iLearnium.com

Strategies for Internet citizens

• iCalendar validation issues #1 and #2: blank lines, PRODID and VERSION

  Sam Ruby offers the following advice to those of us who would like to improve the interoperability of iCalendar feeds: Identifying real issues that prevent real feeds from being consumed by real consumers and describing the issue in terms that makes sense to the producer is what most would call value. I’ll be documenting issues as I [...]

• A conversation with Jeff Jonas about connecting dots

  On this week’s Interviews with Innovators show I spoke with Jeff Jonas whose work (and narration of that work on his blog) first captured my interest in 2007. If you follow Jeff you’ll know what he means when he uses phrases like perpetual analytics, non-obvious relationship awareness, semantic reconciliation, sequence neutrality, and anonymous resolution. If not, [...]

• Feed validation revisited: The parallel universe of iCalendar feeds

  If you were tuned into the blogosphere back in 2001, you’ll recall lots of chatter about RSS feed validation. RSS came in multiple flavors. Anyone could whip up a feed purporting to be in one or another of those formats, and many of us did. There were all kinds of questions about how and why [...]

• Visible Workings (redux)

  For me, one of the 2008’s most important (but least remarked-upon) ideas was spelled out in this post which details how Ward Cunningham implemented Brian Marick’s notion of Visible Workings. The idea, briefly, is that businesses can wear (non-confidential aspects of) their business logic on their sleeves, observable to all. In a year of devastating consequences [...]

• Databasing trusted feeds with del.icio.us

  In my last entry, I sketched a strategy for maintaining lists of the Eventful and Flickr accounts that I consider trusted sources for the elmcity.info event and photo streams. I didn’t spell out exactly how I plan to maintain those lists, in the Azure rewrite of the service that I’m now doing, but David Hochman [...]

• Lightweight event syndication with trusted feeds

  If you check the elmcity.info events page for March 7, 2008 you’ll see that Beau Bristow is performing at Keene State College at 8PM. The Eventful item that has syndicated to the events page doesn’t say anything else. There’s no link to beaubristow.com, though it’s easy enough to find. And there’s no more precise venue [...]

• Azure calendar aggregator: Part 1

  For about a week now, I’ve been running a service in the Azure cloud that aggregates calendar events from Eventful.com and from a diverse set of iCalendar feeds. As I mentioned last month, my aim is to recreate and then extend my experimental elmcity.info community information hub, while exploring and documenting the evolution of Azure [...]

• My rationalization for buying a Wii Balance Board

  This week’s ITConversations show features a cameo appearance by my wife Luann, who came home a couple of weeks ago raving about the Wii Balance Board that she’d been using in physical therapy. I talked with Luann about how her therapists, Anna Domyancic and Darren Gerber, are using the Balance Board — and the Wii [...]

• A recipe for industrial transformation

  When Tom Raftery pointed me to this gloomy assessment I had to go back and remind myself of what I found hopeful in Saul Griffith’s extraordinary energy talk at ETech. Saul concedes a 2-degree-C rise in temperature by 2033. The question is what it will take to hold the line. He thinks we’ll need to build [...]

• Two IronPythonic spreadsheets

  I should get a life, I know, but I can’t help myself, one of my favorite pastimes is figuring out new ways to wrangle information. One of the reasons that IronPython had me at hello is that, my fondness for the Python programming language notwithstanding, IronPython sits in an interesting place: on Windows, side by [...]