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Music about cheese

Doug — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:09:06 +0000

Ween’s “Where’d the Cheese Go” was in my head all day yesterday thanks to @erichauge.

(The explicit remix.)

Today I thank @tmoore13 for this little earwig: “I Like Cheese A Lot” to the tune of “Drop it like it’s Hot.”

Music about cheese

This day in tech: The Interstate is born

Doug — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:44:46 +0000

The Interstate Highway System is 54 years old today. Urban neighborhoods would never be the same.

“When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” —John Steinbeck

This day in tech: The Interstate is born

WordPress 3.0

Doug — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:36:34 +0000

I finally hit the button in WordPress to upgrade to 3.0 and nothing broke. Yay. Now that I’m running 3.0, I plan on setting up various content types (a new feature in 3.0) to make this blog more Tumblr-like and finally make my own theme (I make them for others, why not myself?). In the meantime I’m rocking the default WordPress 3.0 theme called Twenty Ten, which is actually pretty pleasant to look at.

WordPress 3.0

Who has the most New York Times subscriptions per capita?

Doug — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:27:00 +0000

Earlier, well wondering whether The New York Times would add a local section for the Twin Cities, MinnPost’s David Brauer posted a chart of the top 17 New York Times markets outside its home market. Minnesota ranked 17th by number of subscriptions. But knowing our perennial status as one of the most-literate states, I wondered where we ranked per capita. So I grabbed some quick populations numbers from the Wikipedia, and now here’s David’s graph rejiggered to show that.

We’re 12th. (Note that this is incomplete data since I’m just working with the 16 states and the District of Columbia that David listed.)

State	New York Times Subscribers	Population	Subscriptions per Capita (as %)
D.C.	19,300	599,657	3.22%
Massachusetts	41,600	6,593,587	0.63%
Florida	68,400	18,537,969	0.37%
Pennsylvania	38,300	12,604,767	0.30%
Maryland	16,900	5,699,478	0.30%
Washington	18,500	6,664,195	0.28%
California	94,800	36,961,664	0.26%
Colorado	12,100	5,024,748	0.24%
Illinois	29,300	12,910,409	0.23%
Arizona	14,700	6,595,778	0.22%
Virginia	16,000	7,882,590	0.20%
Minnesota	10,400	5,266,214	0.20%
Michigan	17,100	9,969,727	0.17%
Ohio	19,700	11,542,645	0.17%
Georgia	15,700	9,829,211	0.16%
North Carolina	11,500	9,380,884	0.12%
Texas	29,800	24,782,302	0.12%

Who has the most New York Times subscriptions per capita?

Twitter Annotations are going to be awesome

Doug — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:48:45 +0000

One of the more significant announcements from Twitter at this week's Chirp conference was the introduction of Annotations.

Annotations allow for any arbitrary information to be attached to a tweet without counting against the 140 character limit. So what's that good for? Everything, that's the beauty of it.

See the areas I've bolded below from Twitter engineer Marcel Molina's overview of the new feature.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Marcel Molina <marcel@twitter.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 12:54 PM
Subject: [twitter-api-announce] Early look at Annotations
To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com, twitter-api-announce@googlegroups.com

Hey everyone. One of the things we talked about at Chirp is the new Annotations feature we're working on. In short, it allows you to annotate a tweet with structured metadata. We're still working on Annotations, but I wanted to share with a wider audience beyond those I was able to talk to in person at Chirp about how we're thinking of doing Annotations.

* What is an annotation more exactly exactly?

First off let's be clearer about what an annotation is. An annotation is a namespace, key, value triple. A tweet can have one or more annotations. Namespaces can have one or more key/value pairs.

* How do I specify what annotations a tweet should have?

Annotations are specified for a tweet when the tweet is created. When submitting a POST to /statuses/update, you'll include an "annotations" parameter with your annotations. We're thinking we'll provide two mechanisms for specifying what a tweet's annotations are:

1. JSON

2. form encoded parameters

* How big can an annotation be and how many annotations can I attach to a tweet?

There is no limit on the size of any given namespace, key or value but the entire set of all annotations for a given tweet can not exceed some fixed byte size. That size isn't set in stone yet. We will be starting small (probably 512 bytes) and growing it gradually as we incrementally roll out the feature so we can gauge its scalability at various sizes. We'd like to (no promises) have it end up around 2K. How you use that 2K is up to you. You can attach one honking annotation, or a thousand+ tiny ones. You can attach one namespace with hundreds of key/value pairs, or hundreds of namespaces with just one key/value pair. We want to keep things as flexible and open ended as possible.

