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Random Items of Interest

Just a couple of things that I thought would be worth mentioning, but for the most part don’t warrant their own posts. I might explore the Mono issue later, but the rest are pretty much one liners:

  1. I’m not sure whether this says more about me or the usability of the system, but I get the CAPTCHA-style math questions in blog comment authentication systems wrong at least 50 percent of the time. 97+13? I’m not exactly Stephen Hawking here.
  2. Speaking of comment spam prevention systems, an aside to the News.com gang’s new effort: love the blogs, but the comment registration system is brutal. Felt like the Spanish Inquisition.
  3. I was listening to Sporting News Radio this morning – a rarity – and happened to catch James Brown (JB)’s show. Anybody else think that Scoble is the JB of the blogging world, i.e. overly nice, hyper enthusiastic, and one of the hardest working guys in the business?
  4. Can someone explain to me who day light savings time actually benefits, because everyone I know hates it. Myself included.
  5. I upgraded my Mono stack to 1.1.4 over the weekend, and all I can is wow – it runs much faster. Not that performance was a major issue before, but there’s essentially zero latency for opening Tomboy now.
  6. Blogines should really have an “undo” function for the “Mark all as read” button
  7. Is anybody else finding the recent trend on virtually all major online media sites (tech and otherwise) of breaking a single story up into 4 or 5 pages – presumably to articially inflate pageviews and thus ad revenue – as irritating as I am? It irks me that I have to click through multiple times to read a single article.
  8. I have a difficult time believing that nearly a third of MP3 owners have downloaded a podcast, just going off of my experiences with friends and ex-colleagues, but I know one thing that would give podcasting a real kick in the pants: wifi or bluetooth connectivity in both iPods and cars. The existing solutions (tape or FM adapters most commonly) are both kluge and inefficient.
  9. Much has been made in some quarters of the failure of analysts to cover open source technologies, and the criticism is for the most part fair and deserved (though I try). But just in case some of the open source folks out there are looking to get something in front of me and failing, I invite you to tag your project or technology in del.icio.us with the tag “heyredmonk”. I’ll subscribe to it in Bloglines, and watch it just in case you want me to see something.

And that’s all for today. Given that I’m travelling the next two days, I don’t know how much you’ll hear from me but I’ll post when I can.

by-sa

Related posts:

  1. Boston Says Hi and Other Items of Interest
  2. Random Items on a Friday Afternoon
  3. Miscellaneous Friday Items
  4. Friday’s Miscellaneous Items
  5. Random Thoughts and Pet Peeves

7 Comments

Categories: Completely Off Topic.

By sogrady
— April 4, 2005 at 5:26 pm
  • JD McMillan

    "Can someone explain to me who day light savings time actually benefits, because everyone I know hates it. Myself included."

    It benefits surfers in California who work a full time job and can't surf before work – an extra hour of daylight means an extra hour of surfing after work.

  • Noel

    Click throughs: totally annoying… I immediately go to the "print article" link so I can view it in a single page.

  • http://www.drunkandretired.com Cote'

    I like that heyredmonk idea. Do you know of other people doing something like that? In putting together a presentation on tags, and listening to Shirky's etech thing about ontologies on IT Conversations, I recently stumbled across/solidified the idea of using tags for non-taxonomy things: to_read, heyredmonk, etc.

    It's like a sort of social/shared token for groups to use to, well, tag URLs for action.

  • http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady sogrady

    JD: well, as much as i hate it, it's good to know that someone's getting something out of it.

    Noel: that's a really good idea. i hadn't thought of that.

    Cote': i have seen some talk around groupware type uses of tagging solutions, and have definitely seen the "toread" tag before, but don't know that i know of anyone using it in precisely this fashion. definitely could be forgetting something though; it just occured to me while reading another piece on how analyst's don't cover open source and how difficult it is for some smaller technologies to get noticed. we'll see if anyone uses it, but it's at least worth a try.

  • http://fraxas.blogspot.com Fraxas

    I like Daylight savings time. The hour of lost sleep is more than made up for by the pleasure of making dinner during the daylight hours, and not having blinding sun in my window at 5AM.

    I mean, think about the name: the whole point of DST is to rearrange the clock so that more of the workday takes place during daylight — and even I, code monkey I am, can appreciate that.

  • http://fraxas.blogspot.com Fraxas

    And on the topic of groupware tagging — isn't that what the whole taxonomy is *for* in the first place? Presumably, people have more than just idle curiosity as reasons to go through del.icio.us and flickr tags.

    I agree that there's value in tags like "heyredmonk" and "toread", but I'm not sure they qualify as non-taxonomic. It's just a different axis in the topology — one that happens to say more about what a particular thing is *for* than what it *is*.

  • http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady sogrady

    Fraxas: i've got a bunch of folks now who've come out strongly pro-DST, so maybe it's just me. i'm still convinced, however, that it's a vestigial artifact of a different time and exists more for tradition's and convenience's sake than anything else.

    as for the tagging comment, yes that's why social-tagging exists. i'm not aware of other groups that have a tag specifically for the purposes i have heyredmonk, but i wouldn't be surprised if it'd been done before, b/c it's not exactly unique.