software

From 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company…

Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the…

Charlie Stross's keynote at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress Leipzig is entitled "Dude, you broke the Future!" and it's an excellent, Strossian look at the future we're barelling towards, best understood…

I've been hosting my email over at Fastmail for years, and for the most part the service is great. The company understands privacy , contributes back to open source , and is incredibly reliable. One of the main reasons I…

This is the version of the talk I gave at API Strat back in November about OpenStack's API microversions implementation, mostly trying to frame the problem statement. The talk was only 20 minutes long, so you can only…

I had the pleasure of attending the first North Bay Python conference in Petaluma, CA this past weekend. IBM was a sponsor, and I gave a few quick remarks about doing python serverless actions on OpenWhisk. My two days…

Filed under: kind of insane code, be careful about doing this at home. Recently we went electric, and got a Chevy Bolt to replace our 12 year old Toyota Prius (who has and continues to be a workhorse). I had a spot in…

Back in November I had the pleasure to attend API Strat for the first time. It was 2 days of short (20 minute) sessions running in 3 tracks with people discussing web service API design, practice, and related topics. My…

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Often months later something about one I listened to really strikes a chord, enough that I want to share it with others through Facebook or my blog. I'd like to quote the relevant section,…

[ From Microsoft's Inclusive Design Manual . Microsoft's Inclusive Design website is pretty amazing. There is an overview manual, as well as exercises to help train yourself in inclusive design situations. However, even…

Credit: Amy Nguyen A great slide came across twitter the other day, which rang really true after having a heated conversation with someone at the OpenStack PTG. They were convinced certain API behavior would not be…

WASHINGTON, DC—For years, the government and security experts have warned of the looming threat of "cyberwar" against critical infrastructure in the US and elsewhere. Predictions of cyber attacks wreaking havoc…

AI alarmists believe in something called the Orthogonality Thesis. This says that even very complex beings can have simple motivations, like the paper-clip maximizer. You can have rewarding, intelligent conversations…

With all the talk about autonomous cars in general media this year, we all got a refresher in Ethics 101 and the Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem is where you as an onlooker see a trolley barreling towards 5 people.…

A really interesting thing happens if you have a reasonably long standing, stable, and documented API in the wild for a while. Other people start building their own implementations to serve different needs. My current…

Source: Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis A very solid paper on how you are being tracked online. I had known about Font fingerprinting before (as the list of fonts you have installed is actually…

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated about the reporting around Apple vs. the FBI , which is largely this narrative: FBI: "You have to fly" Apple: "Flying is something we've never done before, and doesn't…

People often ask me about my vision for Home Assistant. Before I can describe where I want to go with Home Assistant, I should first talk about how home automation would look in my ideal world. This will be the aim of…

Python Design Patterns — Brandon Rhodes at PyOhio A friend pointed me to this talk by Brandon Rhodes on python design patterns from PyOhio a couple of years ago. The talk asks an interesting question: why aren't design…

Over the past couple of years we've been trying to find a path forward with the Nova API. The Nova v2.0 API defined a very small core set of interfaces that were basically unchangable and copied from Rackspace early in…

Facebook just added optional PGP support for all their email notifications to users: To enhance the privacy of this email content, today we are gradually rolling out an experimental new feature that enables people to add…

Really great talk from this year's PyCon about how the mythology around "being a real programmer" keeps a lot of people out of the industry. Definitely worth 35 minutes of your time.

But of course, the baggage exists. We call the baggage "operations" and to a lesser extent "cognitive overhead." You have to monitor the thing. You have to figure out unit tests. You need to know the…

Working from home is great. No commute. Really good coffee 50ft away. Being able to get started as soon as I wake up. Being able to break for exercise / food / etc when it fits in my natural flow, instead of having to…

The evolution of emoji is impressive and fascinating, but it makes for an uncomfortable contrast when other pictorial writing systems – the most commonly-used writing systems on the planet – are on the chopping block. We…

We're big Plex & Roku users in the house, and recently I installed Weather4Us which runs as the Roku screen saver so any time the device goes idle, you get the weather report cycling on screen. The problem is, it…

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a pretty important communication medium for a lot of Open Source projects nowadays. While email is universal and lives forever, IRC is the equivalent of the hallway chat you'd have with a…

Last week at LinuxCon I gave a presentation on DevStack which gave me the proper excuse to turn an idea that Dean Troyer floated a year ago about OpenStack Layers into pictures (I highly recommend reading that for…

The internet is currently a fury on Facebook's paper where they spent 1 week in 2012 an manipulated 0.1% of their users feeds to have them see more positive or more negative than average posts, and see what they produced…

If you were part of the OpenStack keysigning party from the summit, you are currently probably getting a bunch of emails sent by caff . This is an easy way to let a key signer send you your signed key. These are really…

Reading through an interesting, and mostly accurate piece about OpenSSL the following jumped out at me: The fact that OpenSSL pays next to nothing constrains things further. Those who do help Henson out often juggle…

For someone that used to be very vocal about hating shell scripting, I seem to be building more and more tools related to it every day. The latest is caller (from "man bash"): caller [expr] Returns the context…

xkcd: Heartbleed Explanation . The most clear explanation of how heartbleed works that you'll ever find. As always, xkcd provides humor and enlightenment and awesomeness.

