[GEEKY] How to use Twitter in Rails
This looks like a really nice and detailed tutorial on how to use Twitter in Rails. Check it out! p.s. if you don’t know what the previous sentence means, don’t worry about it. You must not really be geeky.
Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
Page 75 of 142 (2823 total posts)
June 2010
[GEEKY] Nuances about REST
While teaching at Brandeis University this summer (see Cosi JBS Web Site) I’ve come to think a lot more deeply about the often cliche’d ‘REST’ approach to developing Web Services APIs. As everyone always says, when you try and ex...
Read more →TIvo has an outrageous sale going on
Right now, take a look at Tivo’s Site. They are ‘giving away’ refurbished Tivos for $30.00. I just bought one the other day for $50 (they lowered the price again.) They must have a warehouse full of these. I think the very comprehensive set of cables that come with the device alone are worth the $30
We go full circle: Google Command Line Tool
Check out Introducing the Google Command Line Tool(from Google Open Source Blog: ** "GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs." (from: **Introducing the Google Command Line Tool) .
MySpace Loses a Co-President
Check out MySpace Loses a Co-President(from Mashable!: ** "Space has announced that Co-President Jason Hirschorn has decided to leave the company, marking the exit of yet another top-level executive from the declining social network." (from: **MySpace Loses a Co-President) Don’t we know by now that co-presidents don’t work? We used to call it ‘two in a box’ and it was never a success. By the way, MySpace? They still around?
Hubris, Technology and a Whale
A couple of New York Times articles today that point out (what others have pointed out too) that the roots of the disaster in the Gulf have a lot in common with those of the Economic meltdown last year: **“AS the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico follows on the heels of the financial crisis, we can di...
Read more →Safari now has Scribefire
Yay! One reason holding me to using FireFox on Mac was that I rely heavily on Scribefire which was not really working on Safari. I am using it now on Safari 5. It seems ok but, first blush it doesn’t seem quite as nice...
Read more →Live weather radar
It was dark and thundering and lightening today at 4 in the afternoon. I found this really nice animated radar weather map of the last 2 hours. I am sure it’s just one of many but I hadn’t seen this one before. Enjoy! Live Weather Radar 
Don Dodge on your creative genius
I came across this good post from Don Dodge which I wanted to share. Don was at Microsoft and is now at Google. He cites a [New York Times article about creativity](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/boo...
Read more →May 2010
Interesting article about technology and risk
David Brooks of the New York Times writes about technology and risk, in the context of the drilling disaster in the Gulf: **“Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the ...
Read more →We need a debt rating service rating service
Very meta. Who rates the rating services? I saw this in the Wall Street Journal, an article today called Stocks Wind Down a Brutal May: **“Trading was especially volatile in the ...
Read more →MSFT and APPL
I saw this bit today: “Apple: Will Steve Balmer Show Up At The WWDC Keynote?”. Interesting… It leads me to speculate in a different direction. What if Google is distancing itself from Apple over competition between Android and iPhone? And so, what if in anticipation of this, Apple, knowing that it couldn’t ALSO be in the business of creating a world class mapping service, decides to move native support of the iPhone mapping app from Google Maps to Microsoft Maps? Good theory?
I guess it’s 2010 and this is Cambridge
From a signup form at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.
Wall Street Traders == Hackers
Mark Cuban comes up with a very plausible analogy: “The best analogy for traders ? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing. A hacke...
Read more →Poetry – “The Wasteland”
I’m ok with poetry – like it from time to time, but certainly not one of my main interests. Who knew that an hour lecture about a single poem, “The Wasteland” by T.S. Eliot could be absolutely gripping and fascinating. Maybe it...
Read more →Sinking in a sea of documents
Lately because of one of my projects I am having to work my way through a bunch of long, semi structured documents containing things such as requests for proposals, government program reports, threat models and all kinds of things like that. They are in techno-legalese as I would call them: highly s...
Read more →Spy vs. Spy
Here’s a great article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about espionage. Most of the content comes from a couple of books that he essentially is summarizing, but in his inimical style make more fun and fasci...
Read more →The funny thing about iPhone apps
So a friend of mine told me of his iPhone app, called Etude. He sung the praises, it sounds really cool to me. So I whipped out my iPhone and went to download the app. Wouldn’t you know it costs $4.99. I turned to him and I said, hey, “it’s not free!”. Yeah silly reaction, given how I’ve ranted myself about free and not-free. And here’s the funnier part still. He said, Oh, yes, it’s $3.00. I said, “No it’s more like $5.00”. He said, “Oh yes, we just raised the price.” I gave him a blank look. Here’s the kicker. He said, “What if I give you $5.00 right now?”. I still didn’t want to buy it… How does that make any sense?
April 2010
The “T Word” – Trust
I am not sure exactly what this article about Trust means exactly, but it’s thought provoking, don’t you think? “Trust is present or it is absent. Grab a nerd and he’ll tell you that even the absence of trust is a measure of trust and that particular measure is zero. When trust is non-zero (which is better, believe me) it is based on one of two methodologies — empiricism or transparency (the other T-word).” (from I, Cringely)
Bring me different rocks
Scott Kirsner summarizes a new book “Mastering the VC game” and re-tells a funny VC scenario: “He also talks about an exercise called the “rock fetch,” when VCs ask an entrepreneur to spend time finding other investors willing to join them on the investment (bringing them “rocks”), but then decline to collaborate on a deal with those investors (“bring us a different rock.”)” (from Scott Kirsner) Ok, not really funny. More sad depressing poignant familiar…