Ho do you manage your interruptions?
... [a] research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.
The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.
Says the Open Government Working Group:
Rails vs Grails vs Django models
Coming back to Rails after being away from some time in Django land I discovered a huge difference in how Rails, Grails and Django treats your models.
Remixing Youtube
An interesting approach to chains of copyright but these are really interesting. None of the participants were involved in making these songs. At the same time all of them were. A guess is that remixes like these will become more and more popular. Where can I buy these songs? Who will get paid? More information at http://thru-you.com/
Solving Project Euler Problems With Ioke
For those of you that have been following Ola Bini’s work on Ioke, the dynamic language for the JVM, I am happy to report that the current release 0.1.1 is usable enough to solve Project Euler problems with. I wanted to learn more about Ioke and the best way to learn a new language is to use it on your own. So, here is some example Ioke code for some of the simpler Project Euler problems.
Integrating Yahoo Search in a Django site in 5 easy steps
I have been experimenting with various search options for the eutveckling.se site for a while. Google Custom Search is nice and very fast, but the number of ads appearing in the search result page makes it difficult for users to separate result items from ads. (Update: I am sticking with Google Custom Search until I figure out how to get Yahoo search to present proper excerpts).
Twitter synchronicity
Everyone is celebrating this friday in a different way, apparently:
What Sun Should Do
Tim Bray has an interesting post titled What Sun Should Do where he lists some suggestions. I have been thinking about Sun for a while and how my own image of the company has changed over the years. A long time ago I was working for Cambridge Technology Partners (later acquired by Novell). We did a lot of interesting projects, some of which were deployed on Sun hardware. At that time (around ’97-’98) my image of Sun was that it was a huge company selling huge hardware at huge prices.
The Gnostic Nihilist
Modelling by Niklas Lindström who also knows a lot about SPARQL, RDF and Brilliance.
Improving Django performance with better caching
The Django cache middleware is great, but has one drawback. If you are caching views (which can give a nice performance boost) Django will only use the path segment of the URL to create a cache key. If you are an avid reader of RFC 3986 you may remember that a URI consists of multiple components; path and query being of special interest here. The problem is documented in ticket 4992 (Update: it is not in Django).
November 3: Twitter friend icon impersonation week begins
For a long time I have been amazed how much expression you can get into the twitter icon. It is only 48 by 48 pixels but many of my contacts manage to squeeze a lot of style in there. So, starting on monday november 3 I will change my twitter icon once every day trying to impersonate people who follow me on twitter. At the end of the week I’ll publish all icons side by side for your viewing pleasure. Anyone else up for the challenge?
(note: if everyone in my feed does this there might be a slim possibility to see all my followers looking like me. Apart from me, who will look like someone else. Ah, the excitement!).
Serialization formats don’t matter
I mean, if working with RDF has taught me one thing, it’s that converting between two different forms of serialization is trivial—it’s the underlying model that matters.
Exactly! And still, many who are in the integration business think that XML schemas is the only product required to exchange data between multiple parties. The serialization format(s) should be based on the use cases of the information. And even in a small organization use cases tend to pop up all the time demanding new formats. Most SOA-people see a problem with multiple serialization formats but I am thinking that it is almost insignificant these days if you have a well defined model.
Slit-scan Photography (Stockholm Geekmeet presentation)
Last night, Robert Nyman hosted yet another successful Geekmeet in Stockholm. I got one of the lightning talk slots and decided to skip my planned presentation and instead show some of my experiments with slit-scan photography. The presentation slides (in swedish) are available (8 Mb PDF) here.
Hello OpenGL World in Ocaml
I swear, if I read one more programming tutorial that starts with a recursive factorial function instead of a simple “Hello world” I’ll pray for perpetual nigerian spam on their inboxes. So, I was delighted to try out some Ocaml stuff today that didn’t involve factorials.