OpenSSL isn't formally verified!? No, neither is any part of your browser, your kernel, your hardware, the image rendering libraries that your browser uses, the web servers you talk to, or basically any other part of the…

Devstack is tooling for OpenStack to make it easy to bring up an OpenStack environment based on the latest git trees. It's used extensively in upstream testing, and by many OpenStack developers to set up dev/test…

This isn’t just an Amazon problem. In the last few years, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have all made huge attempts to move into major parts of each others’ businesses, usually at the detriment of their…

Chalk one up for the enemies of patent trolls: The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a request for trial from alleged patent troll Soverain Software. The case, called Soverain Software LLC. v. Newegg Inc., is one of…

A week of vacation at home means some organizing, physical and logical, some spending times with friends, and some just letting your brain wander on things it wants to. One of the problems that I've been scratching my…

Recently, a lot of people that I admire and look up to have raised their voices, advocating for getting the Internet back to what it once was. An open web. A web we shared and owned together. The old web was awesome. It…

In early December I finally decided it was time to move my primary email out of google. There were a few reasons to do it, though the practical (reaching the limits on their filtering) largely outweighed the ideological.…

Like a lot of others, I'm currently trying to catch my breath after the incredible OpenStack Havana release. One of they key reasons that OpenStack is able to evolve as fast as it does, and the whole thing not fall…

As with many OpenStack core reviewers, my review queue can be completely overwhelming, often 300 - 400 active reviews that I have +2 / -2 authority on. It's really easy to get discouraged on a list that big. Fortunately…

... with robots... wait, what? Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at Vienna University of Technology, built a Lego Mindstorms robot that presses "next page" on his Kindle repeatedly while it faces his…

It's a common thread among computer professional to complain about "kids these days" when we look at potential new hires. It's always hard to separate how much of that is real vs. how much of it is what people…

From Rafe Colburn's post on Seven signs of dysfunctional engineering teams : Preference for process over tools. As engineering teams grow, there are many approaches to coordinating people’s work. Most of them are some…

Julien Danjou, the project technical lead for the OpenStack Ceilometer project, had some choice words to say about github pull requests , which resonates very strongly with me: The pull-request system looks like an…

My talk from the OpenStack summit is now up on youtube, where I walked people through the process of getting your idea into OpenStack. A big part of the explanation is what's going on behind the scenes with code reviews…

We lost a few features moving mhvlug.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, as modules just didn't exist. One of the ones I missed the most was the Planet function provided by UD Planet. This was an extremely simple to use…

Apparently Source Forge has gone open source again , and even is an incubated project at Apache. The source code is in git , and the new source forge looks like it's all written in Python instead of PHP. Source Forge has…

The OpenStack project has a really impressive continuous integration system, which is one of its core strengths as a project. Every proposed change to our gerrit review system is subjected to a battery of tests on each…

The FOSDEM 2013 talks are up now, and this one of LibreOffice Refactoring really hit an interesting mark. The LibreOffice team has been aggressively rebuilding a culture of rapid change as a road to quality, bringing in…

While I've been giving talks at conferences and user groups for the last decade, I leveled up a little on Friday and was an invited speaker on the Vassar College Computer Science Asprey Lecture Series. The topic was…

One of the things that I liked a lot about Android 4.x is that Chrome was now a browser option. It meant that I got an almost Desktop quality browser on my phone and tablet. The almost bit has gotten pretty annoying of…

The Atlantic just published an in dept look at the Tech team behind the Obama campaign. It's a little personality heavy, because they are trying to make tech interesting to the average reader, but putting that aside,…

When you are learning how to program, you think that most of your time is going to be spent writing code. The reality is most of your coding time is actually spent reading code. Other people's code. Code with comments…

Via channels I can't now remember, I came across this presentation about the very unsolved issue of how Computer Science as a field of study relates in any way to creating software. With so many colleges in the area, and…

In late 1999 I claimed my last name as a domain, and have had various email and web solutions hanging off of it ever since. This past weekend I migrated off of self hosted email to Google Apps for Domains. My email…

2 years ago Google created the Nexus program for their Android phones. Vendors were off screwing around with things like dual screen android phones, 3D android phones, all the weird gimmicks that marketing people loved,…

There is a popular saying: If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. This frames our relationships with Google, Facebook, etc. All those "free" web services that are…

From a former Firefox developer , truer words were never spoken: Software companies would do well to learn this lesson: anything with the phrase "users love our product" in it isn't a strategy, it's wishful…

Interesting new paper on the cost of Patent Trolls in the US. In the past, “non-practicing entities” (NPEs), popularly known as “patent trolls,” have helped small inventors profit from their inventions. Is this true…

There is a long thread on github about how Linus thinks their pull request mechanism is broken. It's worth reading . What I found most humorous was a subthread about text wrapping. If you also found that funny, you are a…

The Jury in the Oracle vs. Google case has decided that Google violated Oracle's copyright in implementing the Java APIs. Now, that's actually not too bad of news, because the Judge in the case told the jury to…

I apparently am lacking in imagination. It never occurred to me that all my childhood construction sets: Lego, Lincoln Log, Tinker Toys should work together. So my mind was completely blown when I saw this: Ever wanted…

Last night, after the Drupal Meetup, we were having many interesting conversations at the bar. One started as a question about why I did so much open source activity. There are a lot of answers there, though mostly at…

Raspberry Pi , the $25 / $35 Linux ARM computer, launched yesterday, with 10k units through 2 distributors. The distributors were crushed within minutes, their websites down for hours. There is now just sign up forms to…

Tip of the day: If you are trying to embed Google Maps in a website, and things look horribly wrong, make sure that the following css style rule exists for your map div: #whateveryourmapdiviscalled img { max-width : none…

If the e-book stores had framed their business as a super digital lending library (with prices to match) I might be an avid customer by now. Instead, by saying I am buying the book, and charging prices that are a delta…

🔗💀 Daily Show video embed The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , Political Humor & Satire Blog , The Daily Show on Facebook Jon Stewart tackles SOPA and the congressional nerd bashing.

Stop [SOPA/PIPA today](http://americancensorship.org/).

