zackham

clickable link http://www.meraiphone.com

I read this comment and was nodding along thinking this sounded exactly why I'm happy with my bootstrapped project, then looked at the username and realized you are my co-founder, doh =)

This is great. Their walking paths work alright for this purpose, since there are many paths you can get routed over that are not roads. This project will add many new paths so that is a good thing. There are several issues with walking paths that this will remedy though - for example, you can be routed the wrong way down a one way street with walking directions, which I imagine will not be allowed in the cycling directions.

The article seems to focus on the big picture of log files of services that are all interconnected in some way... this makes for the most impressive mental picture perhaps, forming "the tributaries feeding an ocean of data in the Cloud"; however, the exponential decrease in cost of computing power, data storage, and bandwidth has this effect on any information that we can digitize. Some of the most interesting developments will likely be in more or less isolated fields. I am excited to see the interplay between field-specific developments (finding patterns in a genome) and broader algorithmic work (finding patterns in any data). I suppose this is already happening, but it will become increasingly visible to laymen over time.

This should integrate really nicely into any of the MVC frameworks, just tell the hub whenever a model is created or updated that has its own page which you want to be indexed.

I understand you can generate and submit sitemaps, but pinging a hub after save makes a lot more sense to me than periodically generating a potentially huge sitemap and submitting the whole thing.

What about the very common cases where you need to do very simple things, like common CRUD operations? Abstracting the SQL required for these simple queries makes a lot of sense to me.

Everyone is tainted by their own experience, I suppose, but I feel like I get to work on plenty of interesting problems. What bothers me (and this author it seems) is having to spend your time learning arbitrary things, such as an XML format for a configuration file, or nuances of how different browsers handle different conditions.

However, we (web developers at least) are writing software that is supposed to run on just about any hardware / OS / browser combination, and making that happen and doing complex and interesting things in that context is going to involve lots of arbitrary details.

That being said, if I think back 10 years, this type of work has become dramatically more pleasant thanks to a lot of open source software that has matured in that time.

If the complaint is that we can't all write our own virtual memory system or our own b-tree, I suppose I can't disagree that that is becoming less of a reality. However, solving interesting problems still requires an understanding of these things, and using existing libraries in my experience saves me time and allows me to have a bigger-picture view and solve larger problems. It is still very satisfying. If this article is written from the perspective of someone automating simple and mundane business processes, putting together forms, etc, then I believe the complaints are misdirected.

Link to the actual indictment, which has a lot more information: http://www.justice.gov/usao/nj/press/press/files/pdffiles/Wi...

The indictment has lots of interesting technical details about what they were doing.

Also very interesting and not mentioned in the article is on page 27: 41. It was further part of the conspiracy that, in or about 2008, having damaged the Online Ticket Vendors' ability to distribute Event tickets fairly on a first-come, first-served basis, defendants LOWSON and KIRSCH would establish and operate Renaissance Events Management ("REM"), a company that proposed to sell Event tickets on behalf of artists and venues as a competitor of Online Ticket Vendors.

I don't think it is fair to criticize patents on DNA and defend patents on software with the argument that DNA is just a combination of four characters - you could say the same thing about any piece of encoded information, software most notably in binary.

Is this solely due to content delivery speeds? Or, was the prior slowness due in part to producing dynamic content? Congrats on the change, getting your page to appear more quickly on the users screen is hugely beneficial.

This is great news. Further adoption of web sockets and PuSH (a little less ridiculous than PubSubHubBub) is good for developers and users alike. More interesting web experiences for users, and more business and hobby opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs.

One issue with this approach is that the author is allowing users to start the background work, rather than putting it into a queue like he had been doing with his prior site. If his site gets slammed, this will be a problem, whereas with a queue he could set up his interface to let the user continue browsing the site while his/her work makes its way through the queue.

One nice find from the article is the link to the Flash implementation of websockets: http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js

Working on a JSON stream parser in AS3, reading data with flash.net.URLStream, for loading up GPS data progressively. The JSON for a ride like this (http://ridewithgps.com/trips/2000) is about 300k, and I think it will look much cooler if it draws as it downloads.

I often use lists in the development of a new feature, and do not consider it a creativity killer. Start with an insight, and break it down into simple steps or components. If this list is crap, it is obvious at that point and can be scrapped and the process can be tried again. For me the creative aspect of a feature is the original insight, and it is usually easy to judge a proposed implementation against how well it achieves that insight.

Consistently crashes Chrome 4.0.266.0 on Ubuntu

I often search this way first, and if I don't find a suitable result, leverage my assumptions about how searching works. I don't know what Google is doing behind the scenes, so my assumptions may be wrong. I like to give Google the benefit of the doubt though, because I know there is an eventual goal of supporting this type of querying.

We are getting international data through their web service currently, but will be integrating an international data set soon.

This is a great idea for an app for a phone with an accelerometer. Thanks for the input!

Excellent point, thanks for the feedback!

That text is outdated =)

The USGS will give you their entire data set (mostly 1/3 arcsecond) if you send them a 500 gb external drive. We expose a web service to get at this data set quickly for our planning flash app and some of our background tasks.

I'm surprised he didn't question how the link between the characters and the avatars worked. Everything else seemed plausible enough, but I struggled to find an explanation for this. Any thoughts?

Paywalled search can definitely work, given that you are searching an exclusive data set. Look to Lexis Nexis.

Other: Actionscript 3

This is incredibly speculative – it reads like a social media conspiracy theory. An interesting look into the mind of the author. The way this is written makes it seem like he wrote it furiously and wide-eyed.

shoot me an email if you'd like to chat about http://ridewithgps.com - zackham@gmail.com

This looks great, will be using it. If I run into anything I'll let you know. Am I safe in assuming that if canvas is not supported it just does around-the-image wrapping?

The Timeless Way of Building (and A Pattern Language) by Christopher Alexander is a great architecture book that was influential in computer science. Interdisciplinary books like this are a great way to connect the dots.

A nice value add over what you can already do by just posting a Facebook status update / shooting out a message on Twitter would be to do a time-delayed push of the message. If I know I want to go shoot pool tomorrow night, put that on your site, shoot it out over Facebook/Twitter/whatever with a link back to your site, then if I haven't created plans, push out a 'last chance' status update that is closer to the time when I want to go do whatever it is I wanted to do.

More generically, I can see value in choosing a strategy to publish information at some future time and not having to do it manually.

Wade - so far so good. I love tools that require minimal input from me and perform some magic. Will be in touch.