January 2012
1 post
The Editorial Truth behind High Dynamic Range...
The Washington Post has apparently caused some confusion and consternation regarding a photograph that it posted on their front page on Friday.
The photograph in question is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo. HDR photos are indeed composites as the WaPo credit indicated, but the way that all HDR photos are taken is to quickly snap several photos (ranging from 2 or 3 all the way up to something...
December 2011
1 post
Getting a PDF you've seen on DocumentCloud
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
1 post
Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It →
Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…
August 2011
2 posts
Joining DocumentCloud/IRE
It brings me much excitement to announce that I’m joining Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE for short) as their primary developer on DocumentCloud in September. As it may be apparent to followers of my blog, I have spent the past couple months diving headlong into the world of journalism and tech, particularly through the Knight-Mozilla Journalism Challenge. Through that...
July 2011
4 posts
1 tag
MoJo Assignment #2: User Incentives
Week two of the Knight Mozilla News Lab featured lectures from Jesse James Garret, John Resig and Christian Heilmann.
@jeresig’s and @jjg’s lectures were especially interesting as they focused on what qualities make projects and products accessible to users. This is something that Aza Raskin has also contended with in his blogs regarding his new project Massive Health.
How can we...
Tim Harford — Article — Why social marketing... →
I don’t like the assumption that lays under Tim Harford’s analysis. Why should we presume that twitter cascades are anything but rare and tiny? Retweeting and mass attention is weighted as the rarity that it is. How often, in a world controlled and directed by users, do you think it is possible to sync up the attention of a large number of people all at one time?
I can also tell...
1 tag
MoJo Assignment #1: On the subject of Process
As I am auditing Mozilla News Lab, I’m going to deviate from the assignments a little bit. Later this week, or early next week I will explain why I am auditing instead of participating as a potential fellow, but for now I’d like to discuss two impressions that I have.
As an outsider, I’ve been quite frustrated at some of the opinions and debates that journalists have had about...
2 tags
Recent experiences in Twitter spam
I’ve noticed an uptick in twitter spam recently, and knowing some people who work at twitter, i’ve been trying to keep an eye out for particularly egregious cases that i might be able to point their way. There’re a lot of spammers who are the equivalent of smash and grab artists. Spin up a new account, blast as many people as one can with links, as quickly as possible until...
June 2011
3 posts
Ezra Klein's succinct description of failures to... →
Making News with the Mozilla Journalism Challenge
Skip the history lesson and tell me what you want me to do
Sunday’s the last day to submit ideas to this year’s Mozilla Knight Journalism Challenges! The challenges (MoJo for short) are the start of a three year collaboration between the Knight Foundation and Mozilla’s Drumbeat project to foster the growing overlap between tech and journalism.
I’ve been really excited...
May 2011
3 posts
What can Journalism learn from Text-based...
Some of you may know that i’ve been quite interested in the Knight-Mozilla Journalism Challenges (MoJo for short). Journalism currently rests at an interesting point, where grass roots support and interest is coalescing around movements such as Open Data, and technologists are pursuing innovation not just for developer tools but as a means to change fields outside of the typical world of...
Hacker pwns police cruiser and lives to tell tale... →
See, i can’t decide which Science Fiction world we’re living in. Is this Ghost in the Shell? Or Megaman Battle Network? Something else? To be sure, technology being employed by people who don’t understand the consequences of what they’re using.
Hanna; a short review
There’s a textural quality to Hanna that stands out as its most prominent feature. Hanna is a film that was made to explore an idea, and that idea is a (barely) scifi, spy drama filmed as a fairy tale. It’s both grittier and more grounded than “Pan’s Labyrinth” but considerably more fantastical than the Bourne Identity.
Hanna’s extent, though, begins and...
April 2011
4 posts
25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like... →
1 tag
Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.” →
More succinctly: make all your refusals contingent. When approached w/ an opportunity you have reservations about, recast/renegotiate the opportunity until you have no reservations (like raising your hourly rate from $25/hr to $100/hr).
March 2011
2 posts
A compendium of information about japan
I’ve been working with the CrisisCommons gang to help put together and catalogue information in response to the quake and tsunami.
What i’ve been realizing is that there is very little public written record with regard to how this is being done, or where it’s being recorded (save for the wiki), so i thought i’d start dropping links in a place that i could link others...
February 2011
3 posts
I can never remember where the BSD plaintext dictionary is (at least, on OSX). It is in /usr/share/dict in a file called “words”. This dictionary is incredibly useful, as you can do all the wonderful things you’d want via text processing tools available on Unix like systems. Want all words that contain “taco”? egrep 'taco' words Or perhaps all words ending with...
Photos - Bluejay & the Fatass Squirrel
My father-in-law has several bird feeders, and daily sets out peanuts for bluejays. The feeders draw all sorts of smaller birds; cardinals, juncos, house and yellow finches. The peanuts on the other hand draw not just bluejays but some very large crows, and what has been dubbed by my father-in-law, the fat ass squirrel.
The Fatass Squirrel
The Fatass Squirrel cluelessly searching for...
January 2011
2 posts
Healthy Hackers RubyConf Video Posted; Forkable... →
The awesome dudes at Confreaks have posted the video for our Rubyconf talk was posted. I set Carolyn up with a Github account and i’ve created a repository for recipes. We posted the Chicken Scallion Quinoa recipe we discussed in our talk. Check it out!
“I want to live up to her expectations.
I want our democracy to be as good as...”
– Barack Obama, 1/12/2010
December 2010
2 posts
Watch@crupar and i created some some gingerbread creations for Google’s Nexus S contests. Here are the picts.
November 2010
2 posts
Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a... →
CBC.ca | The Current | Nov 05/10 - Pt 3: Soviet... →
Definitely worth a listen:
Soviet Afghan War Veteran
The end of Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan is creeping ever closer. Canadians of all stripes continue to debate the wisdom of the mission and the sacrifices being made by Canadian soldiers.
Nikolai Lanine has an interesting perspective on that debate. He’s a Canadian … a public health nurse who lives in Victoria....
September 2010
5 posts
VexFlow - HTML5 Music Engraving →
Yay SVG + HTML5 Canvas for rendering musical scores!
www.benjoffe.com | Texas Hold'em Experiment →
A neat analysis of possible decks in texas hold ‘em.
HTML/XML manipulation in 6 lines of Ruby
There’s a post up on HackerNews about how awesome HTML parsing and manipulation in Node.js + jQuery is. It also mentions in passing hpricot, and asserts “The challenge with using these libraries is that they all have their own quirks that can make working with HTML, CSS and Javascript challenging.”
Well, nokogiri queries with CSS3 selectors or XPath if you need to get crazy,...
WatchHere are my slides for my presentation at RubyKaigi 2010.
Mapping the world with DataMapper
August 2010
2 posts
Like Mom Like Dad →
Neat blog.
June 2010
6 posts
WatchA nice summary in slideshow format of cross domain issues on the interwebs. Interesting stuff.
Breaking The Cross Domain Barrier
1 tag
4 tags
InfoQ: Towards a Universal VM →
This InfoQ talk by Alex Buckley is a good description of why the JVM is quite a cool and interesting space to watch. One of the sort of pipe dreams i’ve had with JRuby is the day when i can use it to access Python’s NLP libraries (like NLTK) through Jython. Buckley’s talk indicates that this is very much an idea that they’d like to make possible if they can.
6 tags
Grinding on Vim, from a Textmate user's...
I’m spending some time trying to learn Vim. I’m finally so fed up with Textmate hogging memory and beachballing (particularly when searching) that i’m just looking for something else. So here are some things i’ve learned.
Learning Vim is like joining an MMO
Like in an MMO, when you start using VIM, everyone is higher level than you, everyone has cooler gear, and knows...
May 2010
7 posts
Nexus One Users, Get Your Froyo Download And... →
Are You Colorblind?
fakescience:
ha ha, now that’s just mean.
WatchKoichiro Tsujikawa - “Eyes” (by Passion Paris)