Posted March 12th, 2009 by Matt
Came across siftables today for the first time via a link from O’Reilly Radar, which referenced a post from that very nice Phil chap’s coverage at ETech (wish I was there). This is very nice kit. The video on the siftables site is really quite exciting. And it shows footage from a media lab – another awesome project from MIT that I’d forgotten about. All very life affirming.
Apparently there was a New Scientist article about it a month or so ago so I was surprised I’d missed it. I suppose it must have been in that issue that got lost in the heavy snow 
Posted March 20th, 2008 by Matt
I recently discovered news.ycombinator.com and I’m loving it. It’s another social link aggregator like digg or reddit, but I find the quality of the links excellent. I have space in my schedule for about two good, longish articles a day, and this site is producing more than I can handle. An embarrassment of riches. Examples from a day earlier this week include:
- Big dog video – impressive, very expensive looking robotic quadruped from DARPA
- Blowing up – a 2002 article from New York Times focussing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb – a hedge fund investor looking for black swans.
- Shell shock – a write up of a researcher at MIT interested in biologically inspired self-assembling materials.
Posted March 20th, 2008 by Matt
Imagine a pill that signals when it’s been swallowed, allowing a patient to track their adherence to the drug’s regime and, if combined with other sensors, the impact of the treatment (thus allowing them to customise the regime in an informed manner). Well someone’s built one. Very sci fi.
Posted January 24th, 2008 by Matt
Last week I released an open source project: ArgKit. It’s the synthesis of some work that I’ve been doing in the last couple of years and I’m very pleased with it. I’ve released early (ish) on this one, so there is more work to come in the same vein, time and attention allowing. One thing that ArgKit’s website misses is some background on “what is argumentation?” so I thought I’d just blog something about Dungine – the only tool in the toolkit at the moment, based on an email I sent to a friend recently (thanks for the question Steve).
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Posted November 28th, 2007 by Matt
Last week I spent a day interviewing candidates for a programmer position. One of the candidates discussed things that he looked for in an organisation. Two things in particular struck me: He wanted to work in an organisation that, if he was making good progress, didn’t slow him down and that, if he asked a stupid question, didn’t call him stupid. The first question revealed the candidates lack of experience (not a problem in this case btw) but the second one is very important to a career in software engineering.
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Posted November 7th, 2007 by Matt
I configured my docked Ubuntu laptop with an external screen to have an extended desktop using Xinerama. It works (almost) nicely. I have a wide desktop that I can drag screens around on now, but unfortunately the pointer isnt rendering properly on the external screen – instead of a clean pointer I have a 2cmx2cm square on the external monitor. Even with a clumsy mouse pointer, this is an improvement on my previous dual monitor setup which used aticonfig’s bigdesktop setting. I found that bigdesktop configured two separate desktops which meant that I was unable to run firefox/thunderbird on both desktops, or drag windows from one screen to another.
These two references were useful:
Posted September 3rd, 2007 by Matt
In the last two years I have come across several long articles by John Sowa. What I’ve read of them has been of very high quality, but towards the edge of my radar. Thus they are still in my in-pile. Today I came across a short, recent article that is a pure gold antidote to some of the extremely drawn out and ongoing discussions in the semantic web communities: Fads and Fallacies about logic.
Posted August 1st, 2007 by Matt
Cargo cults are a delightful new concept to me, from the excellent and thought provoking blog entry, internal code re-use considered dangerous, which in turn was a link from another blog entry, is your code worthless? which in turn was a link from theserverside.com. Now that’s provenance baby. Too much information?
Posted July 16th, 2007 by Matt
On Friday the excellent information aesthetics feed pointed me to wikimindmap.org, an Adobe Flash visualisation of a wikipedia topic as a mind map. The image above shows the wikimindmap visualization for Sweeney Todd – the main character in the musical/opera of the same name by Steven Sondheim (chosen for it’s compact size, and because I’ve just been to see it performed at the Royal Festival Hall). This is very nice. It combines the “at a glance” loveliness of mind mapping with the collective wisdom of wikipedia. It may provide a way for humans (as opposed to machines – that is another story) to scan topics more quickly than scan-reading them.
Posted July 2nd, 2007 by Matt
This link is hot right now on del.icio.us (thanks to bluga.net for the thumbnail). It’s a site that shows a whole bunch of scanned business cards and assorted pictures in a grid. The grid is pretty to look at and could potentially contain a large amount of information. It reminds me of an idea I have for archiving greetings cards.
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