July 2009
10 posts
Freerisk.org begins to take shape
While driving from San Diego to the East Bay today, I was listening to an audiobook of Stephen King’s insanely insane Dark Tower series and a certain passage (I can’t recall which) reminded me of Freerisk.org.
It turns out that the site has started to come together since I last looked, including a nascent API specification.
Here’s the specification for querying the risk...
What Data Am I Looking At?
A few days ago, I came across a post on Discernible Preferences where the blog’s author posted two search trend graphs, and removed the value of the search term. The spikes of search volume were slightly different between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Out of curiosity, I went back to the post today and followed a link in the comments to the Hacker News discussion...
4 tags
Yet Another GAE Memoize Decorator
When building a highly scalable website, one of the most important tools available is caching. While there are certainly times where you don’t want to cache a method, I’ve found that the I’m even starting to carve through my alloted free App Engine memcache quota.
I’ve used a variety of memcache utilities, and have never quite been pleased with any of them. I figured that...
Clean Up Your Administrative Debris! (Edward...
Now, I’m not exactly the prototypical Tufte fanboy, but this insanely incredible post on reinventing the desktop dropped a brilliant Tuftism that I had long forgotten: Administrative debris.
Administrative debris
Edward Tufte coined administrative debris to denote all of the elements of a UI not directly conveying the information the user really cares about. For instance, the menus and...
A Good Review of Obama's Latest Education...
A little late, but I wanted to reblog David Brooks’ editorial on Obama’s recently announced community college funding package.
Most people in government, think tanks and the news media didn’t go to community college, and they don’t send their children to them. It’s a blind spot in their consciousness. As a result, four-year colleges receive three times as much federal money per...
1 tag
The Consensus Widens on Customized Education
A fantastic post about disrupting education..
This passage was of particular interest:
American companies that own a popular online market for customized education can expect to increase profits dramatically by:
1. introducing a loan program for consumers of customized education
2. making the popularity of the company’s market and loan program mutually reinforcing, so a borrower who...
Leah Culver: Web Product Guidelines
Leah Culver published a tidy list of fantastic ideas about web product development:
- simple
- public over private
- personal vanity
- internet is global
- permalinks
- one important item per page
- don’t break the browser
- don’t wanker in technology
- a medium is not a grande
- break convention for your users
- no useless widgets
- nobody changes the defaults
- level up...
Introducing Base-In-A-Case
This last weekend, I visited the second Freebase Hack Day in San Francisco. There were a few demonstrations and talks, some information-packed sessions led by Alec Flett, Jason Douglas, and other Freebase developers.
And there was even some hacking - the afternoon of the Hack Day, I wrote a prototype of an app syncing topics between Google App Engine and Freebase. Since I like to develop on App...
4 tags
Chrome OS Will Not Be Anything Like Windows, OS X,...
Update: Gruber’s perspective. Lots of good insights. However, he misses the idea that Chrome OS is ubiquitous and therefore will be used in parallel with everything else.
In a WSJ article about how Google CEO Eric Schmidt resisted building a browser, I came across this telling quote about Chrome:
“I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way,” Mr. Page said.
And...
3 tags
Where's the Github for Government?
@maxwellterry left an incredibly thought-provoking comment on Hacker News the other day:
We just need the Constitution, U.S. Code, and state laws on a DVCS. It wouldn’t need to even be official; representatives would just essentially make the formal commit of publicly popular diffs, or lose reelection.
As I’ve been learning about some of the more advanced version control...