Eric Martindale

There's been a lot of active discussion about the state of AOL's directory project, DMOZ. There have been many attempts to unseat the directory project from its position as the most authoritative listing resource, such as the Yahoo Directory. Many of these attempts have fallen by the wayside, as Rand Fiskin points out, but none have remained more controversial than DMOZ. More recently, Chris Crum's post on WebProNews about his lack of respect for DMOZ has stirred up a hornet's nest of DMOZ criticism, including a particular post claiming DMOZ is a waste of time.

I forwarded a lot of this on to Philip Nicolcev, known by username as "frug", who is the editor of several roleplay-oriented categories on DMOZ. He responded to me directly with a highly insightful email, and I was fortunate enough to receive his permission to share its contents.

I've been editing the pbp category at DMOZ for what... 4 years now? About that. This article is a big whiny complaint which misses the mark. They are both correct and sadly mistaken. Yes, dmoz is outdated and yes, it fails because of attitude problems, but not silly allegations of 'corruption' or people who are bitter because they didn't get listed. We don't list everything, I don't list even half of the submissions I get, and anyone who has been an administrator or an editor for a similar type of project knows better than to take these kinds of complaints seriously. One thing they say is definitely correct: Apply once carefully following their rules if you wish and then, as Will suggested, forget about them.

This is exactly the approach that should be modeled for any directory, regardless of its state or condition. When you are submitting a link to a directory, you are being offered the privilege to be listed as a resource by the owners and management of that directory. They are not obligated to list your link, let alone review it in a timely fashion--but this would be genuinely appreciated and would reflect on the directory's position as a "good" resource.

DMOZ is the primary source for Google's Directory, and you must respect the opinion of such a large and successful company. It's obvious that the idea behind an open directory like DMOZ is good, but where they fail is in execution. More on that later.

He continues:

That is what you should do. Apply once and forget about it, don't claim anybody is corrupt because whether you believe my opinion or not, there's no corruption. Nobody cares enough about dmoz anymore for it to be valuable for extortion. Don't be ridiculous. Furthermore if you were to speak to some of the senior editors you'd discover that they are pretty damn uptight, even obsessive. The problems with dmoz are, in my opinion, twofold. First off, you have the dated trashy look of the website which is a relic of the 1990's. It's not user friendly, it doesn't entice anyone to go browsing, and it hasn't adapted or added features that would help people understand the structure of the directory or find what they're looking for. The editor forums still use phpBB2, and you should see the editing panel. You wouldn't believe how dated this stuff is. Frankly it has needed an overhaul for years now.

I largely agree with him. The phpBB team deprecated the phpBB2 branch at the beginning of this year, ending support for the outdated platform. AOL would do well to do a complete overhaul of the site's design now that "Web 2.0" has come and gone (and I could reference posts all day on that) - and AOL has completely missed their opportunity to latch on and ride the wave.

Philip finishes his correspondance with the frightening truth that has been plaguing many post-Web2.0 sites and services:

The second problem, attitude, is partially the cause of the first problem. It's a stagnant atmosphere where nothing gets done and nobody gets listened to. They would rather leave a directory as a cluttered mess of garbage than risk breaking its structure by overhauling it. Fixing my category took me about two years before I had approval to restructure it, and I'm in a small niche category nobody pays much attention to. Since becoming an editor I have deleted about 60% of the outdated links listed. Had I not joined, they'd still be there cluttering things up with linkspam geocities pages from 10 years ago. So yeah, dmoz is failing, but not because of corruption or because some guy didn't get what he wanted. And, honestly, if the author of this article was applying to dmoz just to 'test how fair it was' then I'm glad they rejected him. Somehow they made the right decision because he's wasting their time.

And that's the exact problem - the DMOZ community has completely stagnated, which has resulted in the puddle of goop that the directory has become. In my personal opinion, I think that AOL could do a lot better job at community management (all reputation management aside) by setting up a more rigid structure of responsibility. The editors need to be held responsible for a timely review specified by their superiors, and there needs to be cross-checking of the editor's work by other qualified editors.

Is this another example of AOL's purchases being mismanaged and ultimately being forgotten, such as what many people claim is the case with ex-Nullsoft product WinAmp? Perhaps, but I think that remains to be seen. After all, even our favored Google took a questionable amount of time to convert phone-consolidation service GrandCentral to the new Google Voice after its 2007 acquisition. DMOZ was in fact originally a Netscape project, which then-strong AOL acquired in 1998. Since that acquisition, little has changed.

