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Blog
http://blog.jonudell.net/
November 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 moreVisualizing Nobel Peace Prize winners in Freebase
October 10 2009
When I watched Barack Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize, I thought about how the world has changed since the inception of the prize, and how it will continue to change. Since the winners of the Prize are themselves a reflection of what’s changing, I thought I’d try using Freebase… read moreMagic glasses and magic projectors: Private versus public augmentation of experience
October 08 2009
At its core, your browser is powered by an engine called the Document Object Model, hereafter DOM. You can think of the DOM as an outline, and the browser as an outline processor that shows and hides things, displays things in different ways, and even adds, removes, or rearranges things.… read moreTalking with Victoria Stodden about Science Commons
October 07 2009
On this week’s Innovators show I spoke with Victoria Stodden about Science Commons, an effort to bring the values and methods of Creative Commons to the realm of science. Because modern science is so data- and computation-intensive, Science Commons provides legal tools that govern the sharing of data and code.… read moreQuerying mobile data objects with LINQ
September 29 2009
I’m using US census data to look up the estimated populations of the cities and towns running elmcity hubs. The dataset is just plain old CSV (comma-separated variable), a format that’s more popular than ever thanks in part to a new wave of web-based data services like DabbleDB, ManyEyes, and… read moreTalking with Stefano Mazzocchi about reconciling web naming systems
September 28 2009
When Stefano Mazzocchi saw my posts on webscale identiers[1, 2] he pointed me to some recent work he and others have been doing at Metaweb. At ids.freebaseapps.com you can find sets of different web identifiers that refer to the same things. So, for example: Apple Inc. versus Apple Records Each of… read more
