Buzzword Compliant

BoingBoing’s post today about the Wikipedia Quake Tree below caught my eye as I had played so many of Quake and Quake derivatives. I was curious just how many and went through and highlighted all the ones I remembered on the pic below.

Tags: quaketaxonomy

Nelson Minar was helping a friend sort out why: “Google Reader was sending folks to his own domain rather than directly to the link destination.”

Turns out it is because of the differences between guid and link elements in an RSS Feed. You can tell he’s really frustrated with the time and effort this cost him (my most recent RSS pet peeve is people who put dates in that occur several hours into the future), but I think it’s one of those maddening things that has a reasonable explanation. The presence of guid itself is optional, and the developer community as a whole has pretty much deprecated it’s use in favor of using “link”. So, when in doubt leave it out (or If the guid don’t fit, don’t submit … your edits back into SVN).

Andy Baio (who just completed a sweet redesign to Waxy) was having similar problems with the default guid behavior could potentially have used the guid element for his Waxy Links section. It would be within the bounds of the spec to have all the links pointing to the main Waxy.or: Links, but set each of their guid’s differently so as not to confuse RSS readers into thinking they had already consumed a particular page.

While this is certainly arcane knowledge of interest to only those working on a close basis with feeds and feedreaders, it’s interesting from a broader sense in how time, expectations, preset defaults and implicit decisions about how to use something effect actions made later on.

I hadn’t checked out any of the FastCompany.TV ScobleShows. The one that caught my eye is below and features a tour and some extensive interviews with various Rackspace higher ups as they tour and discuss their reasoning for taking over an abandoned mall and making it into a new high tech data center. What I found most fascinating wasn’t the “tech” angle of this, rather the longer term implications for urban blight and revitalization.

The quick summary is that due to the cheap lease price, mall architecture (it’s a big box that was designed to be gutted and split up), and electricity pricing in the area what was a massive eyesore and huge problem is suddenly a revitalizing force bringing 1400 tech jobs into the area.

Rolling Acres Mall in Akron Ohio (the mall I went to growing up) suffered a similar fate to the San Antonio mall described in the video. It slowly became a ghost town of crappy shops selling jewelry that was nearly gold and for some reason an inordinate number of storefront churches. Outwardly at least it would be a good candidate for a similar conversion: cheap electricity from the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, close proximity to the University of Akron, and at this point Akron would probably pay somebody to occupy the building.

I didn’t realize that it had been so long since I’d posted anything (or even looked at this site), but was motivated to dig back in after seeing Kevin Burton’s posts about the WordPress BlogSpam Cancer that is rapidly spreading.

I have a sort of sick fascination with these weird new security threats as they flow across the internet, get beaten back, mutate and come back again. It’s XKCD’s Malware Aquarium fascination played out in real life.

I was trying to figure out how you could potentially make a SETI@Home client implemented in Javascript. With some quick Googling I found an interesting proof of concept paper describing: “Unwitting Distributed Genetic Programming via Asynchronous JavaScript and XML“.

We present a proof-of-concept system for
distributed computation of genetic programming via asyn-
chronous javascript and XML (AJAX) techniques which re-
quires no explicit user interaction and no installation of
client side software. Clients automatically and possibly even
unknowingly participate in a distributed genetic program-
ming system simply by visiting a webpage, thereby allowing
for the solution of genetic programming problems without
running a single local fitness evaluation. The system can be
easily introduced into existing webpages to exploit unused
client-side computation for the solution of genetic program-
ming and other problems.

Which I thought lent some interesting quasi legitimacy to my idea, only to almost immediately have my all these hopes dashed by the SETI@Home problem. Essentially the question is: How Can You Verify the results of a Distributed Calculation.

Potentially well meaning, developers have sought to “improve” the underlying SETI@Home algorithm to make it faster and to gain massive nerd bragging rights.
Unfortunately, the side effect of this also risks introducing subtle and overall extremely disruptive statistical anomalies into the overall project.

So, to combat well meaning, but misguided ideas like mine, the SETI project has implemented some classic methods of verifying distributed computations.

What is most interesting with all the the different techniques is that you get a real sense of a vibrant computational ecosystem of checks and cross checks happening within the staid confines of what is essentially a giant math problem.

A huge pain while travelling is getting to your hotel with *FREE* Internet access only to find that all the bandwidth is being used by Room 204 in an attempt to download the Internet for their personal use; burning all the available bandwidth and reducing your attempts to check email to the 14.4 days.

I’ve been using a Sprint PCS modem with my laptop to insure that I don’t fall into Internet withdrawals and even when a hotel’s wireless is working well, I’m finding it to often still be twice as slow as the modem.

Hotel Access Numbers

Sprint Wireless Numbers

I’d previously written about GigPress the customized just for bands WordPress installation.

Today Scott Kurtz of PVP fame is writing about moving over his extremely popular site to ComicPress the WordPress installation designed just for Web Comic writers.

Even if you are not a fan of PVP (which you should be), I’d recommend checking it out as it starts to dig into some unique aspects of web publishing that are applicable to many other areas.

• How to structure a decade of archived visual works
• How to draw new readers into non-date specific story arcs (there aren’t “seasons” to the comic)

I was Googling for a Ruby to AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) library this evening and came across Raimbo

In keeping with this naming theme, the developer has some of the most evocative version release names I’ve ever seen. Checkout the screenshot:

Both Fake Steve Jobs and Real Om Malik are writing about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article about the newly launched device.

If you haven’t heard Nicholas Negroponte’s TED Talks presentation about the OLPC now, I would really urge you to take a few minutes to check it out as it’s a high point in the mix of social responsibility, technological progress and economics.

What really stuck in my mind from the presentation was: “What is failure?” and that it is not so much about shipping umpteen million of these devices, but about changing the process of how it is done and the attention that is paid to the 80% (my wildly unsourced, made up on the spot figure) of the world that doesn’t currently have a computer.

Is it a “failure” if the laptops are $145 a piece at launch?

Is it a “failure” if they ship 3 months behind schedule?

Is it a “failure” if they draw so much attention to these problems that other larger organizations step in to try to offer similar services?