Archive for May, 2007

Not bad. Even before the iPhone hit the streets, Microsoft pushes out their clone. Too bad they lost the form factor. It’d be hard to fit that sucker in a pocket… Photo by sorenshaman I kid. A little. I want a multi-touch tactile interface. Now. »

I’ve been trying. Really trying. I just can’t find a way to “get” what all of the SecondLife hype is about. I mean, yeah, it’s cool. It’s fun. It’s a really interesting and diverse metaverse. It’s a blast to create and buy stuff, and customize an avatar, and fly around islands. I get that... »

The latest National Geographic came in the mail today. I find it a little ironic that a magazine that’s had such a strong bent toward showcasing the effects of global warming is printed on dead trees and trucked around the world to be delivered into our mailboxes, but whatever… When I get a fresh new... »

Want to work at the Teaching & Learning Centre? We’re hiring. It’s a tenure track position, working on coordinating our major teaching workshops. photo by small ape »

My blog often has fits of sucktacular performance. After digging around, and bugging DreamHost support for some ideas, I’ve made some progress. I had been running wp-cache to enable file-based caching, thinking that would help optimize performance of the site (fewer database calls should equal better performance) – except that DreamHost apparently uses NFS-mounted storage... »

With all of this Web 2.0 activity still building, I’ve been thinking about Cory Doctorow’s concept of whuffie or social currency (from his great short story Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) quite a bit. The idea being that you can “pay” others with a mythical currency based on reputation, not gold. Those... »

I’d been thinking that WordPress might be tricky to scale, but between WP-Cache and the newly announced HyperDB, I think WP might well have some legs in it. WP-Cache stores pages as static files, and dramatically reduces the load on the database. This makes sites more responsive, and at least theoretically able to survive a... »

While chatting with Scott at ETUG, he commented that he was frustrated with Twitter. Both because of the constant flakiness, and the negative effect it’s having on many people’s blog posting activity. I’m definitely posting less frequently since getting bitten by the Twitter bug. At first, I didn’t see the problem, but then he explained... »

Things are getting out of hand, when Peak Oil – the end of cheap petroleum – is the only way I can see out of this mess. It would help reduce carbon emissions, and it would help reduce our environmental exposure to plastics and plastic byproducts like Bisphenol-A. My friend Niran gave a rundown of... »

OpenID appears to be gaining some momentum. It feels like the right approach to identity management – let individuals control their identity in a trusted way, rather than relying on federation through central brokers. Sun Microsystems just rolled out OpenID support for all of their employees. Stephen’s been talking about this kind of decentralized... »