All said and done, DMOZ needs some love if it's going to survive as anything more than a relic of trust and authority in the Web 2.0 bubble. As Philip points out, it has both good and bad traits and deserves further attention, but it needs to be attention in (and from) the right direction. The questions remain; where has AOL been? What can be done about the editors (or lack thereof)? How can DMOZ be improved?

I'm not so sure I would lay the blame for facebook's "problems" with their development model. Not that I'd argue for their development model because I know little about it or particulars of their changes, but my problems with them stem purely from a design perspective (call it Human Factors if you want).

I take phone calls from customers, diagnose and estimate the length of time it will take to fix their problem, and schedule an appointment for an engineer to be there. It is then my duty to dispatch this appointment to the engineer, at the appropriate point in time.

At this point in time, I am no longer associated with your on site service. If the engineer does a bad job, it is my job to talk to you and determine if the problem requires the engineer to go back out and solve the issue, and determine whether or not it requires billing.

Do not vent your stress to me. I will get the engineer in contact with you as soon as possible.

Do not yell at me because the engineer was unable to make it at the scheduled time. I will have an engineer to you as soon as we can, I promise. Sometimes appointments take longer than expected, and sometimes cars break down.

That is all.

I just found an awesome list of Open source applications for Windows, and thought I'd take the time to update.

I think I'm sick or getting sick from the weekend, which was awesome all in itself. Rode over to Ian's on Saturday, enjoyed a good night with some new friends, playing Unreal Tournament (the original, what else?) until somewhere around 3AM. Ah, good times. I woke up the next day in time to give Amber a call before she left for work. We got to gaming shortly after lunch, and for once, our ship didn't esplode! (partly because we left it behind for the majority of the game...)

Sunday we relaxed and watched football, both American and World. Poor poor Chelsea! I ended up rolling in at about 4PM, and proceeded to put together some home cooking for when Amber got off work. Unfortunately, my plans were foiled by her work schedule, and she got off at six instead of the planned five, denying us the opportunity of going to the park to eat while the sun set. We enjoyed ourselves nonetheless, and had a good cuddly evening.

Work today was a pain, though. Internet was out, and Bellsouth took until 5PM to bring us a mediocre solution. One of our major clients was having email problems, which I couldn't troubleshoot until the internet was up. Pity.

And, now I come home, GWing is having some people problems, and the GT League is bumbling along as usual. Now, about that roleplaying social reform...

A favorite quote of mine from my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, on the importance of play. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was notorious for being multi-faceted, in both his personal hobbies and his grasp of science. He worked on the Manhattan Project with Einstein, was part of the panel that investigated the Challenger Disaster, and his work plays a major role in the modern understanding of quantum computing.

“Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?’

I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ‘Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is ...’ and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, ‘Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?’

‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

-- Richard Feynman, “Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman”, © 1985

A favorite quote of mine from my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, on the importance of play. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was notorious for being multi-faceted, in both his personal hobbies and his grasp of science. He worked on the Manhattan Project with Einstein, was part of the panel that investigated the Challenger Disaster, and his work plays a major role in the modern understanding of quantum computing.

“Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?’

I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ‘Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is ...’ and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, ‘Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?’

‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

-- Richard Feynman, “Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman”, © 1985

A favorite quote of mine from my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, on the importance of play. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was notorious for being multi-faceted, in both his personal hobbies and his grasp of science. He worked on the Manhattan Project with Einstein, was part of the panel that investigated the Challenger Disaster, and his work plays a major role in the modern understanding of quantum computing.

“Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?’

I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ‘Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is ...’ and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, ‘Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?’

‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

-- Richard Feynman, “Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman”, © 1985

A favorite quote of mine from my favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, on the importance of play. Dr. Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was notorious for being multi-faceted, in both his personal hobbies and his grasp of science. He worked on the Manhattan Project with Einstein, was part of the panel that investigated the Challenger Disaster, and his work plays a major role in the modern understanding of quantum computing.

“Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing - it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, ‘Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?’

I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.

I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, ‘Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is ...’ and I showed him the accelerations.

He says, ‘Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?’

‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

-- Richard Feynman, “Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman”, © 1985

All you fancy-pants problem solvers, throw us a clue. I'm not getting it.

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“No new cryptographic assumptions are made in Mimblewimble — it's just the discrete log problem. Same thing as Bitcoin.” — Andrew Poelstra

I have a problem with focusing on delivery systems instead of content. Coursera is a delivery system. A proprietary one and not even a particularly good one. Was Robert Panoff in the audience?

