Links for 12-16-2010

• Why TV Lost - "About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers." Mostly true--although this speaks just to the delivery mechanism rather than the content.
• Marten Mickos Talks Red Hat, OpenStack and M&A: Cloud «
• CloudSwitch: Traitor To the [Public Cloud] Cause… | Rational Survivability
• “What Font Should I Use?”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces - Smashing Magazine
• The Value of the Freedom to Leave the Cloud: Salesforce and Heroku – tecosystems
• The PC Industry's Forgotten Market: Grandpa | ZDNet - "The only benefit to him having a Mac is that he could drag the thing into an Apple store and torture some poor bastard in a blue t-shirt at the Genius Bar, and they can charge him some ridiculously expensive surcharge to bring it back from death each time."
• Risk and Reward in the Cloud | Andi Mann – Übergeek - "It is just another risk to evaluate and manage. As I have already published – and it clearly remains exceedingly relevant – downtime is endemic in the public cloud – but it is not unique to public cloud."
• Project Food Blog Entry: Final Reflections - Boston in food.

Links for 12-13-2010

• Richard Thaler’s Rejoinder to the TOTM Free to Choose Symposium « Truth on the Market - "The philosophy of libertarian paternalism that Cass and I advocate in Nudge, could accurately titled Free to Choose, 2.0.  If people would read with care what we have written, they will see that this is accurate.  We do not advocate a larger role for government, just a more efficient, smarter way of achieving a government’s goals, whatever the democratic process determines that they should be."
• Christmas Dinner Recipes from Around the World - Saveur.com
• Heavenly Grease - A Pork Nativity Scene - Slashfood
• Words of the World by The University of Nottingham
• Infinity Blade Raises Standard for iOS Games | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - Some impressive advances on the gaming front.

Links for 12-09-2010

• Beef or Chicken? A Look at U.S. Meat Trends in the Last Century - NYTimes.com - Interesting data but I'm not convinced by the explanations.
• Dartblog: "For a Flexible Drinking Age" - This was of course the norm when I was in school even after Massachusetts increased the drinking age.
• 10 Cloud Predictions for 2011 from Forrester -Bime - SAAS Business Intelligence (BI) by We Are Cloud - Generally agree with these. May do a followup.
• Google's Chrome Web store and the future blurring of Web, app design | ZDNet
• Most Popular Top 10s of 2010
• 250 Free Online Courses from Top Universities | Open Culture
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2010 - Agree about Flipboard; interesting suggestion on how to use it. I'm going to check out some of the other suggestions. I haven't changed my RSS habits in a while.
• SimpleGeo
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Interactive storytelling: an oxymoron - The long-running failure of interactive TV is another (non)-existence proof.
• How the iPad Is Influencing Web Apps

Links for 12-08-2010

• Debating subway map form and function :: Second Ave. Sagas - "The venerable Vingelli took the floor first. While the angular subway schematic that divided the city’s subway riders remains Vingelli’s most iconic New York piece, the subways are replete with the 79-year-old Italian designer’s imprint. The relatively clear signage and the unified use of Helvetica was a part of Vingelli’s Graphics Standard manual that the TA adopted in the late 1960s."
• Someday, Nobody Will Ask “PC or Mac?” - Techland - TIME.com - "But something good has been happening lately: The decision has gotten simpler and less risky. Both Windows PCs and Macs are, on some level, primarily boxes that run the Web browsers we do much of our work in--once you're inside your favorite browser, it doesn't matter all that much which operating system your computer uses. And a high percentage of peripherals--cameras, printers, and many phones--don't care whether you connect them to a Windows computer or a Mac."

Links for 12-07-2010

• Canned Platypus » Blog Archive » Caching vs. Replication II
• Nimbula rips pages from Microsoft's announcement strategy book | ZDNet - "Microsoft is noted for a media relations strategy that persuades otherwise jaded analysts, journalists and consultants to write about products and services long before they’re really available for public consumption. It appears that Nimbula is in the process of executing a similar strategy. That being said, the company has some really interesting ideas about making cloud-based applications transportable that are worthy of consideration."
• Tips to Stop Sucking at PowerPoint
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The cloud press - I'm still not sure that WikiLeaks isn't an extreme enough example that it doesn't say much about the cloud in general. But this piece does shine a little more light on how journalism intersects the cloud.
• Ten Great Movies that Reimagine Shakespeare - The Tempest, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story | Nerve.com
• a sea of lead, a sky of slate: Abandoned on Everest
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The attack on Do Not Track - "There may be valid arguments to make against a Do Not Track program - some of the technical details remain fuzzy, and government regulation, if done clumsily, can impede innovation - but the suggestion that people shouldn't be allowed to make informed choices about their privacy because some businesses may suffer as a result of those choices is ludicrous and even offensive."
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : Hate-spewing “Christians” need to listen up - I should not laugh. (Though Dan should have quit while he was ahead. It gets preachy after a bit.)
• Nelson's Weblog: culture / information-wants-to-be-free - Good, succinct summary.
• WikiLeaks: 6 quirky revelations you may have missed - The Week - Priceless!
• 41Latitude - Google Maps & Label Readability - Really interesting low-level look about legibility of Google maps.
• Public Cloud Computing is NOT For Everyone | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Good counterpoint to the everything-should-migrate-to-public-cloud crowd.
• Understanding the Novell Deal (and when we'll learn more) - ConsortiumInfo.org - Lots of info on the deal mechanics.
• CA Technologies - 7-11: 7 Virtualization Predictions for 2011 : VMblog.com - Virtualization Technology News and Information for Everyone

Links for 12-02-2010

• Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2011 and Beyond - "By 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a workforce using tablets.
  The Apple iPad is the first of what promises to be a huge wave of media tablets focused largely on content consumption, and to some extent communications, rather than content creation, with fewer features and less processing power than traditional PCs and notebooks or pen-centric tablet PCs. Support requirements for media tablets will vary across and within enterprises depending on usage scenario. At minimum, in cases where employees are bringing their own devices for convenience, enterprises will have to offer appliance-level support with a limited level of network connectivity (which will likely include access to enterprise mail and calendaring) and help desk support for connectivity issues."
• 13 Vintage Computer Ads Show How Far We've Come (PHOTOS)
• Flickr: The Flickr Developer Guide
• Where the Silicon Meets the Road - Interesting discussion. And also highlights how workable AI remains largely compute and data driven.
• Lightroom, Storage Space, and Big Catalogs | Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips - I should probably think about deleting more of my photos in Lightroom. Disk is cheap but there are a lot of hidden costs associated with managing photos I'm never going to have the remotest use for. Good workflow suggestions in the comments too.
• Fritinancy: How Prohibition Changed Branding and Language - Lots of fascinating trivia.
• Ovum StraightTalk | Novell is acquired, but its woes continue - Ovum's dour take on the Attachmate buy.
• How IT Execs Consume - Andrew Lark - Interesting data on awareness vehicles by CIO age.
• Food - Cooking and Cookbooks - Recipes - Desserts - Eggnog - Christmas - New York Times

My fave general purpose cookbooks

The past year and a half saw good updates to a couple of old standby cookbooks. These aren't necessarily the sort of cookbooks you buy to read all the way through or to ogle the food porn photography--indeed there aren't many photos in any of the books listed. Nor are they designed to dive deep on a particular cuisine or food style. Rather, they're big tomes intended to give a taste (so to speak) from a wide swatch through relatively traditional American cooking. Here are four cookbooks I put in this category. Two are the aforementioned newcomers.

The publication of Ruth Reichl's new Gourmet cookbook in September of 2009 turned out to be something of a bittersweet event given that it preceded the cancellation of Gourmet magazine by just a couple of weeks. I have quite a few cookbooks from Gourmet in my collection but the two volume 1960s-vintage reference on my shelf stays there mostly for nostalgia reasons; it's not particularly relevant to me in the types of recipes and ingredients on which it focuses. And that's a general problem with older cookbooks. As Reichl puts it:

Back then things were so different that my editor insisted that I call for ground beef instead of lamb in a classic Greek moussaka; she said not many grocers actually sold lamb. She also worried about the recipe for handmade pasta (too esoteric) and a simple Chinese stir-fry of chicken (what on earth was a wok). She worried when I called for freshly grated Parmesan cheese (most people still used the stuff that came in the green can), fresh garlic (frowned upon in many places) and chiles (too hot, too hot, too hot).

I think it's also the case that the recipes in this book tend toward the simpler and the quicker. They're not dumbed down exactly but they do mostly avoid highly complex foods that require all-day preparation. And that aligns with modern lifestyles as well.

Most of the recipes in this book can be found on the Epicurious website, which is also a good place to see how readers may have modified the original recipes. Even though you can look up the recipes for free though, I find it worthwhile to have a curated and packaged version that I can keep in the kitchen (where, to be sure, the Epicurious application also resides on my iPad).


My existing New York Times cookbook wasn't quite so vintage, with a 1990 copyright date. However, this edition--edited by longtime Times food editor Craig Claiborne--seemed to be a largely incremental update of earlier versions. It was one of my more useful references nonetheless but it still dated back to what was in important ways an earlier era of cooking.

Amanda Hesser's The Essential New York Times Cookbook, like Gourmet Today, is explicitly about updating recipes for modern tastes and ingredients (albeit the modern tastes and ingredients associated with locales like Manhattan). However, the book places those updated recipes within the context of the New York Times' recipe files going back to the beginning.

 Thus, while this cookbook certainly contains plenty of "modern" recipes, it also makes a point of reintroducing foods and drinks of the past that may be worth re-examining. And for fans of Craig Claiborne, many of his favorites are still well-represented. (In keeping with the season, his 1958 eggnog concoction is more of a meal than a drink.) This is both a good cookbook and a fun read.


The Cook's Illustrated crew, headed by Chris Kimball, is something of a mini-industry. They have shows on public TV, magazines, a Website that they actually succeed in getting folks like myself to subscribe to (something the New York Times would sincerely love), and a passel of cookbooks that profitably rework and repurpose large swaths of content.

The central conceit of Cook's Illustrated is that everything from recipes to techniques is tested, tested, tested. They're also probably the best-known example of the modern "cooking geek" approach in that they investigate and explain why particular techniques work or don't work. (Alton Brown is another author who focuses on the science of cooking but without the obsessiveness of Cook's Illustrated.)

The Best Recipes is an encyclopedic work and it does a great job of breaking down and illustrating how to do things in the kitchen with something over 1,000 recipes in all. Because it does so much more than just present a bunch of recipes, this has become my go to reference for how to do things in the kitchen and a starting point for how to handle a cut of meat or other ingredient.
If there's a knock on on Cook's Illustrated it's that the whole "we tried 50 different ways of boiling an egg" shtick can get a bit old after a while. More to the point, I find it can result in recipes that are a bit fussy with three types of cheeses grated three different ways and the like. Also be forewarned that large quantities of cream, butter, and the like often seem to play heavily into getting the best tasting result. Still, overall, a great reference and a good bargain given its size.


A lot of people learned cooking from The Joy of Cooking and it's still the standard kitchen reference for many. For my part, I tended to favor modern versions of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook--which traces its origins to the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cookbook.

Now, to tell the truth, I don't use this as much as I used to. If I want to figure out what to do with some leftovers or make some traditional comfort food, the Internet often has a more complete, albeit less vetted answer. And, as I noted above, Cook's Illustrated is a substantial reference work and generally does a more complete job of explaining both whys and hows. So, in short, this is a less essential reference for me than it once was. However, that said, I still use it and it continues to earn its spot on my close-to-hand bookshelf in the kitchen.

Links for 12-01-2010

• Allegations Against Hurd Included Leak of H-P Plans - WSJ.com - This is probably as definitive an account as we'll get.
• Should China Rethink High Speed Rail? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - "To get a really catastrophic misallocation of resources, it seems to take a government; corporations can only screw things up on an artisinal scale."
• Are IT vendors missing the point of cloud? | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - "Developers are leading the charge to cloud, whether IT operations likes it or not. Cloud computing is an application-centric operations model, and as such its adoption is driven by how applications are built, packaged, deployed, monitored, and automated. Re-creating the server-, network-, and storage-centric approaches of the static past in a cloud environment is not conducive to meeting the demands of this new operations model."
• Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt - NYTimes.com
• NIST Moves Forward on Cloud Computing
• Morgan Stanley's Legendary Tech Analyst Mary Meeker Moving To Kleiner Perkins
• I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of E-Mail - Cringely on technology
• The secret to how cats drink, as told to professors by Cutta Cutta
• New Beast on the Block - Tuned In - TIME.com - What a fall. This is almost worse than just fading away.
• The Economics of the Cloud: Dissecting a Must-Read White Paper - CIO.com - The lead argument in this data would seem to be that public clouds (in various forms) make sense for SMBs. Which is hard to argue with. The broader arguments I've seen based on this dat seem more... difficult.
• Open Atmosphere : Microsoft is the New "Open" | Network World - "You've got to Microsoft credit. They may have gotten beaten up by VMWare, bruised by Amazon, and haven't been very well acknowledged by the cloud market. But they have made some fundamental strategic changes designed to accomplish one thing, and one thing only: driving more applications and more users to their cloud. But the leopard hasn't really changed its spots. They've simply recognized the control points in the industry are changing. Microsoft is being more open on the periphery to draw users into its monolithic, proprietary cloud platform."
• You Write 'Bias Journalism' and I Read 'Derp' - Nice rant!
• 2010 Cloud Computing Predictions from around the Web - Good wrapup.
• TidBITS Opinion: A Eulogy for the Xserve: May It Rack in Peace - The fundamental issue is that just as Apple was thinking about getting more serious about enterprise computing, the iPod started to really take off.

Links for 11-10-2010

• What really happened between HP ex-CEO Mark Hurd and Jodie Fisher? - Fortune Tech
• Debunking the myths about southpaws in sports - The Phoenix - Perhaps a more neutral source about percentage of southpaws in championship tennis.
• Hockey Stick Divide - Canada Leans Left, U.S. Right - NYTimes.com - The handedness question in hockey.
• Bats left, throws right (Part 1) - I got into a typically weird discussion of opposite handedness with an MIT friend of mine.
• Ten questions to ask your cloud provider | Network Administrator | TechRepublic.com
• From the X-Files – The Cloud in Context: Evolution from Gadgetry to Popular Culture | Rational Survivability

Links for 10-29-2010

• Shutterfinger: What Your Choice of Camera Says About You - Funny!
• Enterprises face integration hurdles to private clouds - Some of the challenges in moving from virtualization to private clouds.
• Virtualization Then & Now: Symposium 2009-2010 - "IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers have focused on open source and internal technologies to deliver solutions at the lowest possible cost. But that’s changing. In the past year, there’s been a rapidly growing trend for IaaS providers to add support for major commercial VM formats – especially VMware, but also Hyper-V and XenServer. The reason? To create an easy on-ramp for enterprises. As enteprises virtualize (and in many cases, build private clouds), the IaaS providers know that they need to make interoperability, hybrid, overdrafting, migration as easy as possible."
• What is VMware vCloud Director? - Brief but good overview of various prerequisites and user reaction.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle Creator Alex Anderson Dies - TIME - "Animation has had plenty of unknown geniuses — from the directors, artists and storymen of Walt Disney's early features to the sly hands behind the silent pornographic cartoon Buried Treasure — but few were more obscure, or more important, than Alexander Anderson, who died Friday at 90 in Carmel, Calif. Anderson created the characters Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format, for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spin-off The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. "

Links for 10-25-2010

• Gentrification and its Discontents - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Good follow-on to earlier post.
• One Div Zero: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages - Funny!
• The Gentrifier's Lament - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic - Thoughtful piece about gentrification.
• PeteSearch: Visualization myths around Snow's cholera map - "Visualizations are fantastic at engaging people, everyone loves maps. When it comes down to detailed analysis though, a spreadsheet or other list-based interface is almost always better. Maps and other visualizations tell stories so well because of how much they leave out, but textual representations still rule when it comes to actually working with the full data."
• Captured: New York City from Above – Plog Photo Blog
• What Amazon Fears Most: Diapers - BusinessWeek - Focus in a commodity business.
• YouTube politics: A quest for victory or notoriety? | The Social - CNET News
• Google LatLong: The world as the eagle and the wild goose see it - The first aerial photograph. It's of Boston.

Links for 10-15-2010

• A VC: The Impact Of Priority Inbox - "If your email gets into the third section of the main page, called "Everything Else", I most likely won't see it unless I see it on my Android phone. And hopefully Google is working on bringing Priority Inbox to Android. When that happens, I won't ever see it."
• Gartner's 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1,800 Technologies - You can't take these things too seriously IMO, but they can stimulate some useful discussion.
• Another Year, Another Blogoversary - Chuck's Blog - Interesting meta-blogging piece by EMC's Chuck Hollis.
• HDRI Photography: Exciting New Frontier, or Gimmick to Avoid? - A Picture's Worth | PhotoShelter - Unsurprising general consensus. Useful tool but often overdone.
• IBM, Oracle and Java: The Q&A – tecosystems - Typically good writeup by Stephen O'Grady.
• By The Bell: Who really invented virtual desktops? - Pretty good rundown that, for the most part, accurately parses the different forms. (Doesn't clearly distinguish VDI from Terminal services.)
• Amazon Media Room: News Release - "Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century--works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the "heft" required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated--whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event."
• Talking Business - For H.P. Board, a Double Standard - NYTimes.com - Tough stuff. "More important, for a company that professes to be concerned with ethics — so concerned that it had to get rid of Mr. Hurd, with his piddling expense account problems — it is astonishing that it would find Mr. Apotheker’s lapses acceptable. He may not have been directly involved in this brazen theft of intellectual property, but it defies belief to say he didn’t know about it. And he did nothing to stop it until it was far too late. Apparently, the H.P. directors adhere to the highest ethical standards — but only when it’s convenient. "
• What we can learn from procrastination : The New Yorker - "Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”"
• Google sends multicore warning: wimpy cores don’t cut it « SoftTalk – multicore and parallel programming - Of course this will vary by application but for the most part, the mega-multi-lightweight-cores approach seems to be a niche.
• Rebate card comes with a catch | OregonLive.com - "In fact, behavioral economists chalk up my error to something called "mental accounting."" Yup. I've done this.
• First NYC/London cable in a decade promises sub-60ms latency - In case anyone had any doubts that even (very) extra-datacenter latency matters. "How can the speed of light vary among cable operators? It can't, but operators can plan their geographic routes strategically to keep the total cable length a bit shorter than the competition. According to the consultants at Telegeography, breaking 60ms would make Project Express at least 5ms faster than its closest competitor."
• Confessions of a used-book salesman. - By Michael Savitz - Slate Magazine - An eye-opening look into how high-volume used book selling works.
• 'Paradise' found: 70-ton elephant at S.F. Port - "The problem with the map is simple: it is huge and would cost a lot of money to move, restore and display it. The last estimate was in the range of $500,000. And that was 30 years ago. It is a classic white elephant, too valuable to scrap, but too expensive to keep."

