If I had the budget for one, I’d definitely buy one, so I can certainly understand why people with lots of disposable income are flocking to Apple stores today. That said, there is something sort of unseemly about reveling in the act of consumption. I guess this particular tweet captures what I’m trying to say [...]
I’m convinced that the iPad is going to create an entirely new market in personal computing devices. I don’t really want to be reductive about why the iPad will do so (but I’m going to anyway). It’s sort of a little piece of the future dropped in our laps (well, not mine, since I’m a [...]
The first is about what makes a good blog: To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium [...]
I know you probably don’t care about what goes on inside my head most of the time, but here’s a taste anyway. I was rehashing the iPad in my head while perusing my iPod Touch and thinking about the bezel size — a subject of some criticism and a certain amount of defensive posturing: People [...]
This editorial on Microsoft in today’s NYTimes is interesting on many levels. Part elegy, part exposition, even the choice to run an editorial of this sort is in many ways a bit of a puzzle to me. I suppose I’m too far down the Ubuntu rabbit hole to remember how common Microsoft is for most [...]
The entire prefix-i naming scheme is silly in a way that all really excellent marketing is silly. The iPad device itself is not silly, and in many ways proves that freedom zero does not matter, nor do any of the inter-operable hardware or software ecosystems that drove Wintel. What matters is design, capability, and price. The iPad [...]
The shorthand “WTF” is common among developers. It does not actually stand for “worse than failure” but I run a clean ship here people. [Hint: let's just say that WTF is a somewhat crude interrogative. Sample usage: "Dude, WTF?" or, if you prefer, comic form.] I just spent two days looking for a bug in [...]
I compared two Python implementations for computing shortest paths in a previous post. This was all inspired by some Matlab code for computing Isomap that contained the following version of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm: for k=1:N D = min(D,repmat(D(:,k),[1 N])+repmat(D(k,:),[N 1])); end Of course, mirroring my Python comparison, I decided to recreate the Matlab version using [...]
I’m a little late to the party on Google Wave, but I just got an invitation today. Contrary to early Google Mail, Wave is clearly a beta (or even really an alpha release) during this preview-by-invitation-only period. [Aside: Did Google invent the preview-by-invitation-only concept? Or bring it to the Web 2.0 world? I have a [...]
Sifting through my Akismet spam filter today I noticed a number of comments in Cyrillic. Clicking the associated website links led me to Russian language default themed WordPress blogs. It seems like splogs are easy to identify, even when written in another language. [Aside: Even though I'm 99% sure these are spam blogs, and so [...]