The composable web I’ve just been looking at the new Google Buzz API . What struck me first was that it is built up completely from other established protocols: Atom extended with Atom Threading Extensions , MediaRSS , Activity Streams , and PubSubHubbub . Notes on future directions include support for Atom Publishing Protocol for posting and editing messages, Salmon…

We need a data API for the web HTML won for human-readable data. We can point our browsers in any direction we please and we can expect to get something that is at least partially decipherable as human-readable content. The same is not true for data yet. What is the equivalent for data? It is not XML, since there are…

Failure is not the goal “Fail often” is a recurring mantra among many startup thought leaders, but there is a disconnect between the meaning of the phrase and the semantics that it is intended to convey in the context of startups that has been grating on me. I understand the intent of statements like this, but I really think that…

Thoughts on Apple’s new tablet: the iPad I’ve been writing about tablet devices on this blog, so I wanted to put my initial thoughts out there on today’s announcement of the iPad. I wrote earlier that in order to succeed where others had failed, a new tablet device would have to re-invent the UI completely. What I failed to notice…

Source control in the cloud I’ve been experimenting with using GitHub for a few small projects that I have in mind, and I just had a minor revelation about having source control as a web service. I checked in a file and realized that I didn’t finish commenting something important in the header. Ordinarily I would have gone back to…

Stereo imaging for tutorial images I was watching a Discovery Channel interview with James Cameron about the filming of Avatar. One thing that struck me was his comparison of shooting in 3D to shooting in color. When color film was first introduced in cinema years ago, studios didn’t stop shooting black and white overnight, there was a period of overlap.…

Is the cognitive surplus real? I re-read some of Clay Shirky’s writing about the idea of cognitive surplus recently. While the ideas are powerful and well researched, I still have some misgivings about the value of the supposed cognitive surplus that was soaked up by television over the years and is increasingly channeled now online. While television is widely derided…

Recording webcam videos with VLC Media Player I have been recording short videos using the webcam on my laptop using a trial version of some video software that I found on the net. I had also been using the free Yawcam to snap stills, but I didn’t figure out how to get it to record video. It apparently can periodically…

Cycle time of an online community I have taken part in many online communities over the years and I have noticed that no matter what, there are certain cycles that tend to happen. There have been articles written about how sites such as Reddit or Digg change longitudinally over time, but one thing that I’m most interested in is the…

Zero an old hard disk using dd Any time I get rid of a hard disk, I always overwrite the whole drive with zeroes. I know that this is not a secure practice if you are going to be selling the drive, but since the drive is going to the computer recycling center and the data isn’t a matter of…