I've been really frustrated with Google+ slowly consuming all the rest of Google services, because I find it so deficient compared to Twitter, and even Facebook. My long form content lives here, on my own server, in my…

I had an interesting conversation at lunch yesterday when I met a CS professor at a local college. He's got nearly 15 years industry experience, in addition to a decade being in academia, so exposure on both sides of the…

Apparently the only thing that can get bi-partisan agreement right now is destroying the internet . The hearings in the congress were basically stacked with big media executives, with the only vaguely technical person…

The default CSS mode in emacs does very funny things with indentation if you like leaving the brace on the same line as the definition. As with everything in emacs, this is fixable with a few lines of config. In this…

At the September Mid Hudson Drupal Meetup I talked a little about a drupal module idea I'd been kicking around. Most of my drupal websites are about groups that have meetings. So I've got content types with cck date…

The man that invented the C programming language and co-invented UNIX, has passed . When you think about impacts of individuals on the world, it's hard to find people that had quite the same impact. C issued in the era…

Steve Yegge is one of the most insightful people on the internet. I was really bummed when he stopped blogging, because his posts were always well thought out, funny, and really got to the heart of some key issues in…

From a great post about Dennis Ritchie , that puts the magnitude of his contribution in perspective: ... A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language. How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done. C is…

Etherpad was a great idea, online simultaneous editing. After the team was acquired into Google Wave they dumped what they had in open source, and moved on. A few brave souls tried to improve it, but it was a beast, and…

Really interesting post about Google Wave from the inside . My favorite passage is this: And this is the essential broader point--as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex…

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.…

I became one of the co-maintainers of the epublish drupal module this year, as we are an active user of it at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project , where we use it for our newsletter 🔗💀 . I had about 6 big fixes to it that…

From This American Life's latest show : In early July, the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses. Google said…

Being mad at Netflix for raising their prices back to roughly what they were 4 years ago is now pushing Google+ out of the meme-cycle. At one level, this is really pretty silly. $16 / month is cheaper than any cable…

July is a tough meeting for MHVLUG, people are off on vacation, and our turnout over the last few years has been pretty low. It's one of the few times we drop below 20 people. As Ben was putting together the schedule…

I've been playing around with Thinkup , which you should too, if you value any content you create for Twitter or Facebook. For the twitter side they've got this nice graph of clients you've used. Here is mine: This, as…

The July MHVLUG meeting (aka Arduino-palooza ) is something I'm really looking forward to, if nothing other than it has finally added the extra excuse to kick me into gear to start doing something with the Arduino and…

As this blog post on needing a programming language for regular folks is making the rounds, I realized that most people don't really understand what computer programming is. Computer programming is about creating clear…

This past week we had the second meeting of the Hudson Valley Drupalers , over at Marist College, which was really impressive. Vonn gave an overview of some of the really amazing things you can do with Taxonomy in…

I really appreciated my Android phone when we were down at the shuttle launch, for many reasons, but the best of which was the built in Google Navigation system. It got us around perfectly, and helped us find some decent…

One of the things that's most inspired me at IBM over the last couple of years has been a division wide initiative to adopt Agile development methodology among the teams. There remains a lot of resistance to such a…

I finally got around to figuring out how to fix Adblock (Chrome or Firefox) with the Poughkeepsie Journal site. Without running adblock, I find their site completely unusable. Because their design team does truly crazy…

I really love my Kindle, and I'm happy I bought it. I haven't completely given up on real books though. One of the reasons why is evident below: This is not a new book, it's a year and a half old. The Kindle price is…

There was a really great piece this week on the freight train that is Android : So here is the kicker. Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have…

One of my favorite new tools in doing websites is the new Google Font API . Using various hooks that exist in modern browsers, as well as really ancient versions of IE, Google is building a huge library of Open Licensed…

My typical morning blog writing time has gotten taken over by morning code writing recently, which I'm quite happy about, as I've been making very reasonable progress on a new drupal module: lending . This is still in…

At the web design meetup the other day there was a bit of chat about editors afterwards which turned into a normal geek fest of poking fun at each other for our choices. One new truth that came out of this a good editor…

There is a standard Rookie mistake in website development when storing people's information. A phone number, looks like a number, so people think they can use an integer to store it. The problem is that integers, as…

I had a quite productive weekend working on the Poughkeepsie Farm Project site, and learned a lot of useful things about Drupal in the process. Content Profiles I now understand why core profiles are going away in Drupal…

I've been thinking about getting a new wireless router that I could install dd-wrt on, an open Linux replacement firmware, which gives you all kinds of nice features. I started this journey on the dd-wrt website to try…

Some of the conversation that happened last night at the Hudson Valley Programmers gathering made me think about reinvention. There was a fundamental search engine problem that a few people were working with, which…

When your alarm goes off at 5:30am to go to a conference, part of you wants to skip and go back to bed. When it also means you've got to drive 2 1/2 hours in below zero conditions, there is even more inertia to just…

I didn't get home last night until 10:30, and sleep didn't find me until after 1am. All of this was because of a talk I gave at the Poughkeepsie ACM on my experience with Android Development with the Where is Io…

When it comes to the Internet there is something we've all done that's bad for us. You know you've done it. You've probably done it when people weren't watching, when you were all alone. You know what I'm talking about:…

But as we use the Internet for “free,” we have to remember that if we’re not paying for something, we’re not the customer. We are in fact the product being sold — or, more specifically, our data is. So here’s a tricky…

As confirmed yesterday I'm going to be presenting my Android development talk from CPOSC (with a few tweaks for the local audience) at the Poughkeepsie Chapter of the ACM this month. Mon, Jan 17 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm (Ulrich…

I continue to be amazed by what people have managed to build off the Kinect with open drivers in the last month. Recreating the scene from Big is right up there.

AIM spam seems to be on the rise again, I finally started getting hit with it the other day. If you are using pidgin you can change a privacy setting to make it go away.

The Android 2.3 SDK dropped yesterday, and if you look through the api changes you can see the entire release is about gaming. There are new sensors, that are pretty much only good for gaming, new hardware buttons, and a…

Bob Nystrom has an interesting post on the expanse of software as analogous to the expanding realms of science. Assembly programming as mathematics, C as physics, OOP as Chemistry, and dynamic language programming as…

This is really neat, and possibly represents an interesting transition for desktop computing. Alexander Larson has a first prototype of Gtk rendering that converts to HTML5. The demo video shows the Gtk test app being…

This was a lot of places, but here is the Ars story : Viacom joins Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC in blocking Google TV for fear that users might choose to stream those shows over the Internet on-demand instead of watching them…

"We didn't go with them because they didn't support Ubuntu" is something that I wouldn't have expected listening to a cloud service creator talk about selecting cloud vendors. That is exactly what I heard when…

Problem: you want a fixed host name to connect to your home network on some residential ISP service. You don't have a static ip, so it could change at any time, and you want it to stay up to date. There are a lot of…

