Reilly has been learning Javascript, and one of the projects he wanted to do was a snow simulation. I guess growing up in the south snow is a rare and wonderous event for him. window.onload = function () { var canvas = document.getElementById('snow'); var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d'); var W = canvas.width; var H = canvas.height; var angle = 0; var mp = 10; var snowLine = []; for (var i = 0; i W) { p.

So while everyone was losing their minds over the addition of the word twerk to the Oxford Dictionaries Online, I'm actually more upset that the Internet of Things was added with the wrong definition, or at least an incomplete definiton. a proposed development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data The first definitions of the Internet of Things I heard was from Bruce Sterling and it went beyond just having network connectivity, it was about lifecycle management, tracking objects from cradle to grave.

One of the important types of open source that doesn't get talked about is what I call Platonic Programs, which are small programs that exhibit the base level of functionality for some domain, but no more, and have small, clear, and consise code. These projects have outsized impacts on the ecosystem and yet aren't talked about that much. For example, look at MicroEmacs, which not only has a string of variants that are all named a variation of "MicroEmacs", but also EmACT, Jasspa emacs, NanoEmacs, mg, and vile.

This NYTime article on The End of Car Culture very mich rings true for me, none of our kids look forward to having a car like we did. It felt like we had to push the oldest one to get his learners permit. Made even odder by the fact that we don't live anywhere near any sort of useful public transportation.

I'm sure this evolves over time, but for today, the best command-line incantation I found for recording screencasts is: $ avconv -strict experimental \ -f x11grab -r 25 -s 1024x768 -i :0.0 \ -pre medium -f alsa -ac 2 -ar 22050 \ -i pulse cast.webm

Piccolo has been ported to Go. The original Python script is still in place, but will no longer be updated. This entry is the first one published with the new picc.go. Here's a speed comparison between the Python and the Go code for a full republish, i.e. every HTML file needs to be rewritten. First for the old Python code: $ ./bin/piccolo real 0m57.491s user 0m46.415s sys 0m1.

I'm giving Twitter another shot, this time at http://twitter.com/bitworking.

The APIs Discovery Service launched today. This has been in the works for a while, but probably not a secret if you've been following checkins to the google-api-python-client library. The announcement went out on the Google Code blog, and has been covered in other venues. Two things to add that haven't been covered so far, the first is that if someone besides Google were to build an API that could be described by the Discovery format, then potentially some of these libraries would work with that API.

I'm going to propose a new URN namespace for acronyms, so as to avoid any conflicts in the future. urn:ietf:lol:omg:wtf:bbq

You've heard of Peak Oil, right? Well this weekend my wife and I realized that we just passed Peak Stuff.

Posted without comment. Delivered-To: joe.gregorio@gmail.com Received: by 10.42.154.72 with SMTP id p8cs148414icw; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Delivered-To: joe.gregorio@gmail.com Received: by 10.42.154.72 with SMTP id p8cs148414icw; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.90.91.16 with SMTP id o16mr28811agb.173.1297807400151; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <bewertung@beewo.de> Received: from mx10.webfaction.com (mail10.webfaction.com [174.121.221.166]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 8si8472588anr.133.2011.02.15.14.03.19; Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:03:20 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: neutral (google.

What I said last year, now the W3C apparently agrees. In short the case that was presented for distributed extensibility was weak.

Negative externalities are the bane of a market economy. Those wider costs to products and services that aren’t included in the actual cost of a item can wreak major havoc on society and almost always result in years of litigation, lawmaking, and acrimony between businesses and government. So what exactly is an negative externality? Let’s start with the definition of externality from Wikipedia: In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices[1], incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit.

Would you like to work for Google from the Triangle area of North Carolina? Now is your chance, we are hiring Software Engineers. You can apply through the site or shoot me a resume. Update: To clarify, since the job description is a bit general, these are positions to work on Chrome.

Christopher's first iPhone game is now available, Between The Lines. It's been a busy year for him, as he also launched a Facebook application Agitated Ferret, and all the Flash based games he's developed for it, and finally he's joined a FIRST robotics team.

James Clark: It's "Yay", because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this. The fundamental problem is the mismatch between programming language data structures and the XML element/attribute data model of elements.

I've been a little self-conscious about our Christmas decorations this year. Because of a family vacation earlier this year we didn't get to put up Halloween decorations until the day before Halloween, and even then it was a pretty paltry showing. We also didn't get to run our haunted house, which was a big disappointment to the rest of the neighborhood. We had no idea we'd become such an institution, but we heard from many of the trick-or-treaters that they were looking forward to it.

The Google API Client for Python is now considered in Alpha, which means that while it may still blow up, destroy data, and eat small kittens, I will be more surprised by such results, and less likely to say that it's a known issue. Any and all feedback you have on the library will be greatly appreciated, either via the discussion group or the issue tracker. Just to reprise the current status, through the magic of discovery, the client library now supports the Buzz, Moderator, Latitude, Custom Search, Diactize, Translate, and Prediction APIs.

Stephen O'Grady: It is possible that we’ll see standardization of componentry around specific projects like Hadoop – although even that seems unlikely with the rampant proliferation of query, import and other ecosystem projects – but I do not expect to see a standard stack of software used to tackle generic Big Data problems, because there really aren’t many generic Big Data problems. Inconvenient as that might be from a vocabulary perspective.

We have some interesting mailing lists internally at Google and one of the great temptations when starting is to sign up for too many of them. Over the years I've learned my lesson and whittled that list down, but one of them stuck; I had gleaned some interesting nuggets from that list when I first started and was loathe to unsubscribe. I recently looked at that list again and began to question my committment and so performed an experiment, I created a log file, and whenever I learned something new or useful from that list that I hadn't heard from another source, I would jot it down in the log file.