Why Everyone Uses Google

Mar 21, ’11 11:12 AM

This is on PyPI, the canon­i­cal python pack­age repository.

django is second on the list

Search, index­ing, and auto­mated rel­e­vance is hard. It's often not worth the effort to shoot at bet­ter and miss.

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Android's Community Personality

Mar 20, ’11 8:32 AM

Part of what to like about Android is the devel­op­ment com­mu­nity — how peo­ple are doing out as much for fun as for profit.

One of my favorite music play­ers, cubed, has all sorts of inter­est­ing brows­ing abil­i­ties, but most off them are depen­dent on album art. The devel­oper is flat-out against sim­ple lists off music that you click through. His fans finally con­vinced him to add a list-driven menu. He named this theme Boring.

If you don't find that funny, then android might not be for you.

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Ghostery and Tracking

Mar 4, ’11 7:49 PM

Ghostery is a won­der­ful cross-browser exten­sion that lets you know what tech­nol­ogy a web­site is com­mu­ni­cat­ing with. For lud­dites, it's para­noid secu­rity; for tech geeks like me, it's a peek into what a web­site is doing to gen­er­ate the reports they use to make busi­ness decisions.

And other times, it's evi­dence that peo­ple want lots and lots and lots of graphs avail­able to them.

zomg tracking

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Language Slide Bar

Feb 21, ’11 9:56 AM

language slider

Taken from the demo ver­sion of Dungeons.

Pos­si­ble left and right values:

  • baby coo­ing — sous chef cursing
  • engi­neer­ing func­tional spec­i­fi­ca­tion — mar­ket­ing brochure
  • politi­cian speech — gov­ern­ment bud­get meeting
  • end user license agree­ment — donut receipt
  • post-coital pil­lowtalk — mar­riage breakup
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Primary Goals and Internal Customers

Feb 2, ’11 2:36 PM

Boston is in the mid­dle of its nth big snow­storm of this win­ter. I'm fly­ing Delta tomor­row, had heard that many flights have been can­celled, and thought I'd check delta.com so that tomor­row morn­ing I wasn't fum­bling around. I'm glad I did.

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Details Matter

Jan 21, ’11 1:12 PM

An unfor­tu­nate Web 2.0 reflection:

Details mat­ter.

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Weeds in the Android Garden

Jan 18, ’11 8:52 AM

I own an android phone, and love it. I'm a geek, I know it's geeky, and I don't have to worry about what the aver­age user thinks or wants. It was made for me.

I also read about how some iPhone devel­op­ers have a hard time because Apple keeps their gar­den tended, and gar­den­ing takes time and effort. Mean­while, I'm glad that Lev­elUp stu­dio can just update his incred­i­ble Plume twit­ter app as often as he wants–which is often, because he's aggres­sively try­ing to be the best at what he does.

Hav­ing said that, it's also good to laugh at the weeds that appear in the android market:

http://www.appbrain.com/app/the-handwarmer/com.handwarmer

I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't see such an app in the iPhone store. Unless the goal was to sell more hardware.

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Out of Touch Buffer

Dec 22, ’10 9:06 AM
  1. Enjoy a new artis­tic endeavor.
  2. I want to share this with peo­ple who also love good things!
  3. Wait, what if every­one knows about this already? I am out of touch, after all.
  4. Google.
  5. Share with con­fi­dence OR smile and back-fill missed con­ver­sa­tion references.
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Words, Words, Words

Nov 29, ’10 6:58 PM

Read­ing is my pri­mary pas­time. There's a nat­ural incli­na­tion to think that if you don't read books that you don't like read­ing. Books are great, but read­ing isn't all about books.

When I want to learn about cur­rent web tech­nol­ogy and design? Web­sites and web-derived authors: Smash­ing Mag­a­zine. A List Apart. Net Tuts. A Book Apart.

Cur­rent events apart from the day-to-day head­lines? Atlantic Mag­a­zine.

When I have to give a big pre­sen­ta­tion at work? Books. I pur­chase and read Con­fes­sions of a Pub­lic Speaker. (Great book!)

Games. Movies. Rela­tion­ships. Par­ent­ing. Eco­nom­ics. Finances. Pol­i­tics. Phi­los­o­phy. Career. Pro­gram­ming. Fit­ness. Design. Gardening.

Books. Blogs. Forums. Web­sites. Twit­ter. Mag­a­zines. Op-eds. Essays. The Boston Metro that some­one just put down in the Red Line.

And that doesn't count undi­rected read­ing of the ran­dom and inter­est­ing cor­ners of the inter­net.

And then to relax? Fiction.

All read­ing. Read, read, read.

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Review of "Old Man series" by John Scalzi

Nov 27, ’10 4:08 PM

Scalzi is a real writer.

This is a review of the books Old Man's War, Ghost Brigade, Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale, all by John Scalzi. There isn't an offi­cial name of the series, but peo­ple refer to it as the Old Man series.

I guess I'm a tourist sci­ence fic­tion reader, in that I still care about things like char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and plot. I can cer­tainly enjoy explo­sions and melo­drama, and big ideas about the human con­di­tion are always wel­come, but some­times I want to sit down with a real meal. I want it all. For me, this series is a full, enjoy­able meal.

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