I'm trying to figure out why duplicate key errors keep getting generated for the drupal twitter module, because it's all open source, I started reading code to figure out why it didn't seem to be using mysql BIGINTS. I…

I got my Logitech Revue on Friday, and have had a day to play with it. It is clearly a work in progress, which will be accelerated greatly when the SDK drops for it early next year. The long review of the device will…

Last night I finally got time to re-setup eclipse after the Ubuntu upgrade and did a couple of quick fixes for Where is Io. One includes making my ghetto math for the Diorama slightly less ghetto. It still needs future…

Doing some basic mobile development for Android has led me to question a lot about what we take for granted with Desktop applications, and one of the reasons people find these smart phones and tablets a bit more…

Read over at James Governor's redmonk blog : Maritz said that other major tech firms were still “consolidating the client/server stack” while VMware wanted to capture a new wave of application development. “Developers…

This is a great essay about not beating yourself up for feeling stupid when you try to learn something new in programming: ... The problem is that while you've uncovered a wonderful world that makes coding seem so…

I love this new movement of small regional open source conferences that seem to be springing up everywhere. Democratizing the conference space by making it local and affordable is a wonderful thing. When I was at Ohio…

Via Fred Wilson .

Things are going to be quiet here for a few days as I prep for 2 upcoming talks, both which are about aspects of Where is Io. The first of which is this Saturday at the Central PA Open Source Conference , which I'm about…

From Programmable Web : Yes, you read that title correctly. WhereTheLadies.At is, indeed, a thing that exists . Before you get start joking around, let’s be honest. Checking in all the time on Foursquare has earned you…

Lemley gives example after example of this trend. Broadcasters opposed those rogue cable operators when they first appeared; now they demand carriage. The VCR, opposed as a "Boston strangler" of the movie…

Via reddit : If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. posted by blue_beetle It nicely goes to the heart of a lot of web 2.0 economics, including facebook, twitter, google,…

This rails guide on security is one of the most comprehensive that I've seen on that kinds of attacks that exist against web applications today. While the counter measures that are specified are rails specific, the…

Apparently you can no longer legitimately use Twitter with open source clients, Ars has a lot of details around the implications of the way Twitter just rolled out OAuth . Twitter's OAuth implementation and open source…

I finally got back around to working on Where is Io again, trying to get myself past this hump that I've had in front of me for a couple of months where I know exactly how I want something to look.... and I have no idea…

"Would you like to play a game?" It looks like the software patent cold war that we were in is over, and we're now moving into a software patent hot war. Ars Technica has a piece on Paul Allen's IP holding…

CPOSC is now open for registration . It's in Harrisburg PA on October 16th (a Saturday), which makes it about a 4 hour drive from here in Poughkeepsie, NY. This will be my first year there, but based on the list of talks…

Last night I finally figured out why Amazon wouldn't let me view inside books, it was because I still had HTTPS everywhere enabled for amazon. It's a neat idea to force your web session secure for sites that support it,…

Google did something pretty brilliant last month, and created a visual programing environment for Android devices. Google App Inventor is a combination web application for app layout, and java application for building…

Today I found myself in a requirements database where a small group of people had come up with a priority scheme composed of three levels: Very Important, Must Do, and Critical. And I was stumped: what is the relative…

Oracle was the opening keynote for Linuxcon this year, where they talked about how much they did for Linux and open source. The moment everyone had checked out of their hotel in Boston, they filed a massive patent suit…

Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays . But the two sides can agree on this:…

There is one main reason people in the open source community get so violent over Mono (the open source .NET implementation): the fear that Microsoft could shut everything. There is long standing fear that MS has patents…

The full agenda for the Central PA Open Source Conference is now out there, and I'm on the agenda : Sean Dague: Solar System in your Pocket – Developing Android Applications It started with a simple discussion after a…

I've been using Drupal for a number of community websites for the past year. Overall I quite like the system and how customizable it is. What I'm not really thrilled by is the way the module structure exists on…

Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed: Many Java developers have vowed to fight back against the unwelcome opening of their open source. League of Agile Methodology…

From suite101.com : One of the problems with using an Android-based smartphone such as the Droid, Droid Eris, or Droid X as a hiker's GPS is that maps don't work when there is no cell coverage, which is common in areas…

At a press briefing here at its headquarters, Google announced a new version of its Apps suite designed specifically for government customers. This tier will be sold alongside the existing version of Google Apps and…

Two years ago I got into amateur Astronomy. I bought an 8" dobsonian telescope (which is the perfect first scope), and joined the local astronomy club . I've come to realize that my biggest weakness is coming up…

Via twitter yesterday I found out about Readability , which is damn impressive. It's a button for your browser that contains a bunch of javascript code that reforms the page you are looking at into something that's easy…

The last Where is Io release was a few weeks ago. That's because I've been working through a new chunk of math that I'll need for a few new features. One of the things I needed was rise and set times for Jupiter and the…

The Ruby language has this great feature called Mixins . It lets you add methods to existing classes. Take this example from Ruby on Rails (which uses mixins heavily): time = 2.days.ago Yes, that's valid code and does…

I was recently forced into a pair programming exercise at work because we'd gotten to a critical bring up part of the code where nothing was really able to be done in parallel. Given that we are all noobs on this source…

There is a presentation out on slideshare on the Netflix culture , and how they treat their employees. Definitely interesting reading, to see where there are strengths and weaknesses compared to your own organization. I…

On some feed I came across: How to get rejected from the App Store , and as I read through it I became more and more glad that I've got an Android phone. Some of the top things that I do with my phone are explicitly…

One of the things that most excited me out the Google I/O event a couple weeks back was Google TV . It's a set top box that brings a lot of web content to the TV. But what really excites me about it is that it's an…

What does an industry with almost no intellectual property protection look like? It looks like fashion, and [this TED video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0) gives you a lot to think about when it comes to IP…

Google has a different view. Android isn't summer camp for handset vendors and not everyone gets get a trophy for showing up. Google is treating partners equally, but will not slow the rate of innovation so weaker…

The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going. Randal, you are awesome, as always.