Yep, I'm unimpressed too. There is an extension in the Chrome store though for the white space that works pretty well. This wouldn't do anything to fix your problem though, unfortunately, Eric. :((

Let me show you why I started Coursefork, and subsequently began work on BitPay. Not only is the quality of education plummeting, but the cost of it is linearly increasing [1]. What are you doing about it? [1]: http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education#the-problem

I don't see why this is a problem, +Superdave Houdini Meralus... :-P

RT @martindale: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Sa…

RT @martindale: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Sa…

RT @martindale: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Sa…

RT @martindale: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Sa…

RT @martindale: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Sa…

RT @martindale: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” — Antoine de Sa…

How do you think one would attack this problem in a society (my country - South Africa) where basic education isn't even a priority for government?

Create gamified environments like: http://www.checkio.org/ ?

Make sure kids have access?

The biggest problem for a USA is that those attacks will be used as a starting point to recruit a new hackers to work for Iran and other muslim countries governments.
And that will be then one more step to a global cyberwar I mean official cause cyberwar already exist.
The worst thing that could happen to us users of the free internet is that because of that cyberwar they can try to bring new acts like damn Pipa Sopa Cispa and that could endanger our free internet.

There's an amazing feeling you get when you know there is a robot in your kitchen sweeping the floor for you.

So, I get in from gaming at about 3AM this morning, and on my table is this box that my roommate brought in, because it had been delivered. I knew immediately that it was my Roomba Discovery. I have charged it up for a bit, tested it out, watched it, and now I trust it not to get stuck or break anything. Problem is, I'm way too excited to get to sleep. Hello, 5:07 - I'm going to sleep now.

Because bitcoin is environmentally damaging. It relies wasting on immense amounts of cpu cycles, and thus energy.

Because it's a fixed money supply, which carries a lot of economic problems. (There's a reason a lot of libertarians love bitcoin - it's essentially the gold standard, rehashed)

Not to mention its technical flaws - sybil attacks, an ever-growing ledger that is becoming unmanageably large, amongst others.

Bitcoin is a great idea, but it's a prototype for a digital currency.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the "real names" policy either, but it is what it is. In the context of this "war" between the established social-networking sites, I'll take G+.

What we need, though, is to escape the tyranny of all of these centrally managed, dictatorially controlled, standalone social-networks... we need to keep pushing for federated, decentralized social-networks where users are in control.

I think that will come eventually. One problem right now, is that so few people care about the deeper issues. <sigh />

No problem, +Keiichi Matsuda! I was glad to find you here on Google+. The last startup I was a part of (Mirascape) was very familiar with it, as we were building an augmented reality platform and used it as reference material.

Have any thoughts on Google's foray into augmented reality? I ran into Johnny Lee from Google [x] at ARE 2011 last year, but didn't find out that they were working on glasses until earlier this year.

Ever run into an issue where you need a <textarea> to have a width of 100% and some non-zero padding?

Use this:

textarea {     -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; / Safari/Chrome, other WebKit /     -moz-box-sizing: border-box; / Firefox, other Gecko /     box-sizing: border-box; / Opera/IE 8+ / }

Problem solved.

+Darryl Barnes “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Robert A. Heinlein

"What you still hear today from all kinds of people is how a Stuxnet-type attack requires so much insider knowledge."

Lazy programmers and administrators have said similar things for ages. First it was stack overflow bugs where the claim was it was much too hard to take advantage of them. Now it is a science with automatic intrusion tools that characterize certain types of overflows and develop attacks.

The best thing that can happen right now is benign bored teenagers breaking into systems until the owners can't pretend it isn't a real problem. Hopefully that happens long before organized crime and adversarial nations get into the act.

Interesting blog post, He seems pretty angry about it all and while I agree that a deeper understanding is needed for some programming tasks, other just need you to crank out code. Could be wrong but I think people use to argue that Java wasn't scalable either... it evolved and every bank in the country seems to think its the only language out there now. It scales now even though it could have been reasonably debated back in 2001 when it was slow and immature.

What it really comes down to is that a huge majority of software is ephemeral, give it 2-3 years and it will be rewritten not because the code has any real problems but, technology has changed along with the business requirements. Things move change, don't build a cathedral when a bazaar will exceed the requirements.

David, that is an excellent example. But the real problem as I see it is this device is converting apples to oranges, and that's hard/impossible to do well & consistently & for everyone. What you see with your eyes and interpret into your own internal thought process, and what you read from a description written by a program (and influenced by that programmers perspective and interpretation of the world as he perceives it) are very different things.
One person will emphasize the color hue and saturation over the geometry and spatial composition of the image. Others will focus on details like what brand names are on the shirts, what landmarks are visible or implied, etc.
The descriptions look pretty sterilized and minimal, but once again...where is the real value.
I'm willing to concede that this has value for the visually impaired to some degree, but I don't see it as a revolutionary advance. It's more like a neat gimmick than the next big thing.

