Biography
Books
|
|
|
(
Blog
http://blog.jonudell.net/
Kill-A-Watt, WolframAlpha, and the itemized electric bill
December 02 2009
I’ve always imagined getting an itemized electric bill. We’re not there yet, but when I saw a Kill-A-Watt at Radio Shack last night I remembered the discussion thread at this 2007 blog post and impulsively bought it. In a way I’m glad I waited until 2009 because a companion tool… read moreTalking with Martin Hepp about solving the paradox of choice
November 23 2009
In his luminous essay Information obesity, Ned Gulley illustrates the paradox of choice: I’m reading about the Mohawk Trail, where the Cold River crashes noisily down the granitic glacier-fractured hillside. Where whispering understory birches are sheltered by towering firs. Now my mouth is watering. I have to go. I am… read moreSQL Azure “Vidalia”: Practical translucency
November 20 2009
Ever since Peter Wayner introduced me to the idea of a translucent database I’ve been thinking about the implications of this powerful idea. In a nutshell, the data in a translucent database service is opaque to the operator of the service, and visible only to sets of users who establish… read moreOData is grease to cut data friction
November 18 2009
Back in 2007 I talked with Pablo Castro about Astoria, which I described as a way of making data readable and writeable by means of a RESTful interface. The technology has continued to move forward, and I’m now a heavy user of one of its implementations: the Azure table store.… read moreTalking with Gavin Bell about Building Social Web Applications
November 16 2009
My guest for this week’s Innovators show is Gavin Bell, author of Building Social Web Applications. A lot has changed in the decade since I wrote my own book on this topic. One constant, as we discuss in the podcast, is that we still reach for special terminology like computer-supported… read moreNovember 09 2009
Over the weekend I was poking around in the recipient-reported data at recovery.gov. I filtered the New Hampshire spreadsheet down to items for my town, Keene, and was a bit surprised to find no descriptions in many cases. Here’s the breakdown: # of awards 25 # of awards with descriptions 05 20% #… read moreTalking with Marco Barulli about zero-knowledge online password management
November 02 2009
A couple of years ago I was enamored with a clever password manager that pointed the way toward an ideal solution. It was really just a bookmarklet — a small chunk of JavaScript code — that used a simple method to produce a unique and strong password for the website… read moreA literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database
October 23 2009
You will probably never need to know about the Olson database, also known as the Zoneinfo or tz database. And were it not for my elmcity project I never would have looked into it. I knew roughly that this bedrock database is a compendium of definitions of the world’s timezones,… read moreMore Python and C# idioms: Finding the difference between two list
October 22 2009
Recently I’ve posted two examples[1, 2] of Python idioms alongside corresponding C# idioms. It always intrigues me to look at the same concept through different lenses, and it seems to intrigue others as well, so here’s a third installment. Today’s example comes from a real scenario. I’ve recently added a… read moreTo: elmcity, From: @curator, Message: start
October 21 2009
Because I am lazy, curious, and evangelical, the elmcity service in an unusual way. Anything that I can delegate to other services I do. So when curators add feeds to hubs, or modify the behavior of hubs, they do it by bookmarking and tagging URLs at delicious.com. It would be… read moreRestructuring expert attention to revive the lost art of personal customer service
October 20 2009
Instead of mourning the lost art of personal customer service, I would rather celebrate examples that show it’s still possible. Yesterday I found two gems. First, Southwest Airlines. I had booked a round-trip flight and then needed to change to one-way. You can’t do that online. So I clenched my… read moreAllman Brothers, Oct 14: Huntington or Nashville? A parable about syndication and provenance.
October 15 2009
Yesterday Bill Rawlinson, the elmcity curator for Huntington, WV, noticed something odd about an event that showed up on Eventful.com: Here’s the example: http://eventful.com/huntington/events/allman-brothers-/E0-001-020736056-0. It appears the Allman Brothers were in concert today, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t. I’m pretty sure they weren’t either. At AllmanBrothersBand.com it says they… read moreTalking with Daniel Debow about using Rypple to open the Johari Window
October 13 2009
On this week’s Innovators show with Daniel Debow of Rypple I learned about a cognitive psychological tool called the Johari Window. Rypple focuses on the quadrant of the Johari window at the intersection of “known to others” and “not known to self” — the so-called blind area. The company is… read moreMore visualization of Nobel Peace Prize winners in Freebase
October 12 2009
To sharpen the point I made the other day about the eroding bias toward giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Americans and Europeans, here’s a comparison of the nationalities of winners before and after 1960. 1901-2009 nobel peace prize winners by nationality before 1960 after 1960 Here’s another point I forgot… read moreRecovering forgotten methods of construction
October 11 2009
After feasting on audio podcasts for years, I realized that I don’t always want somebody else’s voice in my head while running, biking, and hiking. So I went on an audio fast for a couple of months. But now I’m ready for more input, and I’m once again reminded how… read more
