Posts from December 2010

  • "Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company." Looks nice!
  • A bit outdated, but full of good advice for tuning SQL Server applications.
  • "Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices." It's a start!
  • "...the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors." Let Beginner's Mind have a shot! [via torrez]
  • "As a personal archive tool, it's pretty impressive, as a shared space to find interesting bookmarks, it's problematic." I completely agree with Matt, and check out Maciej's comment after the post. It sounds like more social tools are coming to Pinboard.
  • Devastating critique of the damage Yahoo! has done to Web culture. "All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: 'Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.' Great work, guys."
  • Interesting thinking about the current state of weblogs. Will all blog-like activity be consumed by Facebook, or will new tools emerge to help with privacy? And how do private blogs mix with public tools like Newsreaders? Complicated questions to answer.
  • Nelson has a good roundup of the issues surrounding the Wikileaks story.
  • "Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow."
  • "If you host your content on a commercial provider or on a social network, there are different points at which you can be cut off." The Wikileaks case is pointing out a weakness in the completely libertarian web ideal.
  • The case for Instagram. I must be a photography snob. I can not see the appeal of a community based solely on heavily-filtered photos. 
  • Nice sanity check in the mobile Web App vs. Native App debate. Often a Web App will do.
  • "A naval officer told the present writer that he had often, when on deck, been both amused and surprised at the accuracy with which some of these girls used this form of signalling out of pure fun." People have always found ways to communicate over distances.
  • Interesting take on Montessori-inspired apps: "In a Montessori classroom, children work from the concrete to the abstract. I fear that exposing young children to virtual Montessori materials may hamper this important developmental process."
  • Tax patriotism is on the rise!