446 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2013
    1. Hey Adam — great piece that helps me to think through some important concepts about “open APIs”. Your historic take helps contextualize the place of open APIs today. I agree that making a “public” vs “private” distinction is helpful to clear up confusion, as well as finding concise terms to indicate whether something is free-of-charge vs requiring-payment. I will study the post on business models for APIs.

      I added my comment to this post on open APIs.

    1. Audrey Watters, hackeducation.com Education APIs: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

      Looking forward to reading/hearing Audrey Water's thoughts on education APIs.

    1. The latest to stumble is Small Demons

      It was a bit of shock to read that Small Demons is in trouble.

    1. One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it. But knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found. Don’t know if you like Haitian food? Try a couple of the local maxima – the most important places to the Haitian community – and you’ll be able to discern the answer to that question pretty quickly. It’s unlikely you dislike the food because it’s badly made, as it’s the favorite destination for that community – it’s more likely that you simply don’t like goat soup. (Oh well, more for me.) If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.

      Reading about using "community maxima" in Rewire made me look for a blog post containing the same idea

    1. Some of the companies building the system opposed an early decision by the Medicare agency to use database software from a company called MarkLogic, which handles data differently from systems by companies like IBM and Oracle. Some suggest that its unfamiliar nature slowed their work. By mid-November, more than six weeks after the rollout, the MarkLogic database — essentially the website’s virtual filing cabinet and index — continued to perform below expectations, according to one person who works in the command center. In interviews, MarkLogic’s executives faulted inadequate computing power and instability at the site’s data center, as well as the failure to properly integrate their product, problems repeatedly cited by other website vendors.

      I read this as a PR blow for MarkLogic. Curious to hear MarkLogic's response.

  2. Nov 2013
    1. good to see others want to move highlights/annotation between Moon+ Reader Pro and other systems like Calibre

    1. I'd like to know more about John Tavener's journey to Russian Orthodoxy, his criticism of Western Christianity, including Bach, and then his final return to Bach.

    1. Hmmm....I'm going to have to listen to BWV 159.

    2. Clearly, John Eliot Gardiner's involvement with Bach's music has been in with the passions, masses, and cantatas. Still, it would have been revealing to read Gardiner's take on Bach's instrumental work.

    1. Lived Experience: A term used to describe individuals who have lived through the experience of being given a mental health diagnosis, extreme states, trauma, being a 'client' or 'consumer' within the mental health system, and so on. It is meant to be an open term that includes a variety of experiences and allows individuals to self-identify the labels and language they do or don't want to use for themselves.

      I'm grateful for this definition of the term -- I've not found a formal definition in standard dictionaries on the web so far.

      I've been using "lived experience" to describe close introspective observations of one's own life in all its variety, including the mundane (instead of focusing on extreme states or trauma. Is my use of the term a useful one or should I find an appropriate alternative?

    1. What makes number theory interesting is that problems that are simple to state (at least to mathematicians) are often fiendishly difficult to solve. The most famous such problem, Fermat's last theorem, was postulated in the 17th century. It took until 1993 to prove that it was true.
    1. A class instance has a namespace implemented as a dictionary which is the first place in which attribute references are searched. When an attribute is not found there, and the instance’s class has an attribute by that name, the search continues with the class attributes.

      This search in namespaces -- first in the class instance and then in the class -- is documented here. Perhaps easier to understand by reading http://stackoverflow.com/a/15992667/7782

    1. I'm glad to finally find a page specifying the rate limit for the Flickr API. I didn't know about this limit before.

    1. But this fall the service broke, and Winer said he didn’t see how to fix it.

      Dave Winer's post The End of Trex

    1. When you're editing a named outline in Fargo, you'll notice that the eye icon is available in the left margin. I

      I can't get a named outline to work. Is this feature disabled for most people?

    1. Compared with the 1.0 release, there were relatively few backwards incompatible changes, but there are still a few issues to be aware of with this major release.

      I got all panicky when installing internetarchive via pip caused a move from requests 1.1.0 to 2.0.x -- I had thought that jump was the BIG ONE that broke a lot of other modules. Maybe not.

    1. Behind Ace Hardware on University Avenue (in their parking lot) there is a bin for ''textile recyling''-you can put in clothes and linens that are too old/damaged to be reused. (no sig)

      I'll have to check it out to see whether there is actually a bin for recycling textiles.