On this week's one-hour show (a new format for us!), we're excited to be introducing our new cohost, Gordon Hall.  Having been a guest host before, we're extremely pleased that he's decided to join us as our new full-time partner!  Let's see what he's been up to since the last time we talked, and talk about all the open source goodness he can throw at us.

We'll also be discussing a number of topics; the Bitcoin scalability problem (yes, we'll even mention the block size debate!), Ethereum's new Frontier launch, and the announcement of t0, Overstock.com's new cryptoequity trading platform.

Join us, and ask us questions directly while we're live!

Thanks! I am glad to see this posted here, so thanks! This is good start but very short! I'm glad he addressed the propaganda a lot of us grew up with; which indeed was most proffered by Hitler & USSR against the USA "capitalist pigs". I'm sorta disappointed that Woods here in this brief explanation, does still associate the term capitalism with the idea of free markets. Capitalism is a term used for the means by which all people make a living-- anyone with a job is a capitalist. It is not a form of government or a form of market or a form of banking. There is capitalism; and then there are forms of government, and then there is banking; and then there are markets-- (these are separate things and the words for them are not synonymous). There are free markets and there are regulated markets. We are all capitalists suffering from the problems of corrupt people given sole authority over all the money with which power they have centralized banking & turned it into a government industry, which forces them to REGULATE the market to suit their own interests. May Luck Turn in our Favor and Right Soon! PEACE!

+robby Woodliff I agree 100%. The biggest problem now is that the movement is too diffuse in its goals. That doesn't work in a media-driven movement. You have to have a platform with well-defined points and achievable goals: small ones first, bigger ones for the more advanced stage of the movement.

E.g. Is this a protest against unemployment? Big banks? Political gridlock? Corporate greed? It can't be all of those things or else it's kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.

My prediction is that in the next week or two we will all find out whether this has legs or not. I think if it does have legs, it will largely be because of the feeling of a majority of Americans that the System is broken. But that "having legs" part can only happen if we get down to defining a platform.

+Grant Matheny there've been talks about manual targeting and piloting in EVE for a long time, and you're right -- it's always a question of the engine.  It's an engineering challenge that they'd need to tackle, but imagine the mission types and new tactics that could be created in EVE itself if they did.  It'd bring immersion to a whole 'nother level (and they'd be tackling the collision detection problem at the same time).

It makes sense to put Valkyrie in the hands of a [large] private group of beta users until the engine is fixed so that the other mechanics can be tested, but without integration I worry that the players would be more drawn to the immediate gratification of instant space battles in a way that DUST didn't fill, thus it'd be a drain on the EVE playerbase.

Amber and I have been yelling at each other on and off for the past hour or so, due to the problems she is having with her current math project. I'm glad she's sloughed off her English project, as doing five people's annotations, comparisons, and evaluations of Shakespeare's Othello on her own was clearly wearing thin on her.

Unfortunately, she doesn't own a copy of Microsoft Office, which includes Excel, which is apparently what she needs. A few months ago I pointed her in the direction of OpenOffice, but errors in conversion and viewing (Comments made in Word won't display in OpenOffice, but they will work vice versa), changes and differences in interface and menu placement, broken features, etc etc., have been an endless source of frustration for her. I really wish I knew how to use it at an expert level, but it just seems like I can't help her, because I know so little about the software. Having to communicate via the phone doesn't help, either.

I'm heading over there after work, maybe I can help her more then. Hoorah for another night of sleep deprivation!

I've been working for an industrial company that's still struggling with the very idea of open-source, so unfortunately there's nothing on github I can point a potential employer at. I guess in theory I ought to be doing something on the side just for that reason, but after writing code all week long, it's not exactly high on the list of priorities in my free time. :-)

100% agree with the sentiment though -- résumés are almost worthless for Software Engineers. Once in a while I can tell that someone's not completely inept, based on the specific way they describe their current/past work on a CV. But even then, it's hardly worth the time it takes to sift through the pile, vs. just bringing people in to talk for a bit.

A few lines of code are worth a thousand words. HR at large companies tends to get bogged down with the specifics of which languages/technologies they know, but that's missing the point entirely. If you can just have someone design a small system in pseudocode that solves some simple problem, the orders-of-magnitude difference in talent between individual programmers becomes obvious.

An update before I go to sleep!

I've recovered a VERY old backup of GWing's index pages... and I don't think I have any better ones.

I'm very proud of Fletcher, mainly because it's so simple, yet so functional. I've not had any problems with it, and I seem to have everything modded perfectly for the uses it is put to.

