April 2009
7 posts
The Great CS Brain Teaser of 2009
“The Rise of URL Shorteners”
A common gripe among CS students is that the problems that they encounter in class aren’t relevant to the skills they’ll actually need to know to succeed. While many programs have done an admirable job keeping up with the rise of rapid prototyping, SAAS, and cloud computing, undergraduate level curriculum typically still leave much to be...
Shortable: An Open Source Mega-Shortener
For a project I’m working on, I needed to resolve a list of shortened URLs from a variety of the most popular URL shorteners, given a long URL (or a short URL).
It occurred to me that many developers, especially those interfacing in some way with Twitter, could probably use this functionality. Because as things stand today, trying to gather any kind of intelligence about link propagation...
A Real Life Approach to Algebra
A short article in the Transforming Education through Technology journal caught my eye last week. It was called “Math Course Takes ‘Real Life’ Approach to Algebra”, and described a new courseware program integrating real numbers into algebra problem sets.
Educational courseware publisher American Education Corp. is taking a new approach to answering the age-old question,...
Education, Meet Cloud
I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Campfire One event at Google last week, where a few new App Engine features were previewed.
Some of the new features, like scheduled tasks, are nice additions, but not game changing in any way. As useful and necessary as scheduled tasks are for things like push notifications, it’s not like we couldn’t use third-party cron job schedulers to...
Img.gr - What I Did This Weekend
You want to post a photo on Twitter. So you use TwitPic.
And let’s say you want to tag your friends in these photos.
Um, use Facebook instead?
Not anymore. At StartupWeekend in San Francisco this weekend, I was lucky enough to find myself in an awesome team that built a simple tool for uploading photos and tagging people.
The domain for Img.gr is still resolving (I mean,...
The Livestrong Legacy
You remember Livestrong bracelets, right? Those little yellow bracelets. Katie Couric and Stephen Colbert wore them. They were huge.
So if Livestrong was so successful at promoting a call to action, why aren’t celebrities constantly promoting commercial products in this way? Sure, athletes and rappers do often engage in paid promotion, but the practice is not nearly as prevalent as it...
On Twitter
Focus groups have shown, as recently as the late 1980s, that if computer users want something, they’ll force entry into a home or business and take it. Given this, how does one go about finding a stream of revenue in a model like Twitter’s? Simple: Twitter founders Bob Timpei and El Segundo (not their real names) have begun working in earnest with Germans—the pioneers of cipher code...