What the… Bing is indexing one of my websites which has an explicit robots disallow. C’mon people!
Software Development
Ridiculous Web Surveys
It amazes me when I actually attempt to take a survey on the web how poorly designed they are. Most of the time I disregard them, but sometimes a product that I like runs a survey and I would like to offer my feedback. I got one of those recently and on the third page, which by …
Keep reading · 1 minute: Ridiculous Web SurveysUbuntu Karmic Koala? Where do they get these names. :-)
Unix Lesson for Today
Learned after much difficulty today that find doesn’t actually spawn a shell, and as a result trying to use backticks doesn’t work in a find exec parameter. However, you can tell find to invoke a shell to get around it. This works. find . -name "*.DBF" -print -exec sh -c …
Keep reading · 1 minute: Unix Lesson for TodayInspired Software Keynote
I was honored this year to be invited by the Computer Science department at the University of Minnesota to give the keynote for the 2009 Computer Science Open House. The department has an open house every other year and it is a great opportunity for all the various research …
Keep reading · 2 minutes: Inspired Software KeynoteFancy Flash Websites on the iPhone
There are a bunch of reasons that you shouldn’t have a website that is just one big flash application. Here is one simple one. The other day we were thinking of going to Tejas for lunch and wanted to check their hours. Simple enough. So I brought up their website on my iPhone. …
Keep reading · 1 minute: Fancy Flash Websites on the iPhoneHow to Expire Tweets on Twitter
A lot of people consider Twitter a microblogging platform. I don’t really agree with that. I think Tumblr and Posterous are great examples of microblogging platforms. Twitter, to me, is much more like a “micromessaging"platform. As such I think it has more in common with email …
Keep reading · 4 minutes: How to Expire Tweets on TwitterTED Video: Hans Rosling Dataset Mindset
The visuals in this talk by Hans Rosling at TED blew me away. Animated displays of 200 years of economic data about the world.
Why don’t RSS Readers support kill files?
As I was flowing through my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader I was struck for the millionth time how much everyone likes to write about “All Things Twitter”. “Man, I wish I could just zap these items from these feeds” I thought. Then it hit me that I used to do that all the …
Keep reading · 1 minute: Why don't RSS Readers support kill files?I seem to be very focused on the themes of Creative Commons, GNU Public License and having control of my computing future lately. This is a good thing.