106 Miles to Chicago

Stamen and Trulia

At XTech, a few of the Stamen Design folks gave a presentation looking at the different ways to express time visually. I enjoyed the presentation quite a bit though I wish more of the audience would have come earlier to hear my talk since they spoke right after me but that's neither here nor there.

At any rate, they gave a sneak-peek at their latest project, a visual representation of the growth of populations. Now the project has been launched and it looks really interesting. Trulia, a real estate site is using their data to show how cities evolved over time via Hindsight. [ via ]

Technorati Tags:
stamen, trulia+hindsight

Log4Twitter

Being on the Twitter API development list is a good way to hear about new little apps before everyone else. Case in point, Log4Twitter. It's an Appender to log4j which is pretty much the standard logging component for any Java project.

This wouldn't be for debug logging or information logging. I think it could be useful for those fatal happenings when things are breaking and shutting down. By using Twitter, you could easily subscribe to an account, mark it private and have an easy way of getting notified when something catastrophic happens.

I think piggybacks nicely on the concept of Twitter as a message bus, whether human or computer. That is a direction which could make things very interesting.

The other thing that happens as more machines enter spaces previously restricted to humans is that the potential for interaction based on overhearing emerges. I used “overheard” very deliberately earlier - to suggest we’re not getting the original message (which, presumably, is in XML or binary or something) but a chinese whisper of it, cast out in public via Twitter. But now imagine if the API is two ways, and telescopes, watching the Twitter timeline can start acting upon the things they overhear. Scheduling software overhearing the Victoria line announcing that it’s broken. My cooker picking up that I’m leaving the office.

Technorati Tags: twitter+as+message+bus, twitter, log4twitter

Creating a Web Framework with Conventions

Joe Gregorio has an awesome post detailing the work needed to create a Web framework with some very nice conventions.

They key point of adding 'conventions' is to take a load off the user. You need to actually remove two kinds of load, cognitive and manual. Cognitive load is the number of concepts you need to hold in your head. The fewer the number of concepts, and the more uniformly they are applied, the easier the system will be to use. Manual load is just the amount of manual stuff, like typing, that you need to do. Why should I have to manually create a directory structure when a computer is capable of doing that?

I think this is a great blueprint for any investigation one could do in building something new for the Web, no matter the language. Much has been said about frameworks like Rails and Django but they are not the end of development or at least they shouldn't be looked at that way. There is always room for innovation and improvement, for new and different ideas to take hold. Look at the attention Seaside is getting for an example of that.

What Joe has done is show the way any language can building something with constraints. I think you could easily use this post as a way of improving your skills in the language of your choice.

Yay Ducks!

Ducks are heading back to the Finals! Awesome!

Extending Philadelphia Wireless

CrunchGear notes that our extending Philadelphia wireless network should soon be ready to go. I think that's just awesome and I'm really happy with the extension of the network. Hopefully the folks in Philly feel the same way once they are able to use it.

Even though there have been quite a few recent articles talking about the struggles of Municipal Wireless, I honestly think there is an opportunity to do some amazing things based on location. Hopefully we'll be able to start building those things.

One somewhat selfish note though, it would have been nice if the CrunchGear post would have at least mentioned EarthLink but that's really neither here nor there.

Technorati Tags:
earthlink, municpal+wireless, philly

Memcached

A few memcached-related blog posts over the last couple of days.

First, Tobias Luetke gives the the secret to memcached. It boils down to being as specific as you can with your memcached requests. In his example, part of the key was a version number which gets revved any time an update to a product is done. That way, cache misses will occur automatically after an update without trying to manage a full sweep of the cache.

Second, Greg Luck compares Ehcache with memcached and finds Ehcache to be faster. That's somewhat understandable since Ehcache is being a local cache and obviously memcached has the network overhead for any put/get. I think these two have different roles and it isn't that useful of a comparison. Kevin Burton has some additional thoughts on the benchmarks.

Technorati Tags:
memcached, ehcache

Ignite Where

Looks like some very cool talks at the Ignite Where day during Where 2.0 next week. Really wish I could have made it to Where 2.0 but I think more travel would not have made the domestic life very easy.

Universal Search and Personalization

One of the aspects of my talk at XTech was the addition of contexts to our search queries and how that will be necessary as we move further into a world where always-on connections are the norm. One of those contexts is personalization and it's very interesting how much Google seems to be pushing the personalization aspect of their new universal search.

Greg Linden gives a perfect overview of personalization and how it can change results:

But, the best answer for me is not necessarily the best answer for you. Especially in cases where there is ambiguity in intent and multiple possible verticals that might be relevant, the deciding factor could be what I have done in the past, my search and web history.

Technorati Tags: search, greg+linden, personalization, searching+the+now, google

Lazy XTech Request for a PowerBook G4 adapter for presentation

So, even though I thought I double-checked putting my adapter in my bag before leaving the office last Friday, I now realize I don't have my adapter for my presentation in the morning. Anyone at XTech have one for a PowerBook G4? I would be ever so grateful.

Technorati Tags:
xtech, xtech2007

Be on the lookout

You never know where terror might lurk..

Treo 650 constantly rebooting

My Treo has been on the fritz the past few days, constantly rebooting itself. I did the various soft and warm resets but didn't go as far as a full, hard reset. I found this blog post by Chad Dickerson, giving instructions on how to delete a corrupt message database. I followed them and they are working so far. Awesome!

Some Random Ruby / Rails goodness

Here's a few Ruby / Rails things I've seen around the Web the last few days. All are pretty cool...

Evan Weaver shows off some MySQL configurations for Rails.

Ilya Grigorik creates a simple RSS aggregator in 26 lines of Ruby code.

Here's a custom Mongrel handler to create an XML-RPC server. I've been digging a bit more into Mongrel and custom handlers. I have some ideas for simple servers at work which might benefit from this sort of thing instead of the monstrosity that is JBoss.

And finally, splatter that array.

Technorati Tags:
rss, rubyonrails, mongrel, custom+mongrel+handlers

Satisfaction on Digg

The folks over at Satisfaction have a great post looking into the Digg revolt from earlier in the week. Lots has been written about it and obviously more will continue.

I was thinking about starting a pool at work, having people bet on when a Product Manager is going to bring up the Digg situation as a reason why we shouldn't try to anything with community involved. I'm sure it's going to be soon.

At any rate, the key to the post was this: be completely transparent with users from the beginning. That's how all of the angst could have been avoided. Keeping your users involved is so very important when building a site that depends on their continued use. Kevin Rose has a long history of doing it and it's too bad he didn't start with it this time.

Technorati Tags:
satisfaction, digg, digg+user+revolt, being+transparent

Ameriganzapalooza

Cindy Li and Jason Garber have travelled across the country. Here's the stream of data they generated with the help of Twitter, Flickr and blog posts. It's really an impressive thing when simple data updates can be put together to form a last impression of a trip or event.

I know one of the latest rages is the concept of life streams where you combine all of your feeds into one in order to let everyone know what's going on. I think that's pretty cool overall but the idea of a limited time stream seems even better. You can keep the snapshot together of what you were thinking and doing, what you were thinking and who you were with. It could be a pretty cool service to allow people to create the short-term streams, something like the old idea of short-term blogs which sprung up for events or meetings.

Perhaps I'll try and do something similar for my trip to Paris. I leave next Sunday. I should be updating Twitter, Flickr, hopefully this blog and whatever else I can do.

Technorati Tags:
xtech2007, lifestreams, ameriganzapalooza

Unofficial MySQL Conference Podcast

Kevin Burton has put together a podcast of a few talks from the MySQL conference. Definitely looks like some good ones.