Wow, I had intended to sleep at about 11:00, but a couple of friends came over. They left at 11:30. Yet here I am at 12:49 AM, sitting alone, still fiddling with HTML. Is there something wrong with me, or is this normal?

I'm also looking down at my signature for Gmail, which is what I'm using to write this entry right now. I thought at first that I enjoyed flaunting my IT-Professional-ism, but then I realized that I'm just too damned lazy to go down and delete it. Of course, my ultimate realization is that I'm still sitting here typing about absolutely nothing.
--
Eric Martindale
IT Professional
Admin of GWing.net

Something that wish would have caught on as Node did is RingoJS (http://ringojs.org/), a CommonJS runtime that uses Rhino/JS and runs on the JVM.

Ringo IMHO could have sparked a Java renaissance and taken advantage of the maturity of the Java platform where they running joke is for any giving feature, you have at least 5 different libraries that can do it. That would solve what is a real problem in Node: the fact that libraries are sparse and either require coding yourself or finding a C library and writing a JS meta layer.

A RingoJS app doesn't need a special runtime environment or a hosting provider to enable it, if you can run Java, including Google App Engine. But alas, it wasn't to be, the same individuals who have no business touching a server yet are coding Node because it's just JavaScript. They were the same ones who decried Java as a big slow mass because they couldn't understand the mechanics of not blocking the event handling thread.

The Rubyists eventually got over their hatred of Java, when will the JavaScripters?

Sigh

A recent post from renowned security analyst Bruce Schneier highlighted an interesting problem to me.

It was announced last week that Hugo Chávez of Venezuela intends to repatriate 211 tons of gold (worth some $12.1 billion dollars by calculations based on current prices) from Europe back to Venezuela.

Venezuela would need to transport the gold in several trips, traders said, since the high value of gold means it would be impossible to insure a single aircraft carrying 211 tonnes. It could take about 40 shipments to move the gold back to Caracas, traders estimated. “It’s going to be quite a task. Logistically, I’m not sure if the central bank realises the magnitude of the task ahead of them,” said one senior gold banker.

So the challenge is this: how can Venezuela safely retrieve 211 tons of gold from its European stores? What solutions can you come up with using lateral analysis?

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Google Reader + Disqus would be a better Google+ than Google+

I'm not feeling Google+. I get that people are excited about high level of "engagement" and stuff, but to me it looks like something that is trying to solve too many problems at once. Or combine things that don't need to be combined.

My stream on Google+ looks something like this: link post, link post, lolcatz, lolcatz, long 3-page-down post by +Robert Scoble , lolcatz, link post, long post, etc. It's kind of like twitter, but it's not glanceable. I can have twitter on my secondary monitor and glance at the timeline every few minutes and get back to what I was doing if I don't see anything interesting in a number of tweets that fits on the screen. With G+ the number of posts to glance at is about 1. So you have to scroll to check what's going on - no go, imho.

And to be something like a social blogging platform it lacks formatting, flexibility, etc. And most importantly it requires you to make a move which is not what most people are willing to decide to do easily.

On the other hand, I like that you can read the stream and comment right away. Unlike in Google Reader (or any other RSS reader) where you have to click through to the site to comment/read comments. And quite a lot of the blogs already use a global social commenting platform - Disqus.

So if there was a GReader-like RSS reader combined with inline Disqus comments it would have everything I like about Google+ without all the other stuff that looks like a big indecisive pile of everything to me.

Now that I've upgraded to Google's Blogger Beta, I'm tweaking a bunch of controls on my blog. I am continually running into the user-friendly syndrome, where a feature is too user friendly and I can't get down to the nitty-gritty tech side of the application. While it saves me the five minute trouble of setting up a Wordpress or similiar in-house blog, it constantly reminds me of the merits of having the Wordpress, and consequently influencing me to neglect posting here at all.

I woke up this morning to a completed upgrade from Ubuntu's Dapper Drake (6.06 LTS) to Edgy Eft (6.10), after encountering some problems resulting from my own stupidity. Upgrading from the servers took a grand total of 16 hours, start to finish. This includes my time working out the kinks from my said stupidity, which I won't go into further here. Due to the complications, my personal alarm clock (XMMS and an alarm plugin...) failed to wake me at the goal of 5:30 AM, having not rung at all. Sadly, this caused me to miss the chance to see my beautiful Amber, with her leaving for school at 6:30, and me waking at 7. grumble

After rebooting the machine to seal the deal, I opened up my shiny new Firefox 2.0 to look at the GWing RSS feed. I clicked the most important thing at the time, a new topic titled A Tale of Two Wreckages: A True Story. I then proceeded to heartily laugh my way through the time I had remaining before I had to leave for work.

