December 2006 Archives
Whoah, facebook caught the AJAX bug. Fancy new javascript pop-ups for poking. Kind of a surprise. Maybe UI changes should come with a warning - "Don't panic. This is how it's supposed to work. We just don't know how to tell you we changed things up."
And still, I don't like the interface. The site is still ugly. Microsoft FrontPage style ugly. Business school grads who wanted to make a website to run ads on ugly. And the main navigation still sucks. When will people learn to make the ui elements most people use most often BIG, EASY, and SMART? Slightly better than MySpace, but miles away from good.
Keep trying, guys.
The technological innovations of the 20th and 21st centuries has brought about [or at least brought to light] an interesting shift in the roles of privacy for individuals and organizations. Individual privacy is becoming a thing of the past while corporate and governmental bodies protect their privacy with tenacity. This distribution seems contradictory to some of the basic ideals of democratic society. More, the afore-mentioned distribution proves the innefectiveness in the current zeitgeiest of consumer-based market-economy.
Read Full Paper [pdf]
Been playing with NLP for a number of projects. The Perl interface to WordNet is a godsend.
Two nights ago, I went to look up some guitar tablature for a Neil Young song I wanted to learn. Much to my surprise, in place of the tabs, there was a message saying something along the lines of 'we aint allowed to publish this, because it's copyright infringement or something'. Just when you thought the music industry couldn't get any worse, just when you thought the music industry couldn't alienate and stomp on their customers... What a shame.
Music Industry Frets Over Popular Guitar Web Sites
And in other RIAA news, RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties. Great move, guys. I will never buy a new CD again, as long as the draconian RIAA exists in its current form.
Further progress on the FCC Cell-Tower mapping project. Look forward to 3D (with readable text and a bunch of cool data viz junk) in the next week.
The above images are visualizations of Cell-Tower data from the FCC. I just threw the geo-coordinates on an x/y grid, with no rhyme or reason — so it's a terrible viz. But it looks pretty. The pink areas are cell-towers I have personally logged.
Just came across this brain-teaser: Petals Around the Rose. Took me about 10 minutes to figure it out. Enjoy, stretch some synapses.
