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http://blog.jonudell.net/
December 30 2009
Borrowing Bruce Schneier’s wonderful term security theater, Rohit Khare has written about privacy theater. Not to be outdone, here’s a letter to my local newspaper about carbon theater. To: Editors Re: Carbon challenge in home stretch We love our sports rivalries, and the classic contest between Keene and Portsmouth has riveted… read moreGov2.0 transparency: An enabler for collaborative sense-making
December 28 2009
Recently my town has adopted two innovative web services that I’ve featured on my podcast: CrimeReports.com, which does what its name suggests, and Granicus.com, which delivers video of city council meetings along with synchronized documents. You can see the Keene instance of CrimeReports here, and our Granicus instance here. ‘m… read moreTalking with Howard Eglowstein about micro-CHP and the maker renaissance
December 21 2009
My guest for this week’s Innovators show is my old BYTE pal Howard Eglowstein. Nowadays he’s working for freewatt, a residential micro-CHP (combined heat and power) system, and our conversation revolved partly around that technology. But I also invited Howard to reflect on the cultural phenomenon that’s celebrated in the… read moreComputational thinking and energy literacy
December 16 2009
One of the themes I’ve been exploring for the past few years is computational thinking. It’s an evocative phrase that has led me in a few different directions. One is my intentional use of tagging and syndication as key strategies for social information management. Another is my growing interest in… read moreTalking with Randy Julian about bioinformatics
December 15 2009
My guest for this week’s Innovators show, Randy Julian, founded the bioinformatics company Indigo BioSystems to help modernize the process of drug discovery. The challenge — and opportunity — is partly to standardize the data formats used to represent experimental data, and to locate that data in shared spaces where… read moreDecember 14 2009
In January 2009 I wrote a series of entries [1, 2, 3] documenting examples of ill-formed iCalendar files. And I argued that we need an analog, in calendar space, to the incredibly useful RSS/Atom feed validator. I’m delighted to report that Doug Day has taken up the challenge. The first… read moreStewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline
December 08 2009
I’ve deeply enjoyed every one of the Long Now seminars, but it wasn’t until this one by Stewart Brand in October that I really got what he’s up to as the convener of this remarkable series of talks. In October he appeared as speaker rather than host/interviewer, and he summarized… read moreKill-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 moreBuy Now and Save
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