Pimp status, hrm?

You're right, +Debbie Coultis.  The problem is that more often than not, any customizations made to the existing open resources (+MIT OpenCourseWare, for example) never make their way back "upstream", or otherwise made available to future educators or students who might have use of them.  I talked a bit about how +Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specifically with software, was involved in the open-source community very early on, but perhaps I should've gone into more depth here.

There are many free (and some open) educational resources emerging, but we need deeper interchangeability between them if their innovations are to be capitalized on.

+Bob Calder I don't know if Robert Panoff was in the audience or not, but you're right.  +Coursera isn't the answer, but it is at least a step forward in increasing the availability of the delivery system.  Once we're able to edit that content and the processes (e.g., make everything hackable), we'll close the loop on collaboration in education.

Thanks, +Nathan Greenling!  Once +Coursefork ships more robust composition features, I'll attach the slides into the YouTube video at their corresponding points and perhaps include some further speaker notes.

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

Why isn't education open-source in the first place?
I recently gave a talk at +The Research Triangle Park about education and open source, and how the freedoms that are necessary for a healthy education system were systematically removed over time.  While the slides aren't available in the video, I've uploaded them to +Coursefork [1].

It's incredibly powerful to lay out the data and show how increased spending and manpower has impacted the quality of education over time: aptitude measurements have stayed flat (or negative!) while test scores and grades continue to inflate.  It seems as if we've built a system of education that is extremely good at—wait for it—_getting people to pass standardized tests_.

Companies like +Khan Academy and +Coursera are really chipping away at the problem of making the resources available, both content and services (i.e., actual teaching), but making the content interchangeable and hackable is of critical importance to building the healthy open source ecosystem that we've seen emerge in the software community (a la +GitHub) within the world of education.

One day, we'll see the equivalent of the pull request in education.  I'm hoping to build it with +Coursefork.

[1]:  http://coursefork.org/martindale/open-freedom-and-education

My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]

If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.

While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.

One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.

I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.

[1]: Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED
[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/
[3]: http://www.oled-info.com/tdk-starts-mass-production-transparent-24-qvga-pmoleds
[4]: http://www.laster.fr/produits/promobiledisplay/
[5]: http://www.layar.com/
[6]: http://www.wikitude.com/
[7]: http://www.junaio.com/
[8]: http://questvisual.com/

My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]

If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.

While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.

One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.

I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.

[1]: Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED
[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/
[3]: http://www.oled-info.com/tdk-starts-mass-production-transparent-24-qvga-pmoleds
[4]: http://www.laster.fr/produits/promobiledisplay/
[5]: http://www.layar.com/
[6]: http://www.wikitude.com/
[7]: http://www.junaio.com/
[8]: http://questvisual.com/

My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]

If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.

While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.

One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.

I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.

[1]: Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED
[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/
[3]: http://www.oled-info.com/tdk-starts-mass-production-transparent-24-qvga-pmoleds
[4]: http://www.laster.fr/produits/promobiledisplay/
[5]: http://www.layar.com/
[6]: http://www.wikitude.com/
[7]: http://www.junaio.com/
[8]: http://questvisual.com/

My list of entrepreneurial shortcomings includes Mirascape, which aspired to be a ubiquitous augmented reality (AR) operating system for the real world. The problems we were solving (and our packaged solution) would have been the backbone for all of the [imagined] technology you see in this Samsung promo video for a new tech they're excited about, transparent and flexible OLED displays. [1]

If you're not familiar with augmented reality; it is the visual overlay of otherwise hidden information on the real world, as you observe it.

While you can ogle over ostentatious technologies like the embedded-display contact lenses the University of Washington is so proud of [2], it's exciting to see companies like TDK [3] and Laster Technologies [4] bring these kinds of stepping stone technology to bear. We can all download and install the awkward and barely applicable consumer-level AR applications on our smartphones ([5], [6], and [7]), but they will all remain novelty applications until we see major innovation in the display space.

One of the more practical examples I've seen of augmented reality in the real world is WordLens [8] (sadly only available for iOS), which provides instantaneous video translation through your device. It's not hard to imagine a pair of Oakley glasses with this display technology built-in, providing you with always-on translation while in an unfamiliar foreign location. Or perhaps even displaying your friend's tweet as a speech bubble above their head for a few seconds -- imagine if it were built right, how amazing it could be.

I genuinely hope to see more of this transparent display technology built in to more consumer-level products, and eyewear in particular. We need a lot more developers playing with the practical applications of augmented reality, and not just displaying compass-aligned markers over a geotagged Wikipedia article or Flickr photo. The high-power hardware necessary to do real-time computer vision processing is coming, and the applied software world needs to be ready for it.