In between cutting lumber for this set of shelves, I managed to push the Where is Io source code up onto github . The parts I wrote are under GPLv3, the parts that came from others are under their respective licenses.…

I just pushed Where is Io out to the Android market for the low low price of free. The application presents a "spirograph" view of the 4 large moons of Jupiter over the next 96 hours, including an indicator on…

I've made some more progress on what will be my first Android market application - "Where is Io". I've learned a lot about sqlite performance on the phone, which isn't bad as long as you limit the number of…

There have been a series of posts about Git in the last week over at The Reinvigorated Programme r. It's fascinating to watch someone come to terms with Git that's also a brilliant writer, and gets to the heart of the…

I think that the whole Facebook dust up around privacy really has brought us a new pick any two triangle diagram: The New Pick Any Two When it comes to some kind of online services you only get to pick two of: privacy,…

This weekend I learned about JNI... that's a blog post for another time. The net result is this: Yes, it looks like the glory of Atari land graphics, but that's not the important part. The important part is that it looks…

After nearly a month of tinkering with code, nearly giving up twice, and realizing that I was going to actually need to relearn my linear algebra to get a real solution, I managed to create this graph. It is the position…

Ars Technical has a great write up of some of the uncertainty of the 4th amendment (protection against unreasonable search and seizure) when it comes to your data in the cloud. The first test case for the Supreme Court…

Livnat Peer just posted an interesting look at converting a large source base from C# to Java. This was done because when Red Hat aquired the company that wrote KVM, they also got a huge .NET management application that…

Last Wednesday, at the kind invitation of the folks from Eclipse, I had the opportunity to sit with more august company – Justin Erenkrantz (Apache), Mårten Mickos (Eucalyptus), and Jason van Zyl (Maven/Sonatype) – on a…

NEW YORK – Patents on genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer are invalid, ruled a New York federal court today. The precedent-setting ruling marks the first time a court has found patents on genes…

From the youtube blog : For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to…

Over the weekend I was working on revamping a whole set of older ruby projects, some having to do with my Proliphix Thermostat. I had this crufty Rakefile from the icalendar project that I'd been copying and modifying…

It's been 2 years since I got my Proliphix thermostat , and while I did some early hacking on it , largely the whole effort just sat around for the last 2 years. However, with the fun of connecting up my weather sensors…

I've finally got some very simple ruby code collecting my weather sensors to the round robin database . It took me some time this weekend to finally get my head around RRD, with having to predefine all the data you want…

A few years ago I bought an Oregon Scientific wireless weather station. It's a nice way to keep an eye on what's going on outside. The unit supports up to 3 of these remote sensors (shown here), and aggregates it at a…

We're 1 step closer to the launch of the new Poughkeepsie Farm Project website, so it's down to some final edits before it gets flipped live. While I was looking over the test site the other day, I realized we still had…

Dear Publishers, I really do expect that your ebook pricing is going to be at least 50% lower than you list price for your print book. O'Reilly's 20% lower model just doesn't do it for me, and the fact that I can buy the…

I just ran a link checker for one of the websites I'm running, and got the first ever http error code 410: Gone that I've seen, for something that was a Geocities page. This seems to be in the correct spirit of 410 as…

There is a great article done by a member of the team that did the New York Times Netflix infographic . I especially love the fact that they wrote a scraper in ruby to pull in some of the data they needed off of google…

Want to get a geek roiled up? Tell them you develop code in proportional fonts . The comments on that article are a text book example of irrational geek argument try to get the higher ground. Remember, there is one…

I first heard of Conway's Law last week: Conway's Law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway , who introduced the idea in 1968: ...organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce…

I was listening to Fresh Air last night on the author of new book on google . It started with a nice lay person description of a lot of what Google has been working on, and how the company evolved into the worlds biggest…

In a week Verizon is launching 2 android phones, the droid and the eris. Sprint will have the moment by then, which adds to their existing Hero. T-Mobile has the G1 and the MyTouch. For each carrier this gives you 2…

I've finally wrapped my head around the blocks, views, and content construction kit model for Drupal, which we're going to be using for the upcoming relaunch of the Poughkeepsie Farm Project website (you can see the work…

On Friday morning, I picked up my shiney new HTC Hero from Best Buy. It had been nearly 4 years since my last new cell phone, and the tech at Best Buy was really confused about that. It was the longest between upgrades…

Years ago when I was using the Ion window manager. Ion had many very nice features, not the least of which was goto window by name, which you could do from an interactive console or script into other tools. I created an…

Yesterday we completed the transition of OpenSim from subversion to git as our primary source code system. This had actually been kicked around as an idea for nearly a year and a half, but our gating factor had always…

When I played with Wolfram Alpha a while ago I was really struck by the fact that it's search box was really useless. There is a lot of guessing involved to try to get the engine to give you any real information that you…

I'm quite impressed by how agressively the Cannonical team is getting when it comes to cloud computing. They're integrating eucalyptus into Ubuntu 9.10, which is open source software that lets you build your own…

Hours before the entire NY State Senate imploded into a bunch of whining 1st graders, the previous leadership pushed out something quite interesting: open.nysenate.gov . To pursue its commitment to transparency and…

<Note: thanks to Buffy Miller for giving me a much slicker solution here> Often I want to post a PDF on a web page, but would like the cover of the PDF to be the clickable element. This just makes things look…

A long time ago I used the built in ftp support for emacs to be able to remotely edit files on another system. This gave me all the convenience of a local editor (especially on slower links), with the ability to do edits…

Because I've moved into the more elegant waters of Ruby and Mono, I sometimes forget just how power Perl can be. Sometimes 8 lines of perl is all you need to solve a problem. The Problem So, I've gotten back in to Blood…

I can't even remember the last time I had a coworker that was co-located with me in the same town. Within IBM the other software developers that I typically work with are in: Minnesota, Texas, Germany, Great Britain,…

I've been part of a process of redesigning the Poughkeepsie Farm Project website, both visually and functionally since about March. It's a group effort, with a good number of people from the PFP, all of whom expressed…

