The joy of writing about things that don’t matter
….because sometimes they do matter. I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We...
Delivering Flowers with a Distributed Event System: Event Subscription in Action
This semester, I'm teaching a class at BYU, CS462. We're using Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett's book Event Processing in Action as the class text. The text uses a flower shop and delivery driver scenario as the running example throughout the book. H...
Thinking about learning. And SOPA and PIPA and stuff like that
I love being human. And I love human beings. I’m constantly amazed by human ingenuity. How our brains appear to work. How we construct mental models of things. How we observe, imitate, learn. How we repeat that cycle to augment learning. How, once we learn something, we show the capability to extend that learning in...
Remembering Judith
I got to know Judith Burton when she was still Judith Clarke and Senior VP Corporate Marketing for Novell, in 1987. Novell had just bought a company called CXI, which had been a client of Hodskins Simone & Searls, the Palo Alto advertising agency in which I was a partner. By that time HS&S had...
The Live Web is Live!
My book, The Live Web: Building Event-Based Connections in the Cloud, has been released and is on Amazon. Having the book actually available is great, although slightly anti-climatic after the thrill of just being done last November. :)
The book ...
More on know-how and know-why versus know-what
Thanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which...
Musing gently about filter bubbles and trends
Here’s what’s trending on Twitter right now: And here are the top stories on Google News: Here’s what the BBC News site has at top billing: I tried to even the field. So the twitter trends were set to “Global”, I finally overrode Google’s very irritating attempts to point me towards google.co.uk rather than google.com,...
Leveraging Hal
Hal Crowther remains my favorite essayist, regardless of whether or not I agree with him. (And on some things I don’t.) Like Hunter S. Thompson, Hal’s writing is beyond enviable and his characterizations often over the top. Here’s some of his latest, addressed to the #Occupy movement: “Go get a bath right after you get...
Know-how and know-why versus know-what
A few days ago, I set a cricket question for my twitter followers. To be precise, I set a question for those among my followers who were interested in cricket, interested enough to try and answer the question. The question was simple: Herschelle Gibbs holds the record. Vinod Kambli was the previous holder. What is...
Foursquare and Personal Data in a Personal Event Network
Lately I've been exploring APIs that push data and the use of personal data. While we're proponents of the Evented API specification, there are already a number of APIs that push data in some way....
Static Scoping of Persistents in KRL Modules
With a title like that, I'm sure you just can't wait to dig into this blog post. The bottom line: I made a scoping mistake in designing modules and it's time for KRL to come clean about that. This post describes the problem and what's changing to fi...
Static Scoping of Persistents in KRL Modules
With a title like that, I'm sure you just can't wait to dig into this blog post. The bottom line: I made a scoping mistake in designing modules and it's time for KRL to come clean about that. This post describes the problem and what's changing to fi...
