"backstory" entries
Don't Miss Nat's Last Post
If you didn't bother to read below the fold on Nat's last post, go back and do so now. You'll be rolling on the floor laughing….
Jedi build their own lightsabers
I was down at Stanford recently with Adam, and sat in on one of the classes he's taking there. Later on, I looked around at some of the resources Stanford makes available on the web. They provide a lot of fantastic material for free. One thing I found was this video series of Larry Page and Eric Schmidt from Google,…
The Disappointment of John von Neumann's Unopened Box
I saw my friend George Dyson last night. He's working on a book based on the letters between von Neumann and his wife Klara, one of the first modern programmers. I'd heard from George about a box that was among von Neumann's papers, with a note that it should not be opened till 50 years after his death. We…
Radar Redesign and New Features
OK, how do you like it? (P.S. Be sure to refresh your browser. Shift-reload.) We've been noodling for a while on a redesign of Radar. Our initial design was thrown together in a weekend, and we've lived with it happily for a couple of years. But it really hasn't given us the framework we need to pull together all the…
O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures
It's been leaking out around the edges that O'Reilly has gotten into the venture business, but by SEC rules, we weren't allowed to say so publicly until we had closed our fundraising. We did a first close late last year, and have already made four investments, but needed to stay mum until the final close. But now I can say…
2008 Presidential Technology Race: Who's Using What?
Tim O'Brien wrote: "The web site is the new campaign handshake, and I was curious to see what technologies were powering candidate web sites. Whoever puts these sites together has to choose a site that can be developed quickly and can handle intense bursts of traffic, so while you might think this is irrelevant, it tells you a little bit…
Early History of the Web Pipes Concept
A few days ago, I gave credit to Jon Udell for the talk at the Perl Conference that first introduced me to the idea of pipes and filters for the web. One reader, Ed, asked in the comments whether it wasn't Andrew Schulman who gave that talk? After a bit of digging down memory lane with Jon and Andrew, it's…
From Walled Garden to Green Fields
Before Foo Camp last year, the Radar group had a meeting to share and find common threads in the trends that we'd individually been noticing. I pointed out that one of the characteristics of things that interest us is that they remove artificial barriers to behaviour (we like open source, we don't like DRM, we have a lot of problems…
A Microsoft Timeline via Tags
Tag clouds are a great way to get a quick summary of the concepts in a piece of text and their relative importance. When combined with a timeline and a set of chronologically-ordered content you can quickly see how ideas morphed overtime. This is a great way to track the changes of a company, industry or even a country…
Fast Forward: December 14th, 2006
I'm very glad that Jason Kottke is continuing his war on multiple-page articles. I'll pile on and say, does any advertiser really take readership numbers seriously from sites that do auto refresh (when the page forces a reload a few minutes after you load it)? Yahoo! News Most Popular, for instance, refreshes every five minutes. I remember when that…