* What kind of data can go into an annotation?

We'd like to allow for any arbitrary data to be stored in an annotation. Arbitrary Unicode? Sure. MIDI? Go for it. Emoji? Yes please! There might be some tricky edge cases though. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't care about the details of edge cases… For one, since these annotations will be serialized to, among other formats, XML, and we'd like to keep the XML succinct, the namespace and key components of an annotation triple would likely be an XML tag with its value as, well, its value. If that's the case then the data of the key must be a valid XML tag. This greatly limits what it can contain (not even spaces for example). If allowing all three elements of the triple to contain any arbitrary data is more important than a succinct XML payload then we'll design a more verbose XML payload. Up to you all really. I've included examples of both options below. Make a case for another proposal if you have strong opinions.

* What constitutes a valid annotation?

Aside from the size and data type restrictions listed above, another requirement is that namespaces and keys be non-empty values. Values, on the other hand, may be empty. In this way the namespace/key pair can be treated like a flag of sorts. It should be noted: I'd encourage everyone to always think of a namespace as a namespace, to think of a key as a key and to think of a value as a value. Don't take the fact that a value can be empty to mean that you can skip out on the whole namespace think and morph the namespace into a key and the key into a value. While open endedness and flexibility is a quality of the Annotations feature that I'm most excited about for the developer community, this kind of approach seems prone to causing confusion by undermining namespaces.

* What namespaces can I write to? What namespaces can I read from?

Anyone can write to or read from any namespace. We aren't planning on enforcing any policy that restricts someone else from adding an annotation with "your" namespace or seeing annotations only if they are logged in with a certain account. In the absence of some really compelling reason to do that, we want to err on the side of making this feature as flexible and open ended as possible. Namespaces aren't intended as a way for people to claim their little slice of the tweet space. Rather they are intended to dramatically increase the possible significance of a given key/value pair. If you want a given key to mean one thing and someone else wants that same key to mean something else, and someone else still wants another meaning, consumers of your annotations are put in a tricky spot trying to figure out how to interpret a given annotation without the disambiguation of a namespace.

* How do we consume annotations?

For convenience, we plan on including annotations for a tweet directly embedded into that tweet's payload. The XML payload of a tweet I just inspected at random came out to about 2K in size. The "worst case" annotation would a little more than double that payload to probably about 5k. We're erring on the side of thinking that the moderate increase in payload size for tweets with annotations, even on slow connections, is both more convenient and faster than the latency and inconvenience incurred by adding another HTTP round trip. Though we'd like to provide an embedded and non embedded option, the maintenance cost and fragment cache space increase makes supporting both likely unrealistic so we're going with what we think satisfies the 80% case. Push back as appropriate.

* What will the payloads look like?

This isn't final. The payloads could end up wildly different after we noodle around in things like RDF and the semantic web's literature and all that kind of stuff. You can't see me but my hands are waving vigorously.

Given a hypothetical tweet, "Just got 'Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself' in the mail. Hopeful. Heart broken."

JSON

'annotations':

{

'iso':

{

'isbn': '030759243X'

'amazon':

{

'url': 'http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759243X'

}

XML option #1 which is succinct but restricts the possible values of namespaces and keys

030759243X

http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759243X

XML option #2 which is more verbose but allows for namespaces and keys to contain arbitrary data

iso

isbn

030759243X

amazon

url

http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759243X

If we went with XML option #2 it may or may not be a problem that it isn't "symmetrical" with the JSON representation. On the other hand, JSON and XML tend to be culturally at opposite sides of the Pithiness Spectrum.

* Can I add annotations to a tweet after the tweet has been created?

No. Like the text of a tweet, its annotations are also immutable. They can only be specified when the tweet they are being attached to is created. For talking purposes, though, if you want to add annotations to a tweet after the fact, you could retweet the original tweet and attach annotations to the retweet.

* Ok, great. What should I use annotations for though?

We don't know! That's the cool thing. Annotations are a blank slate that lend themselves to myriad divergent use cases. We want to provide open-ended utility for all the developers to innovate on top of. Some of us have initial ideas of cool potential uses cases that I'm sure we'll start to share just to seed the conversation as we get closer to launch. Developers will experiment with annotations. Certain ideas and approaches will catch on. Certain annotations will become standards democratically because everyone agrees. Some might have diverging opinions. It's something that we hope will grow organically and be driven by sociological and cultural forces.

* Ok, great. How are we going to figure out what Joe Random's annotations actually mean?