Links for 10-06-2010

• 13 Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Ads Aimed at Kids | Cracked.com
• Some like it loud … « Music Machinery - "One of the nifty features that we’ve rolled out in the last 6 months here at the Echo Nest is an extremely flexible song search API. With this API you can search for songs based upon all sorts of criteria from tempo, key mode, duration. You can use this API to do things that would be really hard to do. "
• Typographic Maps - Axis Maps LLC - Cartography. Visualization. Design.
• An Awesome Look at Mini-San Francisco - SF in tilt-shift.
• 483 - The Great European Shouting Match | Strange Maps | Big Think - Funny.
• louisgray.com: New Apple TV Extends Fragmentation, Cupertino Style - This is part and parcel of a broader content fragmentation within the home issue. As one commenter says,, this problem is hardly unique to Apple and partly stems from the content providers. However, Apple has hit the seamless user experience drum so hard that we expect more from Apple's product ecosystem hardware and software.
• Family Guy Abortion Episode and Other Controversial Cartoons - The Daily Beast
• How Karen Owen and Tyler Clementi Lost Control - Kashmir Hill - The Not-So Private Parts - Forbes - "In these tech-savvy, Internet-happy, Google-caching, live-streaming-made-easy days, it’s very easy to be public; control, though, is hard to come by. Welcome to the real Social Network."

Links for 10-04-2010

• Amazon.com : Make Ice Cream with Liquid Nitrogen - This is great!
• The Atlantic Tech Canon - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
• Weak Ties, Twitter and Revolution | Wired Science | Wired.com - "These are all important questions, and I don’t think we have many good answers.  But I would quibble with Gladwell’s wholesale rejection of weak ties as a means of building a social movement. (I have some issues with Shirky, too.) It turns out that such distant relationships aren’t just useful for getting jobs or spreading trends or sharing information. According to Granovetter, they might also help us fight back against the Man, or at least the redevelopment agency."
• Cloud Computing's Stormy Future - Bloomberg - "Cloud computing has the potential to generate a series of disruptions that will ripple out from the tech industry and ultimately transform many industries around the world. This is definitely a technology that deserves serious discussion from the entire senior leadership team of a company."
• The Tech - Browse Volume 97 - Re: the latest Duke thing. Nothing is ever truly new. See story about thursday (newspaper) in this issue.
• The Sounding Board: Worth Watching: Journalism in the Age of Data
• Apple Logo Is an Agnostic's Crucifix, Star of David: Study | Fast Company - "In both cases, "those that were highly religious [or primed to think about religion] cared less about national brands ... religion reduces brand reliance by apparently satisfying the need to express self-worth.""
• Evaluating TEDx as a brand strategy | opensource.com - "When it comes to choosing the right brand strategy for our current 2010 world, we need to weigh two opposing forces tugging mightily at each other."

Links for 09-30-2010

• Intel's next must-have upgrade: a look at Sandy Bridge - The most interesting aspect to this for me is that we seem to have a bifurcation between desktop designs and server architectures.
• There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly - Nice overview of IPv6 history and transition plans.
• New iPod nano BOM at US$43.73, says iSuppli - The BOM teardown. Nice margins.
• The Wisdom of Clouds - a blog about cloud computing by James Urquhart - CNET News - "Even if, say, a vendor solution is a "drop in" technology initially, the complexity and tradeoffs of a long-term dependency on the vendor adds greatly to the cost and complexity."
• Hack The Stack Or Go On a Bender With a Vendor? | Rational Survivability - Good piece. In a followon piece, James Urquhart also correctly notes that even integrated "clouds in a box" aren't just plug and play, especially over time.
• Scott Adams Blog: Wireless Voice Calls are Obsolete 09/29/2010 - "Another great advantage of texting is that it thwarts bores. Bores love voice conversations. In a pinch, they will send you overlong emails. But texting forces boring people to be brief. How great is that?"
• Fritinancy: Does This Name Make Me Look Fat? - Good piece on naming.

Links for 09-29-2010

• Independent commercial Web publishing: still exhausting? — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard - Off-the-shelf software for publishing, content management, and so forth is much more widely available and complete than it once was but a naive "just use the cloud" is still a vast oversimplification in many cases.
• Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences - Anil Dash
• Technology Review: Emtech 2010 Webcast - I should carve out some time to watch some of this.
• Review: Get Lamp Documentary - Z-Machine Matter - "Despite the fact that Get Lamp is a one man operation, the end result is a professional quality film with all of the trimmings: good navigation, compelling content, interviews with almost all of the luminaries in the field, bonus features, cool retro packaging and a unique numbered commemorative Get Lamp coin. And the whole thing is just 40 Zorkmid plus shipping."
• Why Apple Will Never Do a Real iWatch | Cult of Mac - I think some folks misread my initial post a bit.
• BoomTown Decodes Conway's Super Angel Email to Fellow Investors | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD - Hilarious.
• The Diapers-Beer data mining (mostly) myth
• Help! My vendor’s Oracle and I'm locked in! | NetworkWorld.com Community - “Your Oracle sales reps are coming to town,” warned David Vellante, CEO and co-founder of Wikibon.org, a Web site where industry analysts and others share their views on the IT industry. “You will be eaten alive, your costs will go up ... and you’ll be locked-in for a decade.”
• America Before Pearl Harbor - Early Kodachrome Images

Links for 09-23-2010

• Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle - Gosling really lays into Oracle here.
• Seth's Blog: The forever recession - "The other one, I fear, is here forever. This is the recession of the industrial age, the receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication. In short: if you're local, we need to buy from you. If you work in town, we need to hire you. If you can do a craft, we can't replace you with a machine."
• world subways at scale - fake is the new real - But the various comments dispute what should be included in these maps.
• Oracle OpenWorld Keynote – Worst. Keynote(s). Evar. | Error404 – It's A Blog - "It was completely uncalled for, it was completely unprofessional, and it was absolutely revolting. Not only was Larry’s presentation excessively long for no good reason, but it catered exclusively to kool-aid drinkers, and sought to insult people for no reason other than to insult them. HP is one of the biggest sponsors of OpenWorld, and he directly insulted them at least three times. He launched into the most revolting and unprofessional FUD attack on Salesforce.com that I have ever been witness too. No context, no reason, he’s talking about the definition of cloud and out of left field says “oh by the way, Salesforce.com is totally insecure and other people can get at your data.” Are you fucking kidding me?!"
• THE HARDY BOYS THE FINAL CHAPTER. . .
• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's - Aug. 23, 2010
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Open Innovation Re-visited - Nice piece by Irving on open innovation.
• Some more comments... : On a New Road - "In my brief time getting to know Oracle, they made it very clear that you're mostly right (I'd quibble with the Mono part - it's still silly). The key phrase is "in Oracle's hands". It doesn't have to be that way. Lightning might strike and they might live up to their 2007 commitment to create an independent Java foundation. I'm not holding my breath, but if enough customers rose up in revolt, it could actually happen. But it would require Oracle customers to do this, since the only thing that Oracle pays attention to is money, and that's what customers hand over to Oracle."
• Top 10 Super Bowl tech ads

