After many months of being utterly out of commission (and 8 years without any new posts… ehem), I'm pleased to finally have managed to restore my blog, so that visitors are no longer greeted with a directory listing featuring only a favicon.ico file.
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I recently discovered a neat little "trick" on my iPad (and iPhone): I've stumbled upon a way to listen to music streaming from Internet radio stations while I do "other things," like check my email, take photos, or write text messages.
As a number of perturbed status updates I'd posted to my Facebook profile in the wee hours of Friday morning suggested to my friends this AM, the health of my Mac Mini, Cylon.local, took a bit of a nose dive last night. Now, it's probably just a hard drive failure, which is actually not so bad [^1], but I won't know for sure until I take the little fella down to Tekserve's "ER" this weekend and get it properly diagnosed.
Here's a YouTube playlist of videos published by The White House, which includes the complete forum sessions that followed the President's opening remarks.
In January of 1998, Netscape — in a last-ditch effort to retaliate against Microsoft's domination of the browser market with its Internet Explorer browser — took to the strategy of open sourcing the source code for their flagship product, Netscape Navigator. And so the Mozilla Project was born, which has since brought the world the Firefox web browser, and the Thunderbird email client (as well a handful of other things).
A post from earlier today on the White House blog by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, announced the release of two new documents related to the Administration's "open government" initiatives:
On 23 November 2009, President Barack Obama announced the new Educate to Innovate program (full transcript). The program is an initiative to stimulate America's students to develop skills and consider careers in science, engineering, technology, and innovation.
Sometimes events arrive with a timing that is both serendipitous and uncanny. Only days after my last post, wherein I state a case for the growing importance of referencing the datasets and algorithms used in the distillation of research conclusions, comes a story about leaked correspondence records (email messages) amongst climate researchers working in affiliation with the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
Driven in large part by open government efforts initiated by the Obama Administration, and particularly Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, tremendous and rich data sets have become available from the federal government, as well as some state and local governments. This data is published digitally, in organized, well-known and documented formats.
These days, anyone organizing competent promotional efforts (events, organizations, themselves, etc) invests various degrees of their attentions to online efforts. One reason for this is economics: efforts to "spread the word" online has the potential to reach more people at the expense of fewer resources and, therefore, less money.