Ramblings & ephemera
Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?
A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
very long pause….
Java.
Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender.
A [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, language & literature | No Comments »
From Jakob Nielsen’s “Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities” (Alertbox: 30 March 2009):
We asked participants what information they want to see on non-profit websites before they decide whether to donate. Their answers fell into 4 broad categories, 2 of which were the most heavily requested:
The organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work.
How it [...]
Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature | No Comments »
My blog was at http://www.granneman.com/blog, but I then moved it, after several years of living at its old address, to http://blog.granneman.com. I wanted to preserve all my links, however, so that someone going to http://www.granneman.com/blog/2008/04/20/after-a-stroke-he-can-write-but-cant-read/ would instead end up at http://blog.granneman.com/2008/04/20/after-a-stroke-he-can-write-but-cant-read/.
To do this, I edited the .htaccess file in http://www.granneman.com/blog to read as follows (For [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Spencer Reiss’ “Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today” (Wired: 21 April 2008):
Almost a third of [Amazon]’s total number of sales last year were made by people selling their stuff through the Amazon machine. The company calls them seller-customers, and there are 1.3 million of them.
…
Log in to Amazon’s [...]
Posted on September 26th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business | No Comments »
As some of you may have heard, Google has announced its own web browser, Chrome. It’s releasing the Windows version today, with Mac & Linux versions to follow.
To educate people about the new browser & its goals, they release a 38 pg comic book drawn by the brilliant Scott McCloud. It’s a really good read, [...]
Posted on September 2nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
According to RFC2606, available at http://www.rfc.net/rfc2606.html, the following domains have been reserved for examples in technical and other writing:
example.com
example.org
example.net
In addition, the following TLDs are reserved for obvious uses:
.test
.example
.invalid
.localhost
Related posts
Famous domain name sales
What Google’s book settlement means
The Chinese Internet threat
Monopolies & Internet innovation
If concerts bring money in for the music biz, what happens when concerts get [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, technology | No Comments »
Jerry wrote this & sent it to a client;
A fat footer is a means of showing secondary navigation, or
showcasing primary navigation, or reinforcing selected pieces of your
navigation. Here are some examples:
On a long-scroll blog page, put some choices at the bottom:
http://bokardo.com/
Put sales and branding at the top and navigation at the bottom:
http://www.dapper.net/
Promote the pages you [...]
Posted on July 25th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Joshua Porter’s “Do Canonical Web Designs Exist?” (Bokardo: 14 November 2007):
… web designers necessarily approach design from a different perspective than graphic designers.
Graphic designers can judge by looking. Web designers cannot. Web designers must judge by doing (or observing others doing). The problem is that too many people judge web designs without actually using [...]
Posted on May 17th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, technology | No Comments »
On the CWE-LUG mailing list, someone asked a question about creating a program that can be extended with plugins. I thought the answer was so useful that I wanted to save it and make it available to others.
On 2/17/07, Mark wrote:
I’m a young programmer (just finishing high school) who has done a fair [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
Here we’ve got the canonical Tim O’Reilly definition of Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, social software, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From The Internet Archive’s “Orphan Works Reply Comments” (9 May 2005):
The Internet Archive stores over 500 terabytes of ephemeral web pages, book and moving images, adding an additional twenty-five terabytes each month. The short life span and immense quantity of these works prompts a solution that provides immediate and efficient preservation and access to orphaned [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Paul Graham’s “Hiring is Obsolete” (May 2005):
It’s hard to judge the young because (a) they change rapidly, (b) there is great variation between them, and (c) they’re individually inconsistent. That last one is a big problem. When you’re young, you occasionally say and do stupid things even when you’re smart. So if the algorithm [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Tim Bray’s “On the Goodness of Unicode” (6 April 2003):
Another problem is that in these parts of the world [China, Japan, Korea], it is not unheard-of to invent new characters. The Japanese word for such charaacters is gaiji; historically they were invented for personal or company names.
Related posts
The politics & basics of Unicode
Spimes, [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature, technology | Comments Off
From Tim Bray’s “On the Goodness of Unicode” (6 April 2003):
Unicode proper is a consortium of technology vendors that, many years ago in a flash of intelligence and public-spiritedness, decided to unify their work with that going on at the ISO. Thus, while there are officially two standards you should care about, Unicode and ISO [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | Comments Off
From Andrés Duany’s “Classic Urbanism“:
From time to time there appears a concept of exceptional longevity. In architecture, the pre-eminent instance is the Vitruvian triad of Comoditas, Utilitas, e Venustas. This Roman epigram was propelled into immortality by Lord Burlington’s felicitous translation as Commodity, Firmness and Delight.
It has thus passed down the centuries and remains authoritative, [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, history, science | Comments Off
From “Beauty Is Our Business: A Birthday Salute to Edsger W. Dijkstra“:
David Gelernter said in “Machine Beauty – Elegance and the Heart of Technology“:
Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
Related posts
The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad
Web design contrasted [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From “Good Architecture“:
This has a similarity to the ISO 9126 definition of software quality:
Portability
Efficiency
Reliability
Functionality
Usability
Maintainability
Related posts
When to use XML
What is Web 2.0?
Vitruvian Triad terminology
The Vitruvian Triad & the Urban Triad
The politics & basics of Unicode
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From “Good Architecture“:
In ‘building architecture’, for comparison, we have the 3 classic Vitruvian qualities to which ‘GoodArchitecture’ aspires:
‘Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas’ (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio ‘The Ten Books of Architecture’ 1st C AD).
These qualities may be translated as: ‘Technology, Function and Form’ (C St J Wilson ‘ArchitecturalReflections?; Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture’ 1992 [...]
Posted on June 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Clay Shirky’s “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview“:
What is the Semantic Web good for?
The simple answer is this: The Semantic Web is a machine for creating syllogisms. A syllogism is a form of logic, first described by Aristotle, where “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From W3C’s “Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One“:
XML defines textual data formats that are naturally suited to describing data objects which are hierarchical and processed in a chosen sequence. It is widely, but not universally, applicable for data formats; an audio or video format, for example, is unlikely to be well suited to [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help, technology | Comments Off
