As regards 3D Mailbox, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again if I wanted a 3d universe, I’d go outside.”

A brief (and good) explanation of what assembly, compilers, interpreters and virtual machines do.

I say no, no, no. Python with curly braces.

From Geeking with Greg

When companies ask me about personalization, I often recommend they start with baby steps — maintaining and surfacing history, showing related content — rather than trying to implement full personalization immediately.

Nobody asks me about personalization but I bet this is good advice. In fact, the baby steps approach might be good advice across the board.

This is just too plain odd (is that a contradiction?).  Just this weekend I was looking up at the summer sky wondering what type of space craft was going to replace the space shuttle.  Can we go back to capsules and rockets?

Turns out the Lucky Stiff was working on this problem as I spoke: Different Space Shuttles.  On a personal note, I like that Donald Sutherland has his own shuttle.

From I, Cringely:

Incentives don’t happen until incentives are needed and with the iPhone they aren’t needed yet.

Flipping this around, you can ask of any product with a carrot, “why does it need the incentive?”

Adrian Holovaty’s come up with a cool little gizmo called templatemaker. Basically, you feed it a couple of examples and it tells you what the template is that is being used to generate the text. This is useful as if you know the template then you can extract the data. Take a look at the example taken from the repo:

# Create a Template instance. >>> t = Template()  # Learn a Sample String. >>> t.learn('this and that‘)  # Output the template so far, using the “!” character to mark holes. # We’ve only learned a single string, so the template has no holes. >>> t.as_text(’!') ‘this and that‘  # Learn another string. The True return value means the template gained # at least one hole. >>> t.learn(’alex and sue‘) True  # Sure enough, the template now has some holes.  >>> t.as_text(’!') ‘! and !‘

(apologies for the formatting, I’m about to give wordpress and it’s infuriating rich text editor the old heave ho.)

Pretty cool. Now according to Adrian, “I searched but couldn’t find anything else that did this.”

I have no reason to disbelieve him here—I’m certain that he did search for it. But shortly after posting the code several people pointed him to some very interesting materials on ‘wrapper induction‘ and ‘report mining’. It appears people have been working on precisely this problem for a while now. ‘Wrapper induction’ appears to be the computer science term, and ‘report mining’ the industry choice. Traditions and their linguistic predilections aside, this begs a bigger question, how do you search for something when you don’t know what it’s called? One answer would be that you don’t search for it all. You ask people.

A couple weeks ago, Robert Scoble was on an OnPoint radio program extolling the virtues of twitter. One of the things that he said was great about twitter is that he could just throw out a question and since there were a lot of smart people on his twitter list, someone would get back to him. Yes, it’s an example of the ‘lazy web’, but is it indicative of a broader cultural change? Scoble said that he had hundreds of people hooked up to his twitters and there was a lot of diversity among them: CEOs, gear heads, academics, etc.

If the power of the web is the power of your web that would seem to indicate that building your network is of prime importance. What’s the best way to build your web? I don’t know the exact answer, but contributing to it via blogging and open source projects seems to be working pretty well for a lot of people.

From Chui’s counterpoint

Perhaps, with Word, writing is such a creative process, that I find - especially as a non-native speaker - that it is easier to get distracted by the variety of ways in which I can reformat a paragraph. In fact, I find it more productive to work in WordPress than in Word because of this.

Taken in the context of discussing ‘flow’ this is a rather interesting statement. Perhaps I just don’t understand the idea behind it, but I would think that any discussion of flow involves an immersion in an activity. And if there’s one thing staring right in the face of immersion it’s a HTML textarea box. Just for starters, the textarea hardly ever takes up the bulk of the screen.  The rest of the world screams, “I’m only a mouse click away.” (If immersive environments increase flow, then WriteRoom or something like it would be the editor of choice.)

All of this is secondary to the noteworthy aspect of the quote above.  If people really start to find lightweight, web-based tools more ‘productive’ than full fledged apps, Microsoft (and a whole host of other people) have to go back to the drawing board.

Phil Karlton, “To make a decision, look in the mirror. Pick the one that produces the biggest grin.”

Cranky Tog glows over iPhone:

Traditional cell phones are dull, limited, and at end-of-life. iPhone is glorious, and it is only the beginning.

Back in the day, Tog, quite justly, ripped OS X to shreds.  This man knows a thing or two about interface design.