Unfortunately, bugzilla can not do searches with words less than three letters long. Please rephrase your search and try again. That's because it didn't implement search, is implemented LIKE clauses in mysql. There is a…

I love git. I'll state that up front. I also love github , which I've expressed in the past . Both are making me look at software in a new way. I also think the pair of them are changing some of the rules we know for how…

In no particular order, a quick run down of some things I learned this week (no particular order): Ruby / Ruby on Rails In Ruby: don't use f.readlines.each in a loop, as that waits for all output, then iterates. Use…

I'll be giving the Poughkeepsie chapter ACM meeting tonight on Open Source development. Some recent experiences with github have got me thinking on some of the new patterns emerging out of Open Source development. The…

I've seen all manner of people in the twitter verse complaining that Google's AppEngine Java support is a subset of Java, and how that "breaks a decade of compatibility". Seriously? I mean, really, seriously?!?…

Nebadon has a great new video out there showing physics in OpenSim in action. Some really nice stuff:

Pat Ladd started IMing me a week ago looking for a simple Ruby solution to the following problem: He was building objects of a SOAP web service SOAP in Ruby returned everything as strings He wanted his objects to have…

Alternative table row colors (also known as zebra tables) are very handy. Recently I ran into an issue with redmine where it generates tables in a way that prevents you from tagging the rows as "even/odd" when…

Github is great, I really can't say enough good things about them. What's not so great is their css, as it breaks badly if you change you dpi. I finally found the root cause of this which is the search field gets…

I was very happy to recently realize that you can put latitude and longitude directly into google maps, and it will give you a map with that marker. This is really useful if the address gives you a location that isn't…

I'm glad to know that I'm not alone in thinking about Software Debt . Ward Cunningham has a great video up about it , which is starting to filter through the internets. Maybe if we get people thinking about Software Debt…

I made a couple of updates in the last week on the OpenSim Planet . First of, I'm more strictly trying to only pull in the "opensim" tag by various blogs. This helps keep the planet more on topic. This pruned…

Granted, it was only about an hour of outage, but it was still any annoying outage as google marked everything on the internet malware, so no google results worked. A screen shot for posterity:

By the late 1980s, the world had many competing vendor-proprietary networking models plus two competing standardized networking models. So what happened? TCP/IP won in the end. Proprietary protocols are still in use…

For the npr shows that don't podcast, I use icecream to save them off for my own time shifting. The files end up with names like "car_talk_2008_01_17.mp3". Until recently, that was good enough, but the new…

First off, animations actually seem to work in Open Office 3. Not like in Open Office 2 where they seemed to just randomly fire, or not, depending on sunspots. Secondly, if you have, say, 27 pieces of text that you want…

I developed this pattern with mercurial, and have recently adapted it to work with git Assumed You want your production application to be deployed at /data/site/myrailssite on your remote system You are running passenger…

Many people know Metcaff's law: the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2) but it occurs to me we need a new law. Something that goes along…

... they aren't paying attention. Little Big Computer - an adding machine built in little big planet.

Android has finally arrived. The comparisons to the iPhone are everywhere, and rightly so, as this is going to be a very interesting show down between Google + Open and Apple + one of the best design teams in the world.…

Above is one of the many cool visualizations already in many-eyes ( direct link here for rss readers that don't display it), a social visualization site from IBM. I'd heard a little bit about the site but after today's…

I've been thinking about a lot of things in terms of debt recently, and the world looks a bit different if you do that. Debt is borrowing against the future, be that in time, money, energy, health, etc. Debt is what you…

Push finally came to shove, and I've now entered the 21st century by making Thunderbird my email client (I actually tried Evolution for a day, but after 20 crashes gave up. But that's a different story.) Previously I was…

The OpenSim community is one of the most vibrant open source communities that I've had the pleasure to be a part of. We've got an active set of core committers, an active set of more casual developers constantly…

There has been a lot of work in the last few days in different directions for OpenSim / SL browsers. Adam Frisby is starting in on a ground up viewer (sadly, Vista only) MW hacked up SL in a browser (sadly, windows only)…

I found that Liferea (my rss reader) was starting to get really slow. Hitting space bar to go to the next article was getting somewhat painful levels of delay. The Fix Liferea uses sqlite to store it's information. Over…

I've been thinking a lot about the way the implementation of SecondLife has created a very specific culture in that environment. One of the issues SecondLife is currently having in expanding scope, is that culture makes…

Things that I spent too much time figuring out again today with OpenOffice Tools -> AutoCorrect .... - to turn off all those replacement tables which make your Unix commands in a presentation all go funny OpenOffice…

Through dave hansen's blog I found the CHDK project , which creates custom Canon camera firmware that adds a lot of features to existing cameras. While I've only had this loaded for a day, I'm really psyched with the…

Mo Hax and I have started a weekly effort to gather up some of the IBM internally created OpenSim / Second Life content and contribute it to OpenSim as stock content. As OpenSim approaches the 0.6 release, it would be…

A friend of mine pointed me at Live Maps last night, which is basically microsoft's google maps. It looks basically exactly like google maps, so I wasn't sure why he sent me there. Then he said "Find your house, and…

I've been listening to The World is Flat on audio book, as part of my summer run through of popular non fiction of the last couple of years. One phrase really struck me on the way home, which was the assessment by Brian…

A new open source project has shown up on the horizon that makes it easy to add USGS data to OpenSim. For those that have been longing this, check out this email to get you started. Below is Ithica New York, in OpenSim:

I've always felt the root of the emacs vs. vi holy war (which is one of the longest standing holy wars in free software) basically came down to the following key point: When you first were learning Linux / Unix, did your…

A couple weeks ago I found phusion's passenger (aka mod_rails), and it's great. Passenger compiles an apache module which manages a rails app server for each application. It is on par with mongrel on speed, and so much…

A few weeks ago I had an email conversation with Dale Innis about llTargetOmega support in OpenSim. This script function lets you set the angular velocity on a prim, which the client then interprets and displays spinning…

In secondlife sculpties only collide on bounding boxes, which make them really only suitable for visuals, not for part of complex builds. Due to some early work done by Teravus this week, that's no longer true for…