Links for 08-23-2010

• Five years after Katrina, New Orleans' charm calls again - CNN.com - One of the more positive articles I've seen. I lived in New Orleans for three years; it would be nice to have an excuse to visit.
• Critical Shopper - J.C. Penney - Playing to the Middle - NYTimes.com - More Cintra Wilson venom.
• The Downfall of American Apparel -- The Cut - Cintra Wilson has such a great writing style. "Dov Charney, the company's incorrigible scamp of a CEO and founder, had a designer's knack for catching the trend-wave du jour by recycling just the right historical wardrobe references — all the French-cut leotards, metallic headbands, stretch lace tank tops, and elastic belts that could turn a nice girl from Akron into a not-so-nice girl from Akron. The gay shopper, too, felt naughty in colored briefs and gym shorts"
• Fly Right Eat Well The Best Airport Dining Options - Business Travel - Portfolio.com - Interesting piece on what airports have learned about what people are looking for in restaurants, e.g. one exec says "People want better food, not fancier food, and we may have confused the two."
• Ann Coulter: The Gay Speech Flap - The Daily Beast - I knew Ann at Cornell. And, yes, some of the outrageiusness is a bit of an act.
• Faster Forward - No, Wired, the Web is not 'dead' - "The popularity of smartphone apps reflects some temporary competitive imbalances. Many Web sites have yet to see the kind of smartphone-aware redesign that makes the iPhone- and Android-compatible versions of the Facebook and Twitter sites such a pleasure to use."

Links for 08-17-2010

• For the Class of 2014, No E-Mail or Wristwatches - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - "Another insight that shows how quickly things change is this one: The class of 2014 has “never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.” They don’t own watches and instead use their cellphones to tell the time."
• Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain : Pharyngula - "There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
• NeuroLogica Blog » Banning Wi-Fi From Schools - Alas, some nutcases actually buy the WiFi is killing us meme.
• Miscellanea » Archive » The Truth About Wireless Devices - Priceless.
• Rumored iTV Could Pave Way for Apple-Connected Television | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD - If Apple succeeds with v2 of Apple TV, heads should roll over at Xbox (some of which admittedly already have).
• No Yak Shaving! - TheOpenForce.com - Oh my. I've had this happen a lot of times when I've needed to do something on my computer and, before you know it, I'm rebuilding the system.
• Headius: My Thoughts on Oracle v Google
• Robo-James’ Time Machine: M-M-M-Max Headroom - Tuned In - TIME.com - I've been waiting for this.
• Talking Business - The Real Reason for Ousting H.P.’s Chief - NYTimes.com
• BW Online | May 21, 2001 | Commentary: Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work - Interesting blast from the past via HN.
• If Historical Events had Facebook Statuses | Cool Material

Links for 08-13-2010

• Get Outdoors with The North Face Trailhead iPhone App - Need to check this one out.
• Design for Hackers: Why You Don’t Use Garamond on The Web
• Networking Showdown: UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect (Updated) — Define The Cloud
• Mercury News editorial: HP board must be far more forthcoming about Hurd scandal - San Jose Mercury News - Yup. Those are exactly the questions that haven't been answered.
• From 1890: The First Text Messages | Sunday Magazine
• Amazon APIs as cloud standards? Not so fast | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - Good piece. De facto standard is a term that tends to get thrown around in the vein of "of course, XYZ is a standard."
• Don’t Be Ugly By Accident! « OkTrends - Photo attractiveness by the (EXIF) numbers.
• Airing Private Cloud’s Dirty Laundry… | Rational Survivability - The best post ever on private vs. public clouds :-)

Links for 08-09-2010

• YouTube - The Misunderstanding - Presented by AMD - Arguably in poor taste, but still pretty funny.
• Sharpie’s Liquid Pencil Becomes Permanent After Three Days - Techland - TIME.com - This looks interesting.
• VMware: VMware vCloud Blog: A Big Cloud Challenge: Cross Stack Portability - A Big Cloud Challenge: Cross Stack Portability
• Dear StorageMojo: low-cost archive storage? - "The question is whether or not someone can design a commercially viable system for home and SOHO use. It is obvious that drive vendors have the cost advantage, especially with the advent of easy and cheap USB drive docks, if they build a disk drive designed for that purpose."
• On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only - WSJ.com - Impressive.
• Barnes & Noble: The Titanic Goes On Sale - 24/7 Wall St. - "The company will explore “strategic options” which means that the value of Barnes & Noble’s priced peaked some time ago along with its prospects. The board of directors understands Barnes & Noble cannot properly be a public company. It needs to be private which would allow fools who believe in the retail book business to run the firm without damaging shareholders."

Links for 08-04-2010

• Red Eye - Abstract City Blog - NYTimes.com - Really funny virtual diary.
• New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say | AdGrok - Lots of broad brush generalizations (and some points that are IMO quite overstated) but a good read nonetheless.
• The Lifespan of Every TV Show Ever [COMIC] | Cracked.com - Pretty accurate actually.
• OpenStack, an IaaS Platform from Rackspace, NASA and Citrix | The Virtualization Practice - A variety of commentary here that I found interesting.
• Haphazard Firefighting Might Have Sunk BP Oil Rig - The Center for Public Integrity
• Tom Shales - Tom Shales reviews Christiane Amanpour's lackluster debut on ABC's 'This Week' - "With pomp and panoply befitting a visit from a foreign dignitary, ABC raised the curtain on its newly revamped "This Week" program and introduced in a big way the superstar who's taken it over in a big, big way: Christiane Amanpour, veteran CNN foreign correspondent now uneasily relocated to a desk job." I watched pretty regularly in the Brinkley days. Haven't seen it in ages.
• Ping - In School Systems, Slow Progress for Open-Source Textbooks - NYTimes.com - Interesting piece on the (slow) progress of open source textbooks.
• The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline? – tecosystems - Typically good analysis by Stephen.
• Typecasting - I wonder if Mad Men has all its typography correct?
• Steve Ballmer on the iPad: The transcript - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech - "But to get the full flavor of the train wreck that is Steve Ballmer in 2010 -- a salesman whose only answer to technological change seems to be the operating system he inherited from Bill Gates -- you might want to hear the quotes in context."
• Reading on E-Book Devices: the user experience - Lots of good stuff about the good and bad of ebooks.
• Flamethrower Versus Fire Extinguisher at 1000 Frames per Second - "Lets say you had an uber-expensive Phantom slow motion camera, a flamethrower, and a fire extinguisher at your disposal. What would you do?"
  
  Well… probably this!

