Technology

I get a lot of questions about my camera setup, because my video quality is so obviously the bomb.

Last was after I got off interviewing Jerry Colonna for my podcast. I ended up writing up the whole thing in an email to him, and figured I'd repost here.

This selfie drone looks insane. I'm fascinated by selfie culture. If you don't have a selfie of it, it didn't happen? I much prefer to live my life and enjoy it in the moment. But that's just me.

This definitely takes it up a notch.

Ever wondered how you could make your postings in forums, news and similar places more interesting?

HTML is the answer and you can learn the basics in just a few minutes. Read on if you would like to enhance the clearity and usefulness of your postings and make your voice heard.

Line and Paragraph Breaks

The most important thing to notice about HTML is that a line doesn’t break unless you tell it to do so. You break a line by typing <br>, and you separate paragraphs with <p>.

When I want to write something, writing on computer is much more efficient than writing it with pen and paper. But then I want to throw in a quick diagram or a drawing to illustrate my point, and the situation is reversed. There’s nothing inherent in the technology that says it has to be that way. It’s simply because our user interfaces aren’t sophisticated enough … yet. These are some quickly fetched ideas for how this situation could be remedied.

Drawing Diagrams

All...

WAP will fail, because every single assumption it is built on is wrong. The instant someone delivers true, always-on internet to a handheld device, nobody will ever care about WAP again. And it will inevitably happen, because that’s what people want.

Freedom

The WAP is built on the old-fashioned broadcast model as we know it from TV, a model that could be described as “TV with a buy button”. That model has nothing to do with the internet.

Telcos want tight control over the...

Here’s a few things that you want to avoid when you’re building your website. Don’t worry, you’ll save time by avoiding them. And the world will benefit.

Don’t Make Links go Bold on Mouseover

Some sites think it’s cool to make links turn bold when the user moves the mouse over them. Please don’t do this. Your users won’t be able to click on the link.

Chances are that your link will fit neatly on one line under normal circumstances, but when the...

The Big Picure

LDAP is basically a specialized database. Some of the characteristics are:

• It consists of entries organized in a hierarchy.
• It favors reading over writing.
• Every entry has a primary key called the Distinguished Name (DN).
• It’s notion of schema is much more flexible than that of a RDBMS.

You typically use an LDAP directory to store information about entities like people, offices, machines and that sort. But you could equally well store most other relatively static...

This page contains several ideas on how to help rank and categorize content on a web site, to help users find the information they are looking for. The basic premise is that by watching what users actually do and counting that as implicit votes, we can generate much more precise information about how valuable content actually is to users, than by asking users to explicitly score items.

Categorization

As is well known in the Human Sciences, especially Information Science, Categorization is in...

There are two seperate and equally important parts to being a great programmer. You need absolute technical mastering of the technologies you use. But that’s the easy and boring part. The hard part is designing software so that it’s useful to the people using it.

I’ll present a lot of stuff here. Don’t be overwhelmed! You don’t have to learn everything at once. You don’t even have to learn everything I say here at all. But it does help to have some sense...