This is a snap shot from right before OpenSim Office hours last Tuesday, in a neighboring region. It appears that we've incorrectly made our child agents visible, which has some really fun effects on the viewer. Bugs are…

A vendor can often be their own worst competition if they create good technology, but put it out in a way that is too limiting, in platform support or licensing, than their prospective users would like it to be. I've…

Unfortunately no one has made ubuntu packages yet, however here is a script that I built based on Dirk's post to automate mono 1.9 installation onto Ubuntu environments. #!/bin/sh # This is needed to pick up our built…

After a bit of playing around with gtkmorph tonight, I came up with this morph between myself and my Second Life avatar Neas Bade. I haven't quite figured out where I'm going to use this yet, but it seemed like something…

I was just lucky enough to be a participant in the Open Source, IP and Privacy in Virtual Worlds Life 2.0 panel in Secondlife. I would have to say being on the floor with such incredibly big names as Zero Linden, Eben…

Tomorrow I'll be participating in part of the Life 2.0 series on Open Source, IP, and Privacy in Virtual Worlds as a panel member in Second Life. It's quite a line up of folks, so I encourage anyone interested in the…

Some hacking last night got the bulk of the Planet OpenSim site pulling style elements directly from the OpenSim wiki, which makes for a much more unified them experience. We're now tracking 10 blogs on Planet OpenSim,…

Among other roles in the OpenSim project, I'm reluctant admin for most of the opensimulator.org infrastructure. Infrastructure being defined as: scm repo (subversion and mercurial), bug tracker (mantis), and wiki (media…

When not working on OpenSim , I've been doing a bunch of random side projects in Ruby. One of the more recent ones has been a more advanced control and monitoring tool for my thermostat . Along the way I created a module…

Dale Innis provided me with a nice little animated campfire in my test OpenSim instance. I figured a screen shot was worth a thousand words here:

The house monitoring project has made a little bit of progress, as I've now got data being collected into a rails app using backgroundrb , and can get that data back out into very pretty graphs with gruff . (I also…

Xplanet is this great program on Linux that does projections of the earth (including all kinds of possible overlays to include things like real time clouds, earthquake activity, and major storms.) For years I've used it…

This made me laugh too much not to include it in my blog:

One of the interesting effects of the internet has always been the lack of a direct connection between online identity and real world identity. While Pen Names have been a fact of life since the dawn of modern…

Another day, another set of ADO.NET code gutted. I love mondays! Today the SQLite Assets for OpenSim were liberated from their cruel ADO.NET oppressor, saving memory and CPU time in the process. I did manage to break…

Porkchop sent me this youtube video on Saturday. ++ for an hour of really good entertainment. My love for xkcd is even greater after this.

Not all that exciting, but I did do a wordpress update today. Everything looks good to me, but if anyone sees something off, a comment would be appreciated.

Since my dbus post last week , I've been playing around more with dbus whenever I get a few minutes. The modern Linux desktop is pretty good, but with minor tweaks, you can make things even better. ( all this code is now…

A few weeks ago I was chatting with Dan about my one great annoyance with Pidgin : it takes up to 15 minutes to realize that it's network connection isn't valid any more and to automatically reconnect. With…

@strips = @user . comics . collect { | c | c . strips . find ( :all , :conditions => [ "date > ?" , 7. days . ago ] ) } . flatten . delete\_if { | c | c == nil } . sort\_by { | c | c . date } The previous shows ruby in…

As a professor you get sent new sample textbooks all the time, or so I learned from Dr Nick last night. The "hot" area for these textbooks is the CS1 (or Intro to Computer Science) classes. Computer Science…

My grad school class this semester is the Project Course, where the whole semester is spent on a group project. No tests, no other grading besides the project, which is actually what I expected more of when starting grad…

Over the past couple of months I've started looking more at various new "web 2.0" sites, putting aside past prejudices, and seeing where the value in these applications might be. 🔗💀 Delicious is social book…

About 6 months ago I bought an Olevia 542i 42" HDTV. It isn't the best 42" TV that you can get, but it is one of the best deals, and it is a very respectable set. Nice features of the set include a VGA input…

I just found this on the xkcd blog , and it made me smile quite a lot. Click the image to read the whole post.

I've been working on the OpenSim project for the past 3 months, so it's quite exciting to see us put out the 0.4 release of OpenSim as a stake in the ground for future progress. Physics and scripting aren't there yet,…

For my grad school class this semester we are using the book Lucene in Action , as we are doing projects in and around search engines. I did a quick search on getting this book, and found that if I ordered directly from…

There is an article on OpenSim up at the Reuters Second Life booth. On balance, the article isn't that bad, though it has that standard mainstream need to create some sort of conflict in a story, so be it. What I do find…

After years on Livejournal , I've decided to migrate off to my own wordpress installation. This will hopefully help consolidate some of my content which has been spread out on a number of different sites recently. Expect…

The good thing about changing technical focus is all the new exciting things to learn. The bad things is... all those new exciting things to learn mean your development output drops to the floor for some period of time.…

Steve Yegge's OSCON 2007 keynote is up online now . It's a great talk, even if the slides didn't work during it. He also finally lets out what the Next Big Language is, which he's been alluding to for a while in his…

Pictures are worth 1000 words. Follow the link to learn more about how this visualization was made.

