OpenSocial etc.

A thought about where "social networking" could go : instead of just being "a thing that lets you post messages for your friends", the permission groups on social networking could be "the equivalent of AFS-style permissions and groups on the internet-wide massively parallel computer"

If this is combined with a shift of UI metaphors from "desktop, file, etc" to activity and shared artifact it could provide the mechanism of access control for all of the things we do on computers once we start wanting to share not only the finished products, but also edits, revisions, etc, with friends.

really cool time-lapse video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTfx9n2ImMc


Timelapse video of construction of a high-voltage tower in Southern California / Central Valley

I think I should probably learn this...

https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/doc/spec/WebGL-spec.html

WebGL. Apparently it integrates with the "canvas" element. I wonder if IE will properly support it.

I wonder if it matters anymore at this point whether IE supports it ;)

Seems to me, though, that the bulk of the applications I use either run or can run over the web, that its easier to get someone else to run your web app than your "compiled for XXX platform" app, and that Javascript/HTML/CSS is almost entirely unsuited for the type of applications I'd want to write. So, on that side, its probably about time for something like this.

On the other hand, I seem to recall VRML having Javascript support way back in the day, and am somewhat inclined to describe "manipulating scenegraphs with a functional language" as a more advanced form of programming than "mimicking C-style OpenGL calls in the same functional language" It is not as if one could easily implement an efficient scenegraph on top of a JavaScript OpenGL API. On the other hand, this sort of thing *might* be the appropriate way to "incorporate 3d style effects into a 2d Javascript UI"...

How I lived in grad school...

How I lived in grad skool

Cool devices my friends have pointed out to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monome


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby

Cool concepts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_device
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquitous_computing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber-physical_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_computing

These are all mostly unrelated to monome

21st century "libraries"

I propose that, in the near future, as funding and demand for public libraries partially dries up, due to competition from the internet, we introduce an equivalent concept of "public computer cluster".

The idea is that, much as libraries give everyone, even those without homes, bank accounts, credit, etc, access to books and a place to read them, municipalities of the future could fund open public computer clusters, where anyone can just walk in, and grab a terminal with a web browser.

Of course, I got this idea by actually looking at libraries, which are beginning to offer this in addition to "books and a place to read them", but I didn't really grasp how important this service would be until today. Personally, I still like having a public "books and a place to read them" building, but I could imagine public buildings solely devoted to public computer access, something like the computer labs from college, with a hybrid librarian/helpdesk/sysadmin managing it.

filters

Testing blog filter : my intent here is to have my home page (http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~mds2) grab my blog, filter posts with the "news" tag into a section called "news" and posts with the "blog" tag into a section called "blog"