Links for 06-22-2007

• MAKE: Blog: Binary marble adding machine
  This is awesomely cool.
  [tags: diy]
• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Yahoo!/eBay Actually Makes Sense, but Won’t Happen
  Makes a good case.
  [tags: yahoo,ebay]
• O'Reilly Radar; Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA
  Some good discussion in the comments around the lack of an SLA for Amazon's S3 storage service.
  [tags: amazon,webservices]
• tecosystems » Does This Mean We’re Not Friends Anymore?
  Friend seems to have become rather too overloaded a term in the social software world.
  [tags: social]
• The 10 Second Rule: How to Write for Diagonal Readers | Copyblogger
  How to grab attention with diagonal readers, i.e. scanners.
  [tags: writing]

Links for 06-19-2007

• Sebastien Marcel on Face Recognition
  Interesting interview with Sabastien Marcel on facial recognition.
  [tags: google]
• blog.pmarca.com: Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far
  I don't read as much science fiction as I used to. I'll definitely be checking some of these out as it seems as though Marc's tastes may have similarities to my own.
  [tags: SF]
• How do I know this person? Through the Web! « Jon Udell
  From the comments: "The patterns of community enabled (and popularized) by the Internet are anything but new (except in scale and ubiquity). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."
  [tags: social]

Documentation for Old Systems

The post Hardware Archaeology by Simon Phipps at Sun reminds me of the time a few years back when I got contacted by someone wanting to port NetBSD/OpenBSD to some (very) old Data General Motorola 88000-based AViiON hardware. (I used to work for DG.) He was looking for any code or schematics associated with the hardware and email addresses for engineers who had worked on the platform "as they have a lot to teach us." I had a bit of trouble gently getting the point across that it seemed unlikely anyone at EMC (who purchased DG) would have much interest spending the time/money to chase after old documentation to help get BSD running on a very obsolete piece of hardware.

Links from 06-18-2007

• How do I know this person? Through the Web! « Jon Udell
  Great line from the comments: "The patterns of community enabled (and popularized) by the Internet are anything but new (except in scale and ubiquity). History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot."
  [tags: social]
• Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering - Joel on Software
  Good look at the difference between Microsoft and Apple font rendering philosophies.
  [tags: apple,design]
• Splogging in the Sun
  *Pay Per Post is a dark side of the mechanical turk.*
  [tags: blogging]

Links for 06-12-2007

• John Battelle's Searchblog: You Think Google Won't Do What It Takes to Win? Think Again.
  "Google is most definitely a cat, not a dog, when it comes to brands. The image of Google is rather feline - it sits there unruffled, not really *needing you*, but then it jumps in your lap when you least expect it. Google is not a brand that, well, asks for attention."
  [tags: google]
• Trulia Hindsight » Maps of Properties Through Time
  Very cool home property mapping through time.
  [tags: maps,visualization,history]
• The Digital Bits presents... The Soapbox
  I don't really have an opinion on this, but interesting post on why HD-DVD won't win. As I've said before, BOTH sides are shooting themselves in the foot in any case.
  [tags: film,dvd]
• Mountain Gear Adopts SprayCool Solution - Data Center Knowledge
  I'm a sometimes customer of Mountain Gear's. I didn't realize that they were big enough to have this scale of datacenter.
  [tags: cooling]
• Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Open Thread: Do You Crave Offline Web Apps? «
  My personal view is that readers of blogs like Web Worker Daily may have a distorted view of connectivity in the broader world. Even with my Verizon wireless service, my data connection is hardly "always on"
  [tags: mobility]
• Dynamist Blog: What Are Magazines For?
  "Long essays--4,000 words-plus--are ideally suited to magazines, and satisfying to read in that format. It's not clear, however, that there's an advertising market to support them. So medium-sized ideas tend to get chopped down to column length or blown up to masquerade as books."
  [tags: writing,business]

Separate Professional and Personal Networks?

There's an interesting post to check out by the Fortune technology staff that discusses whether people will maintain separate profiles for their personal and professional lives--and whether those profiles will reside on separate social networks. The discussion builds on an interview with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye in which he said

said people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life. The argument, self serving as it is, makes a certain amount of sense. Not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon.

Now, I'm sure that some of the radical transparency/Web 2.0/etc. advocates would argue that there is no such thing as separate professional and personal lives. At some level, I suppose that's true if by "not separate" one means that there are any guarantees that wild drinking stories posed on the Web aren't going to be found by a prospective employer. However, I'm unconvinced that for most people personal and professional lives are quite as intertwined and inseparable as the blogging crowd and others in the coastal high-tech bubbles think they are.

In any case, the Fortune post then goes on to wonder whether such separation need be achieved by a standalone company like LinkedIn or whether it might be more logically implemented as an application on a social network like Facebook.

Wouldn’t it at least be smart, then, for LinkedIn to deploy itself as an application on Facebook, given Facebook’s new open API strategy? Quite possibly, said Nye who pointed out that [LinkedIn founder] Hoffman was an early investor in Facebook, and that Facebook backer Peter Thiel also has money in LinkedIn. “We know each other well,” said Nye. “We like each other.”

Bottom line: the jury is still divided on how much consolidation to expect in social networks, but it will be interesting to see how all these real world social networks hold up when their virtual counterparts begin to merge, or falter….

Links for 06-08-2007

• ongoing · Thread Herrings
  Lots of good pointers from Tim Bray to discussions about programming for massively threaded resources. (aka the issues surrounding concurrency)
  [tags: programming,processors]
• A game of inches - Joel on Software
  Clock radios and UIs. And what they tell us about the value of incremental improvements and designing software.
  [tags: design]