Month: January 2005
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Now that’s important information
Via Tomalak’s Realm, I found this history of the tab at Technology Review, which gives a bit of background on card catalogs as part of the article “Keeping Tabs.” The tab was the idea of a young man named James Newton Gunn (1867š1927), who started using file cards to achieve savings in cost accounting while…
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What if you have more than one iPod?
OK, this is a theoretical question, because I don’t have a single iPod, and even with the new iPod Shuffle I don’t plan on getting one. But I wonder what happens if you have more than one iPod per computer? Does the new lower-priced Shuffle coexist peacefully with its more expensive brethren? Aren’t there some…
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Aggregator market share
Is it a problem for an industry when there are more caveats than statements about one of its key measurements? Yes, though I suppose it’s an opportunity, too. Dick Costolo on the FeedBurner blog put out their current information on RSS aggregator market share, leading with the many, many caveats that are necessary. It’s still…
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Links4U, brief edition
In order to avoid another overwhelming linkdump, here’s a few that caught my eye recently, or otherwise. The endless beta, thanks to Matt. Using The Sims to learn a foreign language seems like a fascinating idea, though I’ve never played The Sims. I’d certainly like to know more than English and broken French. An annotated…
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If only, or, What my son thinks I do at work
Per my usual, I called home right before leaving work, so the family has a clue about my arrival time. Tonight, the boy came on the speakerphone and asked “Did you play with the football today?” The boy has visited the office a few times, and each time, we play with a small Nerf football,…
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Book: Sharpe’s Triumph
Earlier this week, I raced to the end of Sharpe’s Triumph, by Bernard Cornwell. This novel is set in India in 1803, where the British General is Arthur Wellesley, whose fame as the Duke of Wellington still lies in the future. Our hero Sharpe saves the general’s life (of course) in a furious bout of…
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Book: Children of the Mind
During the holidays, I finished Children of the Mind, another novel by Orson Scott Card in the “Ender Quartet.” This wraps up this half of the eight-part series. Honestly, I’m hoping the other half of the series is more even. The pages turned fast enough, but I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the…
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NYTimes RSS feed insistently wrong about what’s new?
I follow the New York Times technology feed via RSS (feed link). For the last couple of weeks, whenever the feed updates, NetNewsWire is convinced by some change in the feed that all the items in the feed are new to me. Since, as of this writing, there are headlines going back 4 days, to…
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But will the Game Neverending ever start?
So the folks at Ludicorp have a hit with Flickr, as many have noted… more power to them. The interesting part, as I was reminded by this light-hearted post comparing Flickr to a MMRPG (via Jeff Veen) that Ludicorp was originally founded to create the Game Neverending. At this point, the folks at Ludicorp have…
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Wasn’t Future Tense first?
Dave Winer notes the introduction of podcasting by NPR’s On the Media, and cites the press release claiming this is the first NPR program to do so. I don’t know how long Future Tense has been podcasting, but it certainly didn’t start today. Future Tense is from American Public Media, which most of us here…