That's something we need to figure out as a community. But here is an early idea: People could add some agreed upon "meta-annotation" that points to something which *describes* the annotation or annotations that person is using. Think something sort of like XML DTD, though not necessarily machine readable. This meta annotation could point to a URL that simply has an HTML document that gives a description with some examples of the various annotations you're experimenting with or standardizing on.

* Will it be in search? Streaming? Mobile? My toaster?

We hope so! When we launch you will at minimum be able to attach annotations to a tweet and consume annotations from a tweet's payload via the REST API. Of course it would be awesome to be able to say to search or the streaming API, "give me all tweets with this namespace", or "give me all tweets with this namespace and key", or etc. We're working with the Search, Streaming and other teams to make all this happen. We can't promise it'll be ready by launch but we know it's killer and a must have and are trying to get it ready soon.

* When is it going to launch?

This is, pretty much, the only thing a couple of us are going to be working on until it's launched. We really can't wait to get it in your hands to see all the cool things you'll do with it, so we're cranking to get it out as soon as possible. If I had to provide a guestimate, I'd wave my hands in the direction of 2 months for a early, incremental roll out. We not only need to implement all the functionality, but we also need to productionize it in a measured and responsible way to ensure its quality of service is high.

In closing:

We're really excited about Annotations. Annotations mark one of our first of many departures from keeping in lock step with features on the web site. To truly be a platform, we want to expose high-leverage general purpose utility for the developer community to innovate on top of. Annotations is just the first of several high-leverage-general-purpose-utlity features we're hoping to get to after Annotations.

Think big. Blow our minds.

Twitter Annotations are going to be awesome

Open your minds, cilantro haters

Doug — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:08:00 +0000

I’m always saddened when I learn an otherwise decent person doesn’t like cilantro. Cilantro makes or breaks guacamole in my book.

The New York Times found at least one doctor who says cilantrophobes are just closed-minded.

“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with,” he said. “But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day.”

“So I began to like cilantro,” he said. “It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”

Open your minds, cilantro haters

My dear Mr. President

Doug — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:33:00 +0000

There’s something otherworldly about Justice John Paul Steven’s resignation letter: the typewriting, the odd (“formal,” I suppose is another word) capitalization, the addressing simply to “The President, The White House.”

This is 2010, isn’t it?

Download now or preview on posterous

20100409-JohnPaulStevens-Letter.pdf (33 KB)

My dear Mr. President

Slate on David Simon’s Treme

Doug — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 01:57:00 +0000

I’ve been reading everything I see on David Simon’s new show Treme set to premiere tomorrow on HBO, including last month’s expansive profile in The New York Times Magazine.

Slate’s Troy Patterson has a more digestible summary of the show, and the first graf pretty well sums it up.

If you need an introduction to David Simon, then this article will be useless to you, and you need to address your cultural illiteracy by arranging an enviable first screening of The Wire, his Baltimore epic. If you do not need an introduction to David Simon, then you do not need an article to tell you what a pleasure it is to watch Treme (HBO, Sundays at 10 p.m.), the new New Orleans-set drama, created by Simon and Eric Overmyer, that exhibits the potential to emerge, like The Wire, as a rich and complicated portrait of the urban South. If you do not think that Baltimore is in the South, then think again, hon. If you are familiar with Simon’s work and do not admire it, then you have my condolences.

All this obsession, and I don’t even have HBO.

Slate on David Simon’s Treme

The Bulldog’s Beer Bible

Doug — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 01:40:00 +0000

My Northeast Minnepolis mainstay The Bulldog has a new beverage book — those binders at the table that every TGI Fridays has. But this is no TGI Fridays beverage book.

The Bulldog doesn’t focus the book on mixed drink concoctions with lame names like most places, but on the beer. That makes sense for a place known for its wide selection of Belgian beers, but they take it one step further by including a glossary of beer terms.

It’s a great way to educate thirsty customers and a nice example of content marketing in the offline world.

The Bulldog’s Beer Bible

Mag+ on iPad looks better than a magazine

Doug — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:33:00 +0000

Tomorrow is iPad day, and while I won’t be standing in line for one (I recently bought a netbook instead), I’m more than excited at the prospects of the device and, yes, a little jealous of those who are buying an iPad right off the bat. Much of the buzz about the iPad before Steve Jobs’ January announcement for the device centered on it’s potential to replace magazines.

There was no talk about magazines during the announcement and there has been little talk since (though the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps have everyone excited), but the Mag+ app looks like it could be that killer app that puts the end to magazines on dead trees.

Makes me even more jealous of you iPad-toting bastards.

(via Kottke)

Mag+ on iPad looks better than a magazine