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).
Posts from 2009
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.
Thursday was a happy day for me. I was quite proud to learn yesterday that NYC has finally publicly demonstrated some evidence of tangible commitment to participating in the "open government" movement.
I recently discovered a handy little Facebook feature which allows you to tag friends (and Pages) in wall posts. It lets your audience know exactly who you're shouting out (or talking smack) to. So I threw together a quick video introduction to how to use it.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch published a post Friday, titled The Truth: What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC. It is—in my opinion—a fairly insightful piece, particularly regarding his analysis of Apple's seemingly misleading wording behind their reasons for "not approving" the Google Voice app for inclusion in the App Store.
Take this sucker with huge grains of salt.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's recent proposal to adopt so-called e-textbooks for his state's public school system has triggered a flurry of press coverage, as well as new products like the Kindle DX and CourseSmart's iPhone app in the market.
We're half way through 2009\. All the major browser vendors are shipping products with really great rendering engines now. Usage of the much-maligned Internet Explorer 6 has plummeted to the 15% neighborhood (stats vary, but they all show < 20%).
I've just invested several hours trying to get my system to use the Pear libraries from MacPorts rather than the Pear libraries I had installed years ago using the command line installer, as described here. This is largely because I'm happy to let the MacPorts package manager take care of upgrading my software, and making sure all inter-dependencies are looked after.
Unix. It's astonishingly flexible. This is, at different times, either wonderful or maddening.
Ballmer's at it again, idly laughing off Google's Chrome OS ... last thing he laughed off so boisterously was the iPhone, which he claimed had "no chance.
Gruber, writing about what he calls the Apple Way (emphasis added):
A summary from Web Worker Daily's 10 Golden Rules of Social Media:
Arnie discussing the imperative to modernize the publishing infrastructure in California's education system by moving to digital textbooks:
Comedian Louis C. K.'s piss-take at human behavior when our expectations are not met.
Thankfully, the Pre has been received with some great reviews, and it's truly something that its team can be proud of. But now that the mysterious device is becoming available to the masses, the nitpicking will begin (which is actually a great thing, incidentally).
I've lately been involved in a number of conversations about the value proposition of Twitter as a publishing platform to anyone interested in developing a public persona for a company, an organization, or even one's own career identity. What follows are ideas that have repeatedly surfaced during these conversations, as well as a handful of links I've been amassing from my reading, as well as links friends and colleagues have shared with me.
In thinking about Google Wave since last week's announcement—and thinking through its extendable document model (particularly its Gadgets API)—I began to realize that it reminded me of something I'd seen before; something from the past.
The Wall Street Journal ran a story on 30 May, titled <span class="title">On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired</span>.
I've lately been exploring the value proposition of RESTful APIs to organizations whose technological infrastructures are built upon a collection of legacy software components, customized to communicate with each other by highly tailored middleware software stacks.
So after a false start a couple of nights ago, I'm finally getting to watching the 1987 Schwarzenegger classic, The Running Man, which I believe it fair to describe as a movie that foretold modern culture's infatuation with so-called "Reality TV". For those unfamiliar with it, the movie is basically Survivor meets ancient Roman gladiatorial event.
A new website, Microsyntax.org is opening its doors. It aims at an attempt to offer some canonization to emergent linguistic conventions that grow organically on Twitter.
The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook. This in the run up to its June 12 presidential elections.
CNN has posted an article about a new zombie movie, called Colin, that is causing a stir at this year's Cannes festival.
The Symfony project has recently launched the Symfony Components sub-project and website. Its goal is to produce a collection of standalone libraries for PHP.
I'm so excited about this, I couldn't wait to post about it before diving in. I present proudly to you Data.gov.
I broke down and hacked my MIE. But just a teeny bit, though: I simply installed the Flock browser and added it to the application launcher.
I've recently been working on Symfony / Propel projects that deal with particularly large data sets. In such cases, Propel's documentation recommends a "lazy hydration" approach.
I recently bought my very first non-Apple computer. It's a netbook — the HP Mini 1120 NR. It comes in two flavors: Windows XP and Linux.