[1]: Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED
[2]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/
[3]: http://www.oled-info.com/tdk-starts-mass-production-transparent-24-qvga-pmoleds
[4]: http://www.laster.fr/produits/promobiledisplay/
[5]: http://www.layar.com/
[6]: http://www.wikitude.com/
[7]: http://www.junaio.com/
[8]: http://questvisual.com/

As a corporate business insider I can offer a perspective from the "enemy's" den. Many people agree that this movement has gained momentum and has the potential to become as big or bigger than the Tea Party Movement. I grew up in the same generation as many of those protesting today and I understand the innuendo behind Anonymous, I understand point being made by the zombies, and I understand what general sense of anger is meant for. However, keep in mind that you are generally a younger generation trying to speak to an industry dominated mostly by an older generation of people. To these people this movement appears random, chaotic, and annoying simply because they don't even know what this movement's demands or goals are. Indeed for almost all of September I don't think Wall Street even understood exactly what they were protesting, and just recently have they gotten some kind of vague idea as to what these people want done. Most people relate these types of sit-in's to hippies from their generation and view them as more of an unorganized annoyance. To my friends who I work with in NYC, comments I hear from them are to this effect (I am summarizing several people's opinions as one): "It's just stupid, they block traffic and cause trouble nearby. We have to exit buildings from completely the opposite side now just to avoid them if we're wearing a suit regardless of our purpose. No one is there during the day but all of a sudden they pop up during rush hour. They wreck local businesses and drive customers away. The corporations they protest are unaffected but the small businesses nearby are the ones they are actually hurting. We don't even know what they want."

My bosses have gone to meetings with Bernanke and Geithner it is unclear still whether these protests will actually have any influence over policy. At an executive level they still appear confused as to how to handle situation, mostly because they do not understand it. But understand this, from their perspective they have changed the following: In terms of big banks, their balance sheets have been improved light years beyond where they were in 2008 with more liquidity and more capital on hand to prevent these types of shocks to the system. They have repaid any tax dollars received and are often significantly more efficient at implementing change than the government is in making up it's mind on what to do. The majority of issues occurs because of the indecisiveness in Washington. Think about these issues: 12 people are tasked with cutting $1.7 Trillion in the next 5 weeks -- The only way that is going to happen is if they cut large dollar programs. That means Healthcare, medicare, social security, and of course military but that is even less politically viable than the other three. There is also gridlock on what will happen with the tax system in the future. Those main issues where indecisiveness has been are also some of the largest possible expenses a corporation could have. How do plan for variable expenses that could go up or down by 50% in EITHER direction? Corporations have no idea how to plan for healthcare, medicare, or social security plans for their employees because there is no decisiveness on what will occur in the future. They do not want to hire people that they cannot afford to keep a year later because of law changes. So even if they have the money for it now (which they do), they are unable to hire because of the risk of causing liquidity issues later and the massive negative PR associated with hiring and then firing. These banks also receive criticism for not lending money out, but this is not their fault. They ARE lending money out, but there is no demand. It is not supply side issues, there is plenty of money out there to be had. You can get a loan today no problem, don't believe me? Go try it at any bank you want. There is just no one who wants to take a loan. So all that free capital that we spent 3 years trying to push into banks is now stuck there.

This issue is not business related anymore. It is purely political. My above statements are not to absolve corporations of responsibility in 2008, but they are more to explain the current situation here and now. Europe is a whole other book to write about another time.

In a world where politicians and talking heads can call the greatest capitalist of our time Warren Buffett a socialist, and get away with it as "news" is the real issue at hand.

Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.

Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.

For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, le gasp, "Lifestreaming".

However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.

I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.

That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!

Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.

Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

Compelling Narratives using Augmented Reality
+Google Glass has, for better or worse, shaped the narrative around augmented reality this past year.  We've seen the arms (eyes?) race rapidly develop, culminating recently with the +YCombinator-backed +meta announcing their "SpaceGlasses" [1], one of the first truly compelling experiences built around a convincingly capable device [2].

The hardest part of augmented reality is not the hardware, nor the computer vision software—both extremely difficult academic challenges in their own right, and certainly not to be taken by the faint of heart—but in the experience.

These problems will be solved, through no small effort, but they will be solved.  The most daunting challenge is to build a compelling story that binds the available data (read "the Internet") to the real world, and exposes it in an unobtrusive and seamless fashion.  This too will emerge naturally, but early pioneers in the space need to think carefully about the application of augmented reality in order to succeed; no one wants a world filled with advertisements [3], and in fact—some even try to eliminate them [4].