Links for 07-28-2010

• CONELRAD | DAISY: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF AN INFAMOUS AND ICONIC AD - PART ONE
• Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit - Enterprise Integration Patterns - Messaging in the context of how Starbucks takes coffee orders.
• ongoing by Tim Bray · Five Pictures of OSCON - Tim's OSCON wrapup.
• Does the Web remember too much — or too little? — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard - A thoughtful counterpoint to the end of forgetting.
• Last Kodachrome roll processed in Parsons - "McCurry told Dwayne's vice president Grant Steinle how he had chosen to shoot the last roll of "Kodachrome produced by Eastman Kodak by capturing images around New York. "Then we went to India, where I photographed a tribe that is actually on the verge of extinction. It's actually disappearing, the same way as Kodachrome," he told Steinle."

Links for 07-23-2010

• Dead Tree Alert: Mad Men Returns; Plus, What Is a Spoiler? - Tuned In - TIME.com - "The implicit request: thanks for all of your rave reviews of our show. We want you to write about the new season in advance. Preferably positively! But without any detail, quotation or concrete substantiation!
  Uh, no. Criticism doesn't work that way. Journalism doesn't work that way--you don't just make assertions without evidence." << Sounds a lot like some NDAs.
• Daring Fireball: Sorry, No, I'm Not Going to Write a Piece Arguing That Dan Lyons Is a Jackass - Have to laugh when journos start pissing on each other.
• Apple's iPad, iPhone and an enterprise halo effect | ZDNet - At least as interesting as formal evaluation and adoption is the many examples of "consumerization of IT" (i.e. people buying personally and using for work) examples that I see out there.
• NASA and Rackspace open source cloud fluffer • Channel Register - "But Kemp also said that the scalability of the product and other issues with Eucalyptus (including the inability by NASA to get some of its enhancements into the Eucalyptus code base) compelled Kemp to take the entire Nebula team and dedicate it – for the past six months – to creating a new fabric controller, called Nova, from scratch."
• The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com - "When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. " << My (mild) counterpoint to this meme is that the norm in history has been living where everyone knows your name (and your past).
• Why GPS voices are so condescending - CNN.com
• Grey beards seize power at Big Blue • The Register - "In the moves announced yesterday, a number of independent IBM groups were consolidated, giving certain IBM executives more power and others less. Most of the executives who have increased power at Big Blue are not much younger than Palmisano, who turns 59 in July and is approaching the traditional 60 retirement age for IBM chairmen, so the reorganization is not meant to anoint a successor to Palmisano. If anything, it makes it pretty clear that there really isn't a successor to Palmisano and that the whole team may just stay together and keep working past retirement age."
• E-Books: The Future Is Here - Business - The Atlantic - Interesting discussion of how the success of the Kindle could end up affecting book pricing (especially hardcover vs. paperback) more broadly.
• NASA drops Ubuntu's Koala food for (real) open source • The Register - "NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders."
• VMware Knows the Cloud Doesn’t Need Server Virtualization - This is really an argument about a level of abstraction different from that of the operating system (which VMware happens not to own).

Links for 07-20-2010

• Amazon Media Room: Amazon.com Now Selling More Kindle Books Than Hardcover Books - "Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher. " Striking given that my perception of the Kindle is that's it's somewhat of a niche device. Of course, Amazon is hardly the only source of hardcovers but still...
• ‘I’m Going to Go Call Ralph and Yell at Him.’ - "For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”"
• VMware Project Redwood = Dead Wood? » ocb - Citrix Community - The always quotable Mr. Crosby.
• We have met Antennagate, and it is us - Good piece. Not that there's an answer.
• Cloud Computing in the Public Sector | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Nice summary and analysis of subject topic.
• Google and the Value of Social Networking - More on the Google doesn't do social meme making the rounds.
• Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
• How Will You Measure Your Life? - Harvard Business Review - By Clayton Christensen

Links for 07-13-2010

• The 'false cloud' is false | Apps Meet Ops - CNET News - "If cloud computing is going to mean something practical, important, and central to enterprise IT over the next few years, cloud must be broad enough to include privately-owned and operated infrastructure. Cloud's benefits must be accessible to enterprise apps. That will often mean implementing the benefits with heavier performance, availability, and other guarantees than available in today's version 1.x cloud environments."
• Hacker News | Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications - Interesting article and comments about the difference between what Google does and what good social does--even if it is overloaded with various mixed metaphors. I think it's also hard to dispute that Google doesn't even use social to augment search especially (except to the degree that Page Rank has an inherent social element). The comments on HN are as interesting as the original article.
• Amazon Web Services: The De Facto Cloud API? « SmoothSpan Blog - However, a number of folks out there are arguing something a bit different--more along the lines that the de facto standard begins and ends with AWS.
• Google - the Moscow-Vladivostok: a virtual journey on Google Maps

Links for 07-09-2010

• tecosystems » A Swing of the Pendulum: The Shift Towards Specialized Hardware and Software - Agree more on software side. Record of specialty hardware vs. "commodity" is not good: SiCortex, Azul, InfiniBand, etc.
• Matter/Anti-Matter - A blog on product design and innovation from Frog Design - CNET News - Nice piece about the intersection of craft and mass manufacturing.
• Aktiv Grotesk, Bruno Maag’s Would-Be Helvetica Killer - For the type geeks in the audience.
• Inside IBM's sex and trading scandal - Jul. 6, 2010 - All the sordid dirt.
• Peter Paul Biro, fingerprints, and a lost Leonardo : The New Yorker
• To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery - NYTimes.com - I went "Just, wow" at some of this.
• CNN, Twitter and Why Hiding Journalists’ Opinions Is (Still) a Bad Idea - Tuned In - TIME.com - "If an organization wants to set parameters for acceptable expression, that's its prerogative, but if that organization is in the information business, it has a responsibility to be transparent about it."

Links for 07-08-2010

• The Real Life Social Network v2 - As @stshank noted, this illustrates the problem of professional and personal separation on social networks.
• Sun’s Lost Intel-Chip Killer - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - Great line! "Sun stood out because it so often oscillated between lovable bravado and insanity."
• Microsoft Rank And File Felt "Embarrassment All Over Campus" From Kin Failure - "We had a huge launch party on campus and I bet that party cost more than the amount of revenues we took in on the product. As an employee, I am embarrassed. As a shareholder, I am pissed. It's one thing to incubate products and bring them to a proof-of-concept to see what works, but it's something else to launch."
• Google Makes the iPhone YouTube App Obsolete - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com - I was just thinking how handy it would be to put a bookmark on my iPhone as an "app."

