I’ve been talking with a lot of people lately about what I do, and I’ve gotten a lot of questions about our use of Mediawiki – largely in the “Why are you using that?” vein. The first few times I didn’t have a great answer, for reasons anyone who’s really worked with Mediawiki knows – …
I got my hands on the new iPhone for a few minutes today, and while it wasn’t the best environment for evaluating the phone, I did get a couple impressions: The Hardware Ok, I know I’m not going to be impartial here – I just wrote a post a couple days ago about how damn …
I got to attend ARE2010 recently, which was an amazing lineup of speakers and a great show of the current state of Augmented Reality. The big takeaway for me, though, had nothing to do with AR and everything to do with AI. Augmented Reality is, at its essence, just a new interface. In some cases, …
Just whipped up a script to check the SHA1 & MD5 hashes of a file and compare it to the clipboard. I rolled it into an Automator workflow so it can be attached as a folder action. Basically, the script takes a parameter, which is the full file name, runs openssl sha1 and openssl dgst …
I went to PrivacyCampSF yesterday and got to engage in spirited debate on privacy with passionate, intelligent people. The takeaway for me was that this is a problem of relationships, not rules. The first problem we have with privacy is that we simply don’t have a good definition for what we want kept private. We’re …
Or, why it’s still good to know people. (I’m aware this is an “obvious-man” sort of post, but I think it’s interesting to consider the limits of the info-god as we rely increasingly on smartphones and ubiquitous data.) I’ve been living in San Francisco for almost 8 months now. I’m starting to get a pretty …
The Big News of the week is Google’s pull out from China, which is the inevitable, extremely well-spun end of the conflict which started back in January. It’s been aptly described as the first great clash of the 21st century’s two emergent superpowers, and while it’s certainly elevated Google’s international profile – few countries get …
I’ve had my droid for a touch more than a month now, so I thought I’d give some general thoughts. I’m just going to shoot from the hip here: What’s Good: Google Voice – I had to go back and edit this article because I almost forgot about this one – that’s how well it’s …
I’ve been annoyed by the inability to easily set a solid color background since I started using OS X. Apple ships a couple “Solid background” png files, but they’re without fail Not the colors I want. Turns out, there’s a nice, easy way to get a solid color background of your choice that doesn’t involve …
I finally got Apache’s Digest authentication, and since there’s a serious dearth of information online about getting Digest working, I decided I’d write up a bit. It’s not difficult, but I’ve had far more trouble than I should have, and most of that’s due to nonexistant documentation. Why Digest? Standard HTTP auth sends the password …