    1. Encyclopædia Britannica was designed for the use of the curious and intelligent layman.

      I think a lot about designing information systems for the "curious and intelligent [layperson]"

  3. Oct 2013
    1. Knight Foundation’s $250,000 grant will enable us to spend six to nine months trying out the model established by the London-based Open Data Institute to determine how to best work with the many actors in this space. In collaboration with the Aspen Institute, Knight held an event in Aspen, Colo., this summer to bring together leaders in the open data community to discuss if there was a need for a new organization and whether the Open Data Institute’s model was a good one to replicate. That event led to the plan that we’re now executing.

      How does one get invited/apply to get invited to the very intriguing event in Aspen, CO?

    1. Nice to read skeptical comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6646936

    2. "Really, everything Dragos reports is something that's easily within the capabilities of a lot of people," said Graham, who is CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. "I could, if I spent a year, write a BIOS that does everything Dragos said badBIOS is doing. To communicate over ultrahigh frequency sound waves between computers is really, really easy."

      experts claim that the scenario has some basic plausibility

    3. It's also possible to use high-frequency sounds broadcast over speakers to send network packets. Early networking standards used the technique, said security expert Rob Graham. Ultrasonic-based networking is also the subject of a great deal of research, including this project by scientists at MIT.

      I'm astounded by this.

    4. Ruiu has conceded that while several fellow security experts have assisted his investigation, none has peer reviewed his process or the tentative findings that he's beginning to draw.

      Not sure whether these results have been reproduced elsewhere

    5. he malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

      wow (if true)!

    1. The change doesn't affect Kraft's plain elbow-shaped macaroni and cheese with "original flavor."

      If the fact that original flavor product hadn't been affected, I wouldn't have read this article.

    1. larger fight over limiting the filibuster and restricting how far the minority party can go to thwart a president’s agenda.

      yep, the fight is what it's all about, eh?

    1. The ability to seamlessly insert IPython notebooks into posts was one of the biggest drivers of my switch to Pelican.

      I want to study how Jake integrates IPython notebooks into his blogging. I'll be writing a lot in IPython notebook for my teaching.

    1. The copyright extension Clinton signed will expire in five years. Copyright holders like the Disney Corp. and the Gershwin estate have a strong incentive to try to extend copyright extension yet further into the future. But with the emergence of the Internet as a political organizing tool, opponents of copyright extension will be much better prepared. The question for the coming legislative battle on copyright is who will prevail: those who would profit from continuing to lock up the great works of the 20th century, or those who believe Bugs Bunny should be as freely available for reuse as Little Red Riding Hood.

      I just encountered the rootstrikers.org petition to stop the CTEA renewal (http://www.rootstrikers.org/#!/project/stop-ctea), making me wonder what's up with the Act, exactly. A quick Google search landed me on this WP story -- and this is a nice little paragraph summary of the current state of affairs.

    1. This is clearly not a complete solution, and if you have some specific ideas about how this should work, you can submit your ideas at http://goo.gl/mVlWI

      Youversion recognizes that there should be a better way to export bookmarks and invites ideas.

    1. spaces

      What does "spaces" mean here? Physical spaces? Mental spaces?

    1. While Mr. Cameron said he supported Ms. Merkel and President François Hollande of France in seeking talks with Washington about new rules governing electronic surveillance, he delivered his strongest denunciation so far of those involved in publishing leaked material.

      Cameron showing that the UK is still the USA's closest friend?

  4. epubjs-reader.appspot.com epubjs-reader.appspot.com
    1. And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’”

      Check out Orson Welles' performance of this formidable sermon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rWV8sBZ9ho&feature=youtu.be&t=2m22s

    1. He entered and was passing through Jericho. 19:2 There was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector, and he was rich. 19:3 He was trying to see who Jesus was, and couldn't because of the crowd, because he was short.

      Zacchaeus: a rich, short chief tax collector

    1. He has gone in to lodge with a man who is a sinner.”

      "to lodge" translated as "to be a guest of" in NRSV.

    1. Zacchaeus
    2. Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.

      This offer of compensation seems super generous. What would be an expected level of compensation?

    3. he was short in stature

      As a short man myself, I identify with Zaccheus. The dude had to climb a tree to see Jesus!

    4. He has gone to be the guest

      If you go to be a "guest" of a sinner, what does that make you? Also a sinner?

    5. sinner

      Why was Zaccheus considered a sinner? (Because he was a tax collector, indeed, the chief tax collector)?