Links for 07-07-2010

• Free movies on your iPad from the National Film Board | iPad Atlas - CNET Reviews
• Zucchini and Summer Squash with Chili, Mint and Toasted Almonds - Blog - food52 - StumbleUpon
• The knowledge factor in Silicon Valley - O Say Can You See? - "Terman’s goal was to import the Cambridge-MIT model of regional innovation to the West Coast. For Terman, marrying the knowledge of the university to the practical concerns of industry was critical to the formation of a self-sustaining high-technology and knowledge region."
• Presentations: Red Hat Summit 2010 - JBossWorld 2010
• Unlocking The Value Of The Cloud - Forbes.com - Nice piece from Forbes that mentions the Red Hat announcements at Summit.
• BuzzWhack: The Buzzword Compliant Dictionary
• A hard look at the Web's 'shallows' | Relevant Results - CNET News - Carr's provocative although his long-form writing is generally more nuanced than the soundbite is.
• Mitch Albom: iPhone crazies need a major wake-up call | freep.com | Detroit Free Press - "And when the doors opened, you'd have thought Justin Bieber was waiting inside. People applauded. They screamed. Some actually squealed. This, for a phone... Never mind that the device would be for sale the next day, too. Never mind that there's a reason it's called iPhone 4 -- because there have already been three iPhones before it."
• OpenOffice at the crossroads - The H Open Source: News and Features - Without really disagreeing with much of what Michael Meeks has to say, there's also the matter of "Who pays?" Lots of people like having a free alternative to Microsoft Office, but there aren't companies out there with the self-interest and the money to fund the level of development needed for OpenOffice to shine.
• Did VMware just cancel their client hypervisor outright? - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com - Don't know anything here beyond Brian's speculations. However, a few salient points: 1.) Client-side virtualization is about portfolios of solutions; 2.) I've been skeptical in the past about the depth of VMware's commitment here; and 3.) Does browser-based (or at least lightweight) client computing largely make all this irrelevant for many purposes.

Links for 06-28-2010

• The "Consumable" Cloud, Red Hat Flavoured | ZDNet UK - Good piece on Cloud Foundations launch from ZDNet UK.
• The basics of cloud computing - This video was actually taped at VMware last September, but TechTarget put it up fairly recently.
• Jon Lech Johansen's blog - The flip side of Apple's much-maligned locked-down app store.
• Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization - Park & ride lots in Massachusetts.
• Marten Mickos says open source doesn't have to be fully open | NetworkWorld.com Community - Marten defends the open core approach.
• Cityscapes: When lightning strikes (twice), a photographer is ready - Cool piece about a photo of twin lightning strikes.

Links for 06-18-2010

• Questions From "Journey To The Private Cloud" Simulcast - Chuck's Blog - A 68(!!) question Q&A on the subject topic.
• Spend Matters: HP's Supply Chain -- By the Numbers (Part 2) - Interesting analysis of HP's supply chain numbers.
• SF Signal: Futurama Recap-O-Rama: 5 Seasons in 7 Minutes
• Daring Fireball: Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies... - This is an oldie but goodie.
• Bring your own PC comes despite vexed IT pros - "While many IT pros hate the idea of allowing end users to bring their own PCs to work, executives and other employees are using netbooks, iPads and other devices without their companies' blessings."

Links for 06-16-2010

• The Map Room: The L.A. Times on Volunteer Mapping - It's worth remembering to temper enthusiasm for local crowdsourcing with the reality that it takes a critical mass that isn't everywhere present.
• How tape dies - "$1.5B markets don’t die overnight – even dropping 25% a year. Tape will be around for a long time to come."
• Map: Where Americans Are Moving - Forbes.com - Shows migration inward and outward by county. Good visualization.
• Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole. - "Sorry the entire world can't all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type."
• SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry | VentureBeat - Interesting but I've seen the low-power server film a lot of times and it never seems to end well.
• Google Earth 5.2 Released | Google Earth Blog - New features around elevation tracks for hiking, etc.
• HP's PC supply chain by the numbers | ZDNet - Some of the numbers are impressive.

Links for 06-14-2010

• "Suddenly...": Seven different salutes to the Odessa Steps scene. - Indie Eye - Blogs - IFC.com
• 468 – Crime Topography of San Francisco « Strange Maps
• furtwangler beethoven - Public domain MP3s
• YouTube - usbtypewriter demo - This is incredibly cool!
• Economic View - Recipes for Ruin, in the Gulf or on Wall St. - NYTimes.com - Thaler was a professor of mine at Corness
• The Mother of All Invention - Magazine - The Atlantic - The 50th anniversary of the Xerox 914 photocopier.
• What Makes Private Cloud Private « Wikibon Blog - Video interview with Marketing VP for the CTOs office at EMC/RSA.
• Bits or pieces?: A life less cloudy - Simon Wardley has joined CSC LEF.
• Blogger Buzz: Blogger Template Designer Now Available To Everyone - I've tuned blogger templates by hand. This could well make things easier.
• Looking Back at SCO - ConsortiumInfo.org
• Department of Energy - Data Summary from Deepwater Horizon - "As part of the Obama Administration's ongoing commitment to transparency surrounding the response to the BP oil spill, the Department of Energy is providing online access to schematics, pressure tests, diagnostic results and other data about the malfunctioning blowout preventer."

Links for 06-11-2010

• Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies? - Community - ComputerworldUK - "Indeed, I would go so far as to say that very few open source startups will ever get anywhere near to $1 billion. Not because they are incompetent, or because open source will “fail” in any sense. But because the economics of open source software – and therefore the business dynamics – are so different from those of traditional software that it simply won't be possible in most markets. Red Hat stands a chance because it has (wisely) colonised the biggest sector, that of enterprise infrastructural products - “we are plumbers”, as Whitehurst put it with brutal frankness. "
• Top Ways to Start and Expand Your Virtualization Deployments | Andi Mann – Übergeek - Good piece.
• BP (Logo Redesign Contest) LogoMyWay.com ™ - This is funny. Sad, but funny.
• Dave Eggers on America and the World Cup. - By Dave Eggers - Slate Magazine - This is also a good piece.
• The Rest-of-the-World Cup - TIME - An oldie but goodie by Joel Stein.
• Lazy, Hazy, Crazy: The 10 Laws of Behavioral Cloudonomics - Good piece on what behavioral economics mean for cloud adoption.
• Be a better interviewer in 14 steps | Article | Homepage articles