These days my car stereo functionally has three modes: WAMC (our local NPR station), XM 84 (Electronica), AUX in for Drunk & Retired podcast (I've gotten into the 40s on the backlog of episodes). Usually when I have…

In an effort to wrap my head around some of the code for OpenSim , I took a detour and started adding C# support to autodia . Autodia was originally written as something to create dia UML diagrams from perl code, but…

Something funny occurred to me the other day. I was one of the last folks locally to switch from Mozilla to Firefox (I still call it Mozilla). The big "complaint" everyone had with Mozilla was "it's so big…

From sogrady's daily links post (which I tend to find one new gem in every other day), I found that Google has a set of online repositories for just about every Linux distro out there. What a great way to make sure…

Ah, those internets. Refuctoring is the process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anybody except yourself. Comprehensive…

I was just doing my morning catchup on RSS feeds with trusty Liferea , and ran across ingimp in my freshmeat feed, which has a rather interesting idea. The standard method for usability testing in proprietary software is…

I've had the following up on my office wall since 1999, when I first read it. It is reproduced here for posterity, though you can read the static version at the source . My software design process (Score:4) by Shoeboy…

Pidgin 2.0 just released, which has given me a chance to start looking at IM plugins (which I wasn't going to do during Gaim's 2 year beta cycle where that interface was always changing). Pidgin 2.0 has some nice changes…

For the third time I attempted to get a paper in for OSCON , however, unlike the last 2 attempts, this one was accepted. :) The paper is entitled "Easy as Pie: Making Graphical Desktop Applications with Perl and…

I just came across two-mode-mode when looking for some xemacs extensions for editing ruby on rails code, and it is awesome. The basic problem is one that anyone editing PHP, or even HTML with embedded CSS or Javascript…

Apparently when Viacom issued their statement of 100,000 videos on youtube infringing their copyright, they didn't really bother to look at many of them to verify that. There was a youtube video based on "Re: Your…

If you are a Linux user, and you have ever had to give presentations, you probably used OpenOffice Impress to do it. OpenOffice Impress is a reasonable clone of PowerPoint, though certain things like Animation, work very…

I had some time this weekend, as well as some motivation, to add a couple more things to ExifTagger . One of the things that took longer than I expected to sort out was how to change the cursor to a watch prior to doing…

The Bad Dear Open Office, Why can't you insert a table? All I want is a simple table. Tables are good ways to organize some information. No, I don't want to embed a full spread sheet, that uses entirely different fonts,…

Listening to NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, and there was an interview with Jonathan Coulton who wrote and performed the song Code Monkey as part of his Thing-a-week blog this past year. had brought up Code Monkey…

After reading much of distutils code, I've finally figured out how to hack a setup.py to have extra rules, and extra required flags, and not break any of the build in support. It was far hackier than I had hoped, and it…

ExifTagger has been released. This brings the following enhancements: Preferences panel for options like image scaling algo, jump size- Store state like last directory opened, and last image viewed- Realtime validation…

While visiting friends of Susan's over the weekend, I had some downtime to spend with ExifTagger and work in a few features that I'd been contemplating. More importantly it meant a critical break through in mentally…

ExifTagger v0.20 is out... a day after 0.1 was out. The quick turn around was due to me not really testing the SHAREINST code for the glade file. In short, the app didn't work from tarball, though it would from rpm. I…

By now, just about everyone has heard of Google's Code Search 🔗💀 . After seeing Bruce Scheier's blog post , I decided it would be amusing to search for my name on it, just to see if there was anything surprising. While…

I've updated my main website to be something a little more current. Given that I'm actually using this blog on a regular basis, and generating rss content in various other ways, it made sense to actually had dague.net…

ExifTagger has been doing reasonably well for me. I'm now about 40% through the honeymoon pictures (finally made it to yellowstone about 10 minutes ago). A couple usability things I've realized I should add: Jump 10 (or…

I've gotten ExifTagger, my program to edit comment and location exif tags in images, to the point of usefulness now. I just finished tagging all the images from the photographer at the wedding, and it was so much faster…

For the record, I have OpenOffice a fair shake, trying to use it for our wedding guest list. Had I known going into it that I'd be unable, in any way, to export the data into flat text, I never would have tried. That's…

'Note to self' Make sure to remove all pp stanzas for debugging rails apps under webrick. While they work fine there, that is printing to stdout for apache, and hence break everything when one of them is tripped. Lesson…

It's been a while, so there will probably be a couple of posts coming in rapid fire, especially as Tuesday is going to land me with a nice 7 hour car ride to Canada (at least I'm not doing it alone this year). A couple…

Every once in a while I love to look through my spam folder just to see what makes spamassassin mark something really high. Here is one that got 49 points: * 4.5 MIME_BOUND_DD_DIGITS Spam tool pattern in MIME boundary *…

I'm catching up on the mailing list for mercurial from the past couple of months. A couple really neat things in there: * Mercurial Quick Reference Cards . These are really awesome. I've got to print out copies for all…

In the near future, media will be revolutionized by the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the successors of the DVD. These two will be able to carry movies in much higher resolutions, dramatically improving image…

I really wish that Firefox set WM_URGENT when a new tab or window loaded. I need to look into what it would take to make that happen, as my use of Ion would end up being nirvana after that. Click on a link in an…

Funny and quick. My laptop has 7 days uptime (my month of uptime was killed by iwpriv ath0 mode 2 while doing wpa_supplicant things. 3rd time I've done that, 3rd time I've gotten killed on it). Even though wipes out much…

I was in the middle of this amusing exchange the other day. Names removed to protect the innocent, and summarized a bit. I like and respect everyone involved in the exchange, but it just shows a difference of world view.…

I had an interesting experience this weekend, in which I was finishing up my CS project for the semester (an Assembler written in Java), and found that I didn't really hate Java that much. The API is still a bit odd at…

While Sunday I was off curling all day, Saturday managed to be a pretty reasonable day for getting things done for the wedding, shower, and other obligations. I put together the automatic gallery script for Mike Fogg's…

On slashdot a couple of days ago I read this interesting article on collaboration , which I found to be quite insightful. It also strikes pretty close to home, as I'm in process of putting together a paper for an…

The name and the image caught my attention when looking through RSS. Given that finding a place we can all eat ends up being difficult at times, something like this might be quite helpful. :) And I, for one, welcome the…

While search the NIST Algorithms Dictionary for a simple sort algorithm that would be easy to write in CUSP asm, I came across gnome sort , which I'd never seen before. Gnome Sort is based on the technique used by the…

I just pushed out version 0.2 of rpm2rss , which I need to announce on FreshMeat still. This is an idea I came up with last month, as I maintain a number of Mandriva RPM s in a number 🔗💀 of locations . Honestly, most…

I just saw a link to this analysis of internet spellings of Aaarrgh on jwz's blog . It is one of those fun uses of google, as well as an interesting look at word usage. There is also a fun flash version When I was…