October 21, 2003
Software gets refactored when it accumulates too much legacy cruft. Step back, redesign, rewrite the awkward bits. The result: a system new people can actually understand. Most Western law was written in the 19th century, talks about phenomena from 80 years ago, and is incomprehensible to anyone without a billable hour. So why don't we apply the same trick?
October 21, 2003
A reader points out that the Mind World Map seems to have stalled — a decent map appears quickly, and then just noise piles on top. There's a reason, and it has to do with what happens when 95% of people click the right pixel. Sounds great, until you do the math on what the other 5% are quietly doing to your map.
October 17, 2003
I went back to the failed best-time-to-visit project and tortured the code until it gave reasonable answers. It now scans Google snippets for month names and picks the top two. There's still one nagging problem: it knows April and October are the right months for Amsterdam, but it doesn't know which one comes first. February in Amsterdam is, shall we say, suboptimal.
October 15, 2003
Can Google be used as a common sense engine? My early attempts to extract trivia by parsing snippets worked surprisingly well, until they didn't — June, apparently, is also the best time to visit Australia. Maybe scanning the top 100 would help. Maybe Google itself, with three billion documents and a clever algorithm, is the one that should be doing this. Skynet, but for trivia.
October 14, 2003
The CDDB started as a volunteer project — strangers typing in song titles for the love of it. Then the Internet boom hit, the founders realized there was money on the table, and the volunteers got nothing. IMDB went the same way. TravLang too. And, I'm sorry to say, world66.com — a project I helped set up. Which is why we're opening it back up.
October 14, 2003
Usenet doesn't really forget. Dig around and you can find the unassuming first posts — a guy named Stallman with a bright idea about free Unix, a Finnish student tinkering with an OS for some old hardware, a fellow at CERN announcing a thing he optimistically called the WorldWideWeb. Plus one Larry Page asking a basic Java question for an app he was building.
October 13, 2003
A glance at the referer logs shows people keep arriving here looking for Google hacks. Fair enough — there's now a category for them, six projects deep, all doing something slightly unreasonable with the worlds favourite search engine.
October 13, 2003
Steven Berlin Johnson writes about salvaging email through better organization. I'd settle for two simpler things: search in Outlook that doesn't take minutes to grind through a 500MB mail file, and rules that file mail away a day after it arrives — so my inbox shows only the recent stuff I actually have to deal with. Weren't computers supposed to be fast?
October 10, 2003
Germany pushed for the European Stability Pact because they feared their fiscally lax neighbours would weaken the Euro. Years later, Germany is the one busting the rules, France is daring anyone to stop them, and the Euro is somehow strong anyway. There's a deeper irony lurking — and it's about to be carved into the constitution.
October 10, 2003
On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog — but for how much longer? Powerful parties want mandatory Digital IDs, and they'll wrap the pitch in spam, piracy and terrorism. You need a license to drive the highway, so why not the Information Super Highway? The answer matters more than it sounds.
October 09, 2003
If removing a head of state by force is ever justified, surely the bar is the threat they pose to human welfare. By that measure the greatest danger on the planet right now isn't sitting in Baghdad — and one daisy cutter would handle it in minutes. A provocation, with a serious question buried inside.
October 08, 2003
Feed Google three or four words and let it predict the next one. Then the next. Then the next. The result is dada poetry by way of the search index — a language model built out of the web before anyone called it that.
October 07, 2003
Everyone moaning about programming jobs moving to India seems to have skipped the day they covered Ricardo. If productivity destroyed jobs, the industrial revolution would have left 90% of us idle by now. A walk through comparative advantage, the lump of labour fallacy, and why the real problem with outsourcing isn't what people think.
October 06, 2003
My Archean project got picked up by a software art site, which raises an awkward question: can code be art? Socrates was a sculptor before he was a philosopher, and Fred Brooks claimed programmers build castles in the air from pure thought-stuff. Where Rembrandt and a quick hack might actually have something in common.
October 05, 2003
A contrarian case: every freedom-loving person should be cheering on Digital Rights Management. Yes, it would be an economic disaster. That's exactly the point. Lock Office down hard enough and people will discover OpenOffice. Make music unshareable and they'll find bands who don't mind. The fastest path to freedom may run straight through the cage.
October 01, 2003
Poetry is supposed to project images in your mind. What if you outsourced that part to Google? Feed VisualPoetry any text and it hands the words to Google Image Search, then plays back the results as a slide show. Whether the images match what the poet intended is another matter entirely.
September 26, 2003
Growing up in the Netherlands there were two state channels, and that was that. Now there are dozens — and somehow the programming feels worse. The doomsayers warned us about American-style commercial TV, and they were mostly right. Mostly. Because something strange is happening across the Atlantic that hints at how this evolutionary process actually ends.
September 25, 2003
Malaria kills 3000 children a day. If ten 747s of kids crashed into Kilimanjaro every morning, someone would do something. Instead, the world spends less on malaria research than a single cruise ship costs to build. Bill Gates — the man the Internet loves to hate — just doubled the global budget out of pocket. So who's the evil one again?
September 24, 2003
Everyone knows Islam is harsh and Buddhism is the religion of peace. Everyone is wrong. Before the Chinese rolled in, Tibet was a medieval theocracy with slavery, severed hands, and a Dalai Lama whose circle of friends included some surprising names. A look at why we keep hoping the East holds a secret the West has already found.
September 23, 2003
Twenty-five million camera-phones shipped in six months, mostly in Japan. My phone does 640x480, which is fine for blog photos and not much else. But once they hit two or three megapixels, the standalone camera starts looking like a dedicated MP3 player in an iPod world. A rough timeline for when carrying one becomes silly.