Asians."
More big cat heads
Since I first posted a link to Bruce Mckay’s Big Cat Heads, he has added pastels to his repertoire, giving his signature mousers some wonderful texture. This one’s called “The Golden Hills of Catilonia”
Funny or Die, The Landlord
I'm literally the 8252302nd person to see this, but better late than never.
Art in the age of surveillance
I've blogged, seen and talked about many artistic projects that remind us of the omnipresence of technologies of control --and in particular surveillance cameras-- in public space. And grown increasingly sceptical. The audience of such art works usually "knows", right? Most of them are already very critical of the big brotherization of our society. It sometimes feels like preaching to the converted. What about the others? Those who don't go to the ars electronica of the world or feel safer when they are video'd on CCTV, can they really be shaken by these artistic and activist projects? Is "trying to rise awareness" enough? I was thinking again about those questions today while travelling, arrived in Turin and stumbled upon an article on BBC news where Bill Thompson discusses an upcoming session at the ENTER_ conference that will take place in Cambridge at the end of the month. One of the projects presented is (re)collector, by James Coupe.
The installation uses footage from CCTV in Cambridge to extract daily storyline narratives, and make up larger computer generated feature films
Surveillance cameras were programmed to recognise and capture public activities including farewell scenes, meetings, escape scenes, chases, love scenes, etc. Each day over the festival, the results will be edited to produce a daily feature film, rather than a documentary, showing just how much variety, interest and excitement can be reflected in everyday lives. The daily films will be organised to have a premise, protagonists, locations, plot, etc. to be viewed at a public screening in Cambridge during the festival programme. Interesting, not as powerful as the Surveillance Camera Players but i'd love to see what comes out of it. Would innocent passersby be disturbed (or just amused) to discover that their most banal activities can be material for a soap CCTV opera?
I was about to leave the story as a del.icio.us link but 3 seconds after read about another surveillance project on plus six.
Tracking-the-trackers is a mobile unit that provides participants with an expanded audible experience of the proliferation of video surveillance in urban space. A bag contains a laptop, GPS-receiver, earphones, and a mouse is taken on a walk through the city. The sound in the headphones changes whenever the participant enters the vicinity of a surveillance camera. This effect is not automatic but created by other participants who are continuously adding new locations to the existing database.
Track-the-trackers got all my attention because the technology used in the piece is documented with precise instructions to allow others to build similar systems and improve on the design. Apparently the last time they carried out the experiment was in 2004. Too bad... I might be sceptical but i still want to believe that artistic projects do matter.
disinfographics
Dion Hinchcliffe is a blogger responsible for an intimidating volume of writing on web 2.0, ajax, service-oriented architecture, and other such topics. To accompany his articles, he creates a torrent of infographics that are a clear example of muddled thinking. Arrows point this way and that, boxes sit inside boxes, and labels abound: consumption, viral feedback, REST, engagement. Fortunately, they're all served up from an open directory, so here are a selection of my all-time faves. Click on each to see the full-res original!
This is the first Dion Hinchcliffe infographic I ever saw. Things that struck me: the "mutual sense of community" label under the people (oh, that's where that goes), the arrows labeled REST, HTTP, JSON, and SOAP, and the public edge of the enterprise peeking into the cloud from the right:
I assume there are sentences containing the following words in the accompanying article:
This one has the obligatory internet web cloud:
The important part of this chart is the five blobs to the right, yet the full internal structure of an AJAX application is show to the left:
"You can't make requests to servers other than the one the page is from":
I like the little thread pinwheels here:
The people consume, create and consume, and socially consume:
The Einsteinian gravity-sheet here is awesome:
The cloud has been upgraded to "2.0":
"The web is growing":
I thought for sure the fall trend for 2006 was open platforms being closing up in response to the lure of acquisition:
Synchronize Metadata From Flickr to Hard Drive
Dutch IT consultant and photographer Erwyn Van Der Meer is working on something called a Flickr Metadata Synchr, “a tool to synchronize relevant metadata added to images stored on Flickr with the original versions of those images stored locally on your hard drive.” Though the project is only at version 0.6.0.0 at the moment, this is a great idea. Erwyn shares some of the thinking behind it in this blog post. I think it’s a great idea. (The one drawback, for now, is that it works only under Vista.) It would be great to have access to the metadata associated with my Flickr photos even while offline, and to be able to work with that and then synch the same data on Flickr without having the enter it all again. Storing that kind of data locally makes it accessible to all kind of other applications, which broadens the range of things I can possibly do with it.
Discovery chain: Interestingly, I found out about this while checking out this image on Flickr, from Thomas Hawk, CEO of photo-sharing site Zooomr. Hawk uses the image as a long blog post that mainly describes Geotagger 1.2, a cool-sounding Mac app that geotags photos locally with the help of Google Earth. Not that Hawk blogs solely on Flickr–the post is also on Hawk’s blog itself–but I dig the fact that the discovery chain starts at Flickr, not at a blog. Now if only I could trackback to Flickr.
earth, Flickr, Google, mapping, Tagging
Brooklyn's Sludgie the Whale Dies
Sad news about Sludgie the whale: The baby minke whale, who captivated our attention as he frolicked in the Gowanus Bay, died yesterday afternoon. He beached himself near Clinton Street around 5PM. The Riverhead Foundation's rescue program had been monitoring the whale and did not believe he was in trouble when he first appeared yesterday, since he seemed to be swimming normally. Rescue director Kim Durham told WCBS 2, "it suddenly began heavy splashing, hit the dock and then just went quiet." She said, "It was a very young whale that became confused and disoriented." There will be a necropsy performed on the whale - apparently it had fresh cuts on its head. The NY Times spoke to Debra Clarke, who arrived too late to catch sight of the whale:
"We just came hoping for good news,” she said, noting that she and her friends had spent most of the day watching broadcast news of the Virginia Tech massacre. “After Virginia, you come here rooting for the whale. You hope that something good has to happen, because it turns out these are days for tears.”Gowanus Lounge's Robert Guskind had told the press, "People are concerned about the creature's ability to survive. Quite honestly it could not have picked a worse spot." Even Mayor Bloomberg agreed; before the whale died, he said, "My thoughts are with the whale." Photographs by Amy Langfield/NewYorkology