Category Archives: Uncategorized

Peter Delevett reports in the San José Mercury-News that Martin Odersky (with whom I did my Ph.D. research at Yale) is starting up a company to serve the Scala programming language, which he developed. [via TechMeme]

The Economist has a special pull-out section on information overload this week. It’s a useful non-technical overview of where things are.

Influential XML personage James Clark has posted a very carefully thought-out essay on XML namespaces. Everybody loves to bash XML namespaces, but this essay is the most careful and dispassionate I have seen to date. You should read the whole … Continue reading →

The New York Times has an article on mining local-government data for unforeseen purposes. Nothing new here, but its being in the Times means my mom reads about it, and yours might too.

For the last 2.5 years I’ve been using a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx device to record my travels. It’s not bad overall, but sometimes if I don’t replace the micro-SD card just right it doesn’t record my tracks. Recalling that my … Continue reading →

Werner Vogels of Amazon talks about availability and consistency at their kind of scale. What he says resonates with my experience from working at another big Web company.

Google [disclosure: a former employer] introduces the Data Liberation Front to ensure that all its services have simple data export functionality. Brad Fitzpatrick says: What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in … Continue reading →