Jason Kincaid writes about the insights of Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
John Gruber recently published a characteristically insightful piece about the Verizon iPhone rumors in the press earlier this week. Speaking to rumors of what Business Week has called the "iPhone Lite," Gruber revisits Apple's introduction of the iPod Mini, which was the event that turned the iPod from a single product into a product family.
One of the amazing things about Twitter's simplicity is how well it lends itself to utilization in a variety of ways that weren't explicitly intended when it was initially designed.
Erik Sherman of BNET Technology highlights some interesting points:
A quick heads-up for those of you that find yourself using whiteboards a lot. Whiteboard Capture is a $1.99 iPhone app designed to help you make those whiteboard photos you take significantly more readable (and, therefore, more useful as reference).
At least, that's what Richard Wray and Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian conclude:
The recent media coverage about Palm having a lower-tier WebOS phone in the works — which I've already labled as madness, if true — has gotten me thinking about an old showmanship concept, called the art of the Reveal (or, more simply, the Reveal). It's a technique exploited by writers, directors, comedians, strippers, politicians, and carnies; anyone in the business of organizing a show.
TechCrunch is reporting that Palm is already creating a second WebOS device, code named Pixie, that will be a "low end" version of its upcoming (and as-yet unreleased) Pre.
BusinessWeek is carrying a story by Spencer E. Ante and Arik Hesseldahl, claiming familiarity with talks between Apple and Verizon regarding some upcoming "iPhone-like" products.
Troubled times are here for Microsoft; truly troubled times.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball yesterday wrote about the incredible variety of UI solutions to be found in the various Twitter client apps.
A bunch of Silicon Valley execs are in Iraq, apparently "explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.
Google recently posted about its new support for recognizing canonical URLs for page content.
Another painfully insightful piece by John Gruber.
My brother and I had been suffering from a chronic affliction for roughly the last decade. You see, every year or so, we'd have to reinstall Windows on the PCs in our father's office. The reasons for the re-installation ranged from viruses, to a hosed registry, and even hard drive failures; the poor man's PCs have seen it all.
In a Palm press release dated 8 January 2009, the company's president and CEO, Ed Colligan, said:
I've been eagerly following news about Palm's upcoming Pre smartphone. Even though I am not presently planning to pick one up for myself (for starters, there's no way in hell I'm signing up for Sprint service), I'm quite excited about this new contender in the smartphone market.
In contrast with the spirit of yesterday's link to Designing Convertbots application comes news of the confirmed continuation of effort to bring Microsoft Office to the iPhone.
The developers of the iPhone app Convertbot offer a glimpse into their design process.
Wu Wei is a Taoist concept that means "act without doing," or "action without effort." It is an ideal towards which the Taoist aims in life.
There has recently been quite a bit of controversy over Macheist, arguing that it's unfair to the participating developers, largely due to the "steep discount" at which these (largely great) apps are being sold. Some other arguments are simply in the sensationalist vein.
Arguably the best linguistic "style guide" ever written for contemporary English. Doubly-relevant to Uncarved, since it both informs the way I aim to write, and serves as a canon for how sentences and paragraphs can most optimally be constructed.
It didn't take very long, but I finally grew annoyed with Blogger. The Blogger bar permanently affixed to the top of the blog was the straw that broke the camel's back; though its presence seems perfectly reasonable, I just couldn't bear looking at it.
Dear LiveScribe Product Managers:
As evidenced by my recent post history, I've been thinking quite a bit about the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0, Apple's rumored "netbook" device, and generally evaluating Apple's products from a product design perspective.
That's what the iPhone Dev-Team are promising. Let's see.
I'm going to call my prediction a bust.
So here's the very first of what I'm sure will be many Apple announcement predictions I shall make on Uncarved.
So Courtney Gaines, of the Telegraph's "Gadget Inspectors" gadget reviews series rates the HTC G1 (the first Google phone) with a a 10/10 rating, citing capabilities that are theoretically possible in upcoming Android-based phones... what?!
Microsoft has recently announced that they will be entering the retail space with their own stores. Clearly they feel a need to compete with Apple's success in their retail endeavors. But, in a seeming effort to remain depressingly consistent, they're once again stealing from the surface and ignoring the treasures below.