The second one from Kevin Ballard finds nothing for me….
The second one from Kevin Ballard finds nothing for me….
An entire Wiki on procedural content generation - not that there’s too much there, but it’s a good start if you want to delve into the subject.
Who knew - skyhook actually makes their wireless location API available to developers. Since I don’t see any other way they are making money, I guess there is money in selling API keys these days. (Which really just means access to data.)
I’ve been looking a little bit into the APIs for social apps that let you modify your own profile, and it’s an amazing desert. They are non-existent, incomplete (changing your profile pic is frequently left out), shoddy, you name it.
“OpenSocial” seems to sort-of, kind-of allow it. It is possible that the newUpdatePersonAppRequest actually is capable of handling updating your personal data. Except that the field is opensocial.Person.Field.THUMBNAIL_URL - i.e. you need to know what URL the image is stored at. Which of course wildly differs for each social webs service.
I’m not even going to get started on the idiocy of defining gender as an enum of two values. (At the *very* least, support undefined. ) And there are plenty more stupid decisions in opensocial.Enum…
I guess that was to be expected from an API that talks, in its spec, about “viral channels” to spread your app.
One of the things that makes it truly upsetting is that OpenSocial very poorly tries to replicate a lot of the work that RDF was created for - a social schema for RDF would probably have been a better idea.
And even if RDF itself is flawed, OpenSocial is a quick hack compared to RDF.
I’m sure Google hired a lot of smart people, but it sure looks like they weren’t allowed to work on OpenSocial…
6 months ago
There are quite a few really nifty desktops out there - but I never realized why anybody would use them. After all, screen real estate is *valuable*
The Mac’s dashboard is a first step in providing these widgets without impacting user experience. With a multi-monitor setup, it would be great if the “unused” desktop could slowly fade in the background, to be replaced by your desktop, though.
6 months ago
I spent the last year or so thinking a lot about managing where my attention goes. While I love reading hundreds of RSS feeds, twittering, facebooking, etc, it’s simply not practical to do it all the time.
So far, I mostly considered how to filter wheat from chaff. But it occurs to me that there is a second part to attention management - how busy am I right now, and how important is what I’m doing? I.e. if I’m playing Mafia on Facebook, sure, open the twitter pipe a bit wider - but if I’m writing code, would you please shut it down for the duration.
I wonder if there are any tools that seriously try to figure out what your attention is on, and how important it is to you….
6 months agoThat’s one of the mysteries of life for me. I mean, why spend time on beautifying the one thing in your life that you shouldn’t see?
There’s never enough screen real estate as-is, so what’s the point in putting a picture on it?
Screensaver, I can possibly see - although even there, I wonder why you’d spend time looking at a screen if there’s nothing to do…
7 months agoIncredibly cool visualization of sort algorithms
