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Beginning of the end for open web data APIs?
[Update: hacking the Google Search AJAX API — see below.] [Update #2: Don Box is thinking along the same lines as I am.] [Update #3: Rob Sayre points out that there is, in fact, a published browser-side JavaScript API underlying … Continue reading
Tagged architecture, business, news, web
28 Comments
Nice (religious) ad campaign
Like many Canadians, I grew up in the Protestant United Church of Canada [Wikipedia] and then stopped going after confirmation, though in my case it was not apathy but teenage experimentation with Christian fundamentalism (I didn’t inhale, much) that kept … Continue reading
Wikipedia and trust
Update: corrected Encyclopedia Britannica link. A lot of people — publishers, the press, public figures, and bloggers — spend a lot of time agonizing over Wikipedia, and the general conclusion is either (a) Wikipedia is dangerously untrustworthy (from its detractors), … Continue reading
Tagged news, web
2 Comments
Linux grows up, a bit: a surprising (small) change in Ubuntu Edgy Eft
I recently upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft (which is about to be officially released). The upgrade was almost 100% painless, except that I had to reselect the gnome-desktop package after it got deselected somehow. Everything … Continue reading
Stephens vs. Wikipedia
Stephen Dubner is the co-author of Freakonomics, a book that stands out for its ability to move past conventional wisdom and commonplaces to look at evidence that others either ignored or couldn’t understand. Dubner recently posted a blog entry about … Continue reading
Tagged news, web
2 Comments
National Debt(s)
Tony Coates is celebrating the elimination of the Australian federal government’s net debt. During the 1970s and 1980s, Canada carried a brutal public debt, to the point that our federal government was spending more on interest than on any major … Continue reading
Tagged news
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Announcement: The XML Scholarship
In conjunction with the XML 2006 conference from 5-7 December in Boston, IDEAlliance will be awarding the first XML Scholarship. This scholarship is open to anyone who is enrolled as a student in a diploma or degree program at a … Continue reading
Tagged conferences, news
1 Comment
A breath of intellectual-property sanity
As most of you probably already know, Dan Brown, author of the (unintentionally) hilarious novel The Da Vinci Code, has won a copyright-violation case suit brought against him by authors of one of the books he used as a source … Continue reading
Tagged kulcher, news, rights
4 Comments
Earthquakes and high tech
Ottawa had a little earthquake (magnitude 4.5) yesterday evening at 8:39 pm EST. Ottawa is Canada’s biggest high tech centre (or at least was before the dot.bomb, drawing more investment than Toronto). Like the San Francisco Bay area, Ottawa is … Continue reading
Remembering the Y2K panic
Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) has started a small controversy by casually mentioning that the Y2K crisis was a false prophesy (his more detailed followup posting is here; he also points to a paper that I didn’t bother reading, but … Continue reading
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