Links for 06-10-2010

• Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
• John Nack on Adobe: Brief thoughts (and a question) on tablets & styluses - "When did my finger start resembling a giant breadstick? More on that in a moment."
• ignore the code: Gestures - "In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface."
• Locals and Tourists - a set on Flickr - Fascinating maps of local vs. tourists in many cities using geotagged photo data.
• Urban Photo Data Uncovers Local Hot Spots - Yet another interesting example of the sort of information that can be mined from widespread "instrumentation"
• The 'Cloud Computing Bill of Rights': 2010 edition | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News - "Possibly the best thing cloud vendors can do to extend their community, and encourage innovation on their platform from community members is to open their platform as much as possible. By making themselves the "reference platform" for their respective market space, an open vendor creates a petrie dish of sorts for cultivating differentiating features and successes on their platform. Protective proprietary vendors are on their own."
• Balkinization - "The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines."
• Session videos from Google I/O 2010 now available | Google Earth Blog - I've been wanting to get back to playing with Google Maps again but I haven't had the time.
• Lessons from Apple on Advertising and Aesthetics | Smarterware - "They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments. Contrast this with the Droid ads, which actually scare my friend's two-year-old daughter away from the TV when they come on. The dark, rainy background, the spinning globe of glowing apps, the robot hands poking at them, nary a human in sight. Droid does. Does what? Show, don't tell."

Links for 06-08-2010

• My iPad? A Great Bundle of Sticks : Andrew McAfee’s Blog - Cory Doctorow gets Andrew McAfee riled up. I pretty much agree with Andrew on this.
• Open Reasoning: This thing called cloud - "The trick is to focus on what is underpinning all of the noise in terms of fundamental trends and developments. When you do this, it becomes clear that cloud computing in its various forms is not the ‘cause’ of anything; it is rather a marketing friendly word used to label certain ‘effects’ of the ongoing evolution of capability in some key areas." << I may think things aren't quite as vague as Dale does but this generally seems about right.

Links for 06-07-2010

• The Macalope Weekly: I want to believe! | Phones | MacUser | Macworld - "Rob works in crazy like other artists work in clay or pastels. "
• Data Center Dialog: Is your organization ready for an internal cloud? - From a little while back but still relevant.
• only rainwater and pure grain alcohol: On 'On Android Compatibility' - The bad old world of the carrier-controlled experience.
• Distortion Article: 1. Page 1: Digital Photography Review - Interesting piece on computational photography--designing lenses with post-capture image correction in mind.
• Careers In The Clouds - Chuck's Blog - How cloud computing intersects with IT skill sets.
• xkcd: Worst-Case Scenario - As is always the case with xkcd at its best, there's a layer of specialist knowledge below the surface. (Plus it's just pretty funny.)
• Daring Fireball: The Good and the Bad Regarding AT&T's New Data Plans - Great analysis of AT&T's changes.

Links for 06-02-2010

• The Oil Drum | What caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster? - The best technical analysis I've seen to date.
• What is data science? - O'Reilly Radar
• Top Of The Food Chain: Hanger Steak – Eat Me Daily
• Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code
• Incomplete Thought: The DevOps Disconnect | Rational Survivability - "In many presentations promoting DevOps, developers are shown to have evolved in practice and methodology, but operators (of all kinds) are described as being stuck in the dark ages. DevOps evangelists paint a picture that compares and contrasts the Agile-based, reusable componentized, source-controlled, team-based and integrated approach of “evolved” development environments with that of loosely-scripted, poorly-automated, inefficient, individually-contributed, undisciplined, non-source-controlled operations. You can see how this might be just a tad off-putting to some people."
• Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture? - Advertising Age - Digital - Interesting--although any such relationships are inevitably complicated and diffuse.
• Are you still in a "fog" over cloud computing? - CA on Service Management - "Cloud computing is about bringing together many existing technologies and approaches in a new way for delivering and consuming technology as services."
• 'Zero clients' promise to replace fat clients but have downsides
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Experiments in delinkification - I actually struggle with this with respect to footnotes as well. I tend to favor inline footnotes for context and parentheticals but, for one thing, this format doesn't fit well with digital formats.
• Can Asus take on iPad with Eee Pad, Eee Tablet? | Crave - CNET - Styli seem to have been almost written off at this point and I think that's premature.

Links for 06-01-2010

• BP, the oil spill, and the urge to crucify…. somebody - Agree with the general sense of this piece although it remains to be learned whether reasonable best practices were followed throughout this operation.
• I've Changed My Mind About The iPad - I concur with all this.It's not that the iPad has unique capabilities but that it does some things more naturally than the alternatives.
• Sales Venn diagram - This is optimistic. You'll spend way more than four hours and what's sold won't necessarily intersect with what the technology can provide.
• ABC adding confusing images to 'Lost' finale: Dumbest move ever? Take the poll - The Watcher - Wow. Just dumb. The images don't actually invalidate the ending but they do open a big door to "It was all a dream."
• Keeping Cloud Computing's Prospects Safe and Sunny - IEEE on cloud security and work with CSA.

Links for 05-26-2010

• HP outperforms IBM in Q1 server sales - Servers - ComputerworldUK - The shift towards x86 at the high end does seem to be accelerating.
• The Wrong Way to Cloud-Enable A Data Center « Data Center Knowledge - This is good!
• 'Lost' finale: All the unanswered questions, courtesy of College Humor - From Inside the Box - Zap2it - Pretty good!
• Home - Cloud Commons
• CloudStandards - A wiki litng various standardization efforts going on around cloud computing.
• IBM's Moffat, Chiesi Were `Intimate,' U.S. Says - Bloomberg - Can't say this story is a shocker. It's the only thing that ever made any sense to me.
• An analysis of WebM and its patent risk | carlodaffara.conecta.it - This post is more optimistic about patent risk in WebM because of apparent deliberate(?) "sub-optimal" choices.
• IPad Rivals Encounter Delays - Forbes.com - Not that I had any regrets, but makes me feel that much better about not waiting for whatever the "ideal" device coming down the pike turns out to be.
• HP explains why printer ink is so expensive - Computerworld Blogs
• Practical Analysis: The Slog Toward Private Clouds -- Cloud Computing -- InformationWeek - "SaaS is simply better understood than the other forms of cloud computing, including internal private clouds, and that comes through in our survey." << Consistent with what I see as well. And only gets more pronounced among less IT-savvy audiences.
• Internet Evolution - Midmarket Clan Editor's Blog - Midmarket Favors Local Cloud Support - "While your average midmarket company may do massive amounts of business with larger suppliers, they are more likely to favor cloud computing service and support from smaller vendors located closer to their own businesses." << Another reason why public clouds aren't just about mega-providers.
• There is No Such Thing as Mass Culture Any More - Business - The Atlantic - "We live in a different world, one where there's something for almost everyone--but not the same thing."