Tag Archives: programming

Can The Muppets be relevant in this day and age?

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The NYTimes, in a recent story, documents the effort by Disney to reintroduce the Muppets. You might be wondering if The Muppets could be relevant to today’s children. Richelle had told me that she didn’t think it would be for Emma, who loved The Backyardigans, or The Wonder Pets, or Jack’s Music Show, or Elmo and Seasme Street (which has changed considerably from what I grew up with).

Well, I can report from my own experience that

The Muppet Movie – Movie – Review – The New York Times

The Muppets Take Manhattan – Movie Trailers – Preview – The New York Times

The Great Muppet Caper – Readers’ Reviews – The New York Times

Disney.com | Characters | The Muppets

Development links for today, Sunday, September 28th 2008

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stackoverflow: What are the best resources to learn about capacity planning

Charles Miller: Spring is Sprung – his thoughts on SpringSource’s new maintenance policy.

xkcd: Listen to Yourself

IBM developerWorks: Using Python to create UNIX command line tools

SEOBook: Google’s Chinese Wall Between AdWords Ads & Organic Search Results Disappears*

Erann Gat: Lisping at JPL – the history of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

“a Manual for our Kids to Save the Future”?

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That’s what John Baichtal at his Wired Blog “Geek Dad” called Cory Doctorow’s book sci-fi novel “Little Brother”, in his glowing review posted last week.

While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I’m going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf – it’s a great book so far.

One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series “Futuristic Tales” from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.

Web Development Links for Thursday, September 25th, 2008

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InfoQ: JSR 311 Final: Java API for RESTful Web Services

IBM developerWorks: Mastering Grails: RESTful Grails: Build a resource-oriented architecture

InfoQ: Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design

Aaron Swartz: The Semantic Web In Breadth

Mock Objects: “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests”: Chapter 1. What’s the point of Test Driven Development?

Code To Joy: A fascinating quote attributed to James Gosling: “James Gosling once said that every configuration file becomes a programming language, so you might as well think that way.”

Wiki.Directi.Com: Building a Scalable Architecture for Web Apps – Part I

Previously: InfoQ: How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters

Social Media/Software Links for September 19th, 2008

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Tim O’Reilly is sounding the alarm – CNet.com: O’Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy:

“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

Lefsetz connects other media industries to the music industry – Lefsetz Letter: Denial:

Is this getting familiar yet? Does this sound like the record business?

What we’re going through in America replicates what happened in Japan in the 1990s. But rather than taking the bullet, eating the loss, the government continued to try to prop up the country’s financial system, to its detriment. It took almost a decade for it to revive. Every analyst says this was a mistake. They should have taken the hit immediately and started over.

The major labels refuse to believe we’re living in the twenty first century, they refuse to bite the bullet and get with the program, they want to continue to live in the glory days of the 1990’s. Isn’t that what Warner’s failed Estelle effort was about? Getting people to buy an overpriced CD to get the one good track? As they said in that old 1990’s TV show, homey don’t play that no more.

The labels have to confront reality, and bite the bullet now.

Dare explains why what bit Sarah Palin – a typical ‘forgot your password’ function – bit Sarah Palin – Dare Obasanjo: The Problem with Every Implementation of a “Forgot Your Password?” Feature I’ve Seen Online:

The fundamental flaw of pretty much every password recovery feature I’ve found online is that what they consider “secret” information actually isn’t thanks to social networking, blogs and even Wikipedia. Yahoo! Mail password recovery relies on asking you your date of birth, zip code and country of residence as a proof of identity. Considering that this is the kind of information that is on the average Facebook profile or MySpace page, it seems ludicrous that this is all that stops someone from stealing your identity online.

Lots of people scratched their heads at Google Chrome. Dare explains why Google would pursue it – Dare Obasanjo: The Significance of Google Chrome:

his boils down to the corporate ideology that “anything that is good for the Web is good for Google”. This means Google is in favor of anything that increases the breadth of the Web which explains why it is investing in O3b networks in an effort intended to bring the Web to 3 billion people in emerging markets. The more people there are using the Web, the more people there are viewing ads on Google’s services and on pages of sites that use AdSense and DoubleClick ads. This also means that Google is in favor of moving as much media consumption as possible to the Web. This explains why purchasing YouTube was so important.

Tim Berners-Lee new foundation the W3F is timely

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The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.

arstechnica.com: WWW creator Berners-Lee launches ambitious Web Foundation

BBC.com: Warning sounded on web’s future

The Register: Berners-Lee backs web truthiness labelling scheme

Wow. Talk about timing!

Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?

Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on ‘truth’ be the prevailing ‘truth’ as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).

Marc Ambinder: What We Learned This Weekend:

The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It’s all a struggle for power.

ScienceBlogs.com: Cognitive Dissonance And Politics:

…dissonant facts made them double-down. It would be too painful to be wrong, and so they convinced themselves that they were right.

USNews: The Campaign, “The Matrix,” and the GOP Offensive Against Truth:

Among historians, there’s a raging Great Debate about the question of Truth.

Wall Street Journal: The Triumph of Culture Over Politics:

For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like “politics,” “spectacle” and “entertainment” barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack Obama:

In my book “True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society”, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”–the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio–lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then ‘truth’ is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.

I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual ‘truth’.

Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common ‘truth’ ?

YouTube: Stephen Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor

Google Video: Colbert Roasts President Bush – 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner

What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we’ve come to a core reason why computer programming is so… flawed – that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?

And if it seems odd that I am making connections between tech, media and politics, well Dave Winer posted yesterday “People thought I stopped writing about technology but the technology and politics are all one and the same.”.

I’m just asking questions here, I have no answers. And probably need to drink less coffee in the morning.

Stack Overflow launches

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I like what I see at Stack Overflow so far. Growing an online community of any sort can be tricky, but this collaboration engine looks smart. Additional info at Joel Spolksy’s. Hmmm… I might post a Java, Emacs, or Python question shortly to give it a whirl.

Who is Clay Shirky?

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For coworkers (you know who you are…):

Jeff Atwood says, It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It

Hugh Macleod says there is only Clay Shirky’s Law: Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two.

Ted: Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaboration:

Clay Shirky is author of the recent “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” (on my must-read list), and from his bio:

Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist’s Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his “After Darwin” column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O’Reilly’s bioinformatics series. He helps program the “Biological Models of Computation” track for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conferences.

Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Power Laws, Weblogs, , and Inequality

Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Communities, Audiences, and Scale

Shirky, to me, is noteworthy for his balanced views on the Web and its applications to and effects from society.

Far more here.

YouTube: Clay Shirky on Love, Internet Style: