As usual, Bruce Schneier is dispensing wisdom: We learned the news in March: Contrary to decades of denials, the U.S. Census Bureau used individual records to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II. The Census Bureau normally is prohibited by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals; the law exists to [...]
Through the Wire
"Hey, I'm just happy to be here…"
June 28th, 2007
Confusion, alarm, or embarrassment
I just happened across the URIs for W3C Namespaces document, which explains formal W3C policy and rationale behind the assignment of… well, URIs for XML namespaces. I love the fact that it uses the phrase ssss is a short string not causing confusion, alarm, or embarrassment … twice! The policy for when the value of [...]
June 27th, 2007
Microformats Turn Two
The Microformats.org community is celebrating its second birthday this week. Their blog post on the subject notes some successes in the last year, and Chris Casciano notes a few high profile adoptions. Community leader Tantek Çelik reaffirms his focus on advancing Microformats. The Microformats to-do list provides several ideas for ways people could contribute. The [...]
June 27th, 2007
Good Reads: YABOSNS
Something curious is going on with the social reading site Good Reads. After being invited by Heath, who I can reliably expect to find on all of these things, I signed up and imported my address book. The only two “hits” I got were people who I have never seen on any SNS anywhere! And [...]
June 23rd, 2007
Social Use Cases
I’ve been rather fascinated with Facebook in the last couple of weeks. I’ve always been interested in Social Networking sites (or SNS), but I usually don’t stay interested for long. In fact, I am so interested in Facebook that I broke my cardinal rule of Social Network services: “don’t invite anyone.” I only ever make [...]
June 22nd, 2007
Overlooking Oversight
Joe in politricks
I just had to whip off this e-missive to my elected representatives: Two pieces in the New York Times have grabbed my attention and raised my concern. The first is an article on how the Vice President’s office attempts to circumvent oversight into its operations. The second regards the pattern by which the President signs [...]
June 20th, 2007
Minor iPod/iTunes annoyance
Today I decided that I felt like listening to my iPod at work instead of iTunes. One of the main reasons I don’t usually do this is that it interferes with my ability to hear interface sounds from my MacBook. If I recall correctly, when I had my iPod set to “manually manage music,” I [...]
June 20th, 2007
Black Market Gaming
I saw this in the New York Times: Less promisingly for Take-Two, the British Board of Film Classification yesterday effectively banned another game developed by its Rockstar Games unit, which is also responsible for Grand Theft Auto. The board refused to issue a rating for Manhunt 2, citing its extreme violence. The denial of a [...]
June 20th, 2007
Wikipedia Calls for Experts
I just saw this on the Wikipedia entry for Gnosticism: I think that if you asked several people for a three-sentence explanation of Wikipedia, many of them would somehow touch on the idea that Wikipedia doesn’t require expertise of its contributors, but that’s clearly an oversimplification. (Of course, three-sentence explanations of just about anything are [...]
June 14th, 2007
Special Delivery: Penguins!
I knew Levi and Stacey were cool, but inventing a board game as a Christmas gift for your nephew…? That’s a whole new school of cool. More documentation can be found in this Flickr set. Photo of the whole board originally uploaded by rocketlass Share and Enjoy: