May 2008
10 posts
Let's make Distributed Twitter!
Bre and I spent quite awhile talking about how to make an open-source, open-format distributed microblogging service. We plotted and schemed, designed and mocked, and then discovered a bunch of people already talking about it. It looks like the way to go is with Jabber, since that’s already what Twitter and Jaiku use. The next step is to organize a project and to get coding. We’re...
Cobo-updates
Great geek weekend. The wife was out of town so i got to nerd it up.
Made some great progress on cobosoda. Got sexual reproduction working! Now we’re actually combining models rather than just mutating then randomly. We still have mutations, but they’re much less frequent. The updates are in CVS if you want to check it out.
I pinged the nyc resistor gang for some ideas of...
Java got no soul
Hackin’ on cobosoda today. Writing a class named SexualReproduction right now, which is kind of fun. I wish java would let me do things like combine non-booleans with logical operators. Where I could write in perl:
sub get_number_of_parents {
my $self = shift;
return ($self->{mom} && $self->{dad} && 2) ||
(($self->{mom} || $self->{data})...
I was on a panel discussion today at Streaming Media East. Went OK I guess. The topic was, “Should content creators get a cut?”, to which we all answer, “Of course.”.
What the panel was really about was, “Is there enough money to go around for content creators? How about for Hollywood?”. I think there’s certainly enough money there for the...
Dear [Insert Social Networking Site],
How do I say this? I’m just not that into you. I feel like you work for so many other people because it’s a way for them to find something to do. Chat with old friends, write on a wall, zombie bite a chump.. It all sounds very nice in theory. Problem is, I’ve already got plenty to do, and plenty more rattling around just waiting for free cycles. Sure, sure, I’ll still...
Two steps forward... one step back..
They never should’ve made the String object pass by value. It negatively reinforces the difference between objects and values. I run into confusion on this point quite a bit. Developers who have had limited access to mid-level languages like C don’t often stop and think about the difference. If you had to use a clone() method, or even toString() every time you passed a String,...
I love my new place, but man the bodega downstairs plays the mariachi music late and LOUD. The buzzing speakers are a nice touch. Good thing they close at midnight.