Here, +Field Trip attempts to builds one such compelling story.  The experience of contextual information making itself available without interrupting your interactions with the real world is so tantalizingly close you can feel it, but one wonders just how much control the user will have over the frequency and relevance of the information "popups".  In the early days of the software industry (late 60s, early 70s), an ongoing debate between the [then] default of free software vs. closed software unfolded, setting the foundation for today's conversation around open source and free [5] software.  I'll be talking more about this in a presentation at the upcoming #RTP180 : Open Source All Things event [6] in North Carolina.

It's another step forward for ubiquitous augmented reality, an exciting one indeed, but one that won't achieve mass adoption until the user can control their own experience [7].

[1]: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
[2]: SpaceGlasses are the future of computing
[3]: https://vimeo.com/8569187
[4]: http://unlogo.org/pages/about
[5]: that's free as in libertas, not as in gratis.
[6]: http://www.rtp.org/rtp-180-open-source-all-things
[7]: I recently started a project to this effect called "Para", a client-agnostic peer-to-peer network for implementing a data layer on top of the real world.  I'm seeking collaborators!  Check it out: http://para.io

I've been relying heavily on node.js this past year to provide a robust set of tools to solve the problems I encounter on a daily basis. I was pleased to see honorCipherOrder was added to node's TLS library in node.js v0.7.6, and released with node.js v0.8.0.

Late last year, security researcher Juliano Rizzo announced a new attack against the AES encryption used in the SSL/TLS transaction he dubbed BEAST. The details are interesting to those who care, but it turns out that we can mitigate this attack in node.js by enforcing honorCipherOrder on the server. Let's take a look.

If you have an HTTPS server that looks like this:

var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');

var options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem')
};

https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200);
  res.end("hello world\n");
}).listen(443);

...you can now manage the cipher order by using the ciphers option. In the following code snippet we're going set the options for the above server to use Steve Caligo's cipher order, which prefers TLS 1.2 ciphers (which are not vulnerable to the BEAST attack) for clients that support TLS 1.2 but falls back to the RC4 ciphers on TLS 1.0 clients.^[...]

var options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem'),
  ciphers: 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM'
};

Finally, we will enforce the cipher order on the server's side of the negotiation:

var options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem'),
  ciphers: 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM',
  honorCipherOrder: true
};

...which leaves us with the following code for a working server that is not vulnerable to the BEAST attack (in node v0.8.0+!):

var https = require('https');
var fs = require('fs');

var options = {
  key: fs.readFileSync('key.pem'),
  cert: fs.readFileSync('cert.pem'),
  ciphers: 'ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES256-SHA:RC4-SHA:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH:!AESGCM',
  honorCipherOrder: true
};

https.createServer(options, function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200);
  res.end("hello world\n");
}).listen(443);

Edit, 6/13/2013: Lloyd Watkin has done some research on his own and decided to use a different cipher chain:

ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:AES128-GCM-SHA256:RC4:HIGH:!MD5:!aNULL:!EDH

You should read into why he chose it and make an educated decision. </edit>

Until node.js implements this as the defaults (they should), this is something you should implement where using HTTPS with node!

RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they've been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.

You'll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn't an issue. In today's roleplaying world, RPGChat's index fits right in.

They've got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn't very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the "Home" and "Rules" link work.

I'm going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn't horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let's have a glance:

<a href="http://forums.rpgchat.com/index.php"> <img src="header/but_home.jpg" border="0"> </a>

Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn't have an alt attribute! Search engines won't be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won't be very beneficial.

I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).

When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character's history to fit it into the post.

After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for "advertising on multiple occasions", much to my surprise.

However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn't very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.

After speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.

I sent a request via the site's contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven't yet received a response. It'd be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!

In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That's scary!

Let's take a look at their search results:

As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we've seen - most of RPGChat's traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.

RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 "active" members. While that's only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don't see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.

It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called "C/G" for short. It looks like most other forums' version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.

Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you're careful to follow their 500 word list of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they're going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.

+Carel L. van Rooyen apologies for the delayed response! I think the most important thing is to realize that the government can not and will not be able to make a significant impact on education without the initiative being led by the community itself. Access is key, and there are many projects that solve the challenges associated with access--see laptop.org and kiwix.org--but the best people suited to understand a child's needs are those closest to them.

+Johnny Roquemore , When did Chee jump over to the photos team? Did he and +Brian Rose trade jobs or something and I missed a memo?

I guess the workaround for this bug +Eric Martindale , is make a copy of the cover photo to share in a post. A bit of a pain to click around and do that, but it should temporarily solve that issue.