IBM Watson: Overprovisioned "Big Iron"?

At Memesteading: IBM Watson: Overprovisioned "Big Iron"?

IBM is known, and rightly admired, for many things… but hardware thrift isn’t one of them. Could a leaner, younger, hungrier team have matched Watson’s performance with a tiny fraction of Watson’s 2880 cores and 15TB RAM?

«» (6) comments

Tomorrow's Daily Show Gags First

At Memesteading: Tomorrow's Daily Show Gags First

Memesteading, June 24, 2009: Seven Score Characters, The Gettysburg Tweet

…

The Daily Show, December 2, 2010: The Twittersburg Address

Labels: daily show, gettysburg address, tweet, twitter, twittersburg

«» (0) comments

The Rise of the Web √ Tick

At Memesteading: The Rise of the Web √ Tick

A tick is thus the smallest, easiest gesture that can contribute to larger attention cascades. An interface that uses a tick properly is like a lever with a well-placed fulcrum, turning a tiny initial force — an almost effortless twitch, even — into a larger effect on a wider audience.

Ticktrails are as meaningful on the Likernet as outlinks and clicktrails are on the Internet — an essential part of digital stigmergy. Facebook and Twitter may soon make most of their money from pay-per-tick offerings.

Labels: facebook, likernet, likes, social software, social web, ticks, twitter, user experience, user interface, web

«»

Welcome to the Likernet… like ‘er or not

At Memesteading: Welcome to the Likernet… like ‘er or not

Facebook’s Likernet is a bright, safe, sanitary metropolis. It’s like Singapore, but in cyberspace with 100 times more citizens. Most current Internet residents will prefer to move to the Likernet. And even if you don’t want to move, you may find the Likernet rising all around you, leaving older Internet districts as blighted slums.

Labels: facebook, google, likernet, likes, malware, singapore, spam

«»

Five Largest Nations by Population or Active Users, early 2010

At Memesteading: Five Largest Nations by Population or Active Users, early 2010

3. Facebook, 400+ megacitizens networked-membership corporate principality, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg

Labels: facebook, jurisdictions, megacitizens, nations, population, sovereignty

«»

Dialectical Inclusionism

At Memesteading: Dialectical Inclusionism

The current generation of deletionists are but a transition phase, still hung up on Britannica-like definitions of ‘notability’ and ‘encyclopedic’.

The “sum of all human knowledge” will not contain deletionism, it will transcend deletionism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

Deletionists, we will bury you.

«»

Output Elsewhere

While I may yet post things here, I now intend any 'big thoughts' to go to Memesteading, and little thoughts to Twitter @gojomo.

«» (0) comments

Seven Score Characters: The Gettysburg Tweet

At Memesteading: Seven Score Characters: The Gettysburg Tweet

By future stds: Gettysburg Address, short? Give me a break! (Why! won’t! he! get! to! the! point!?) #lincolnfail

Labels: abraham lincoln, future, gettysburg address, tweets, twitter

«»

Renaming swine flu? Try 09flu / ‘ohnine flu’

At Memesteading: Renaming swine flu? Try 09flu / ‘ohnine flu’

Labels: neologism, swine flu

«»

These are the days

Well I was watching my TV
with a quart of old Milwaukee
catching up on all the murderers
when the telephone starts to ring
It turns out that it's the President
telling me if he gets my vote
I will soon be wearing a mink coat
coz he'll make all of us Americans rich as kings

Well he had me hook line and sinker
even though it was just a recording
till the news showed guys on Wall Street
trying to fly without their jets
So I fed my german shepherd
checked the canned goods in the basement
and hoped the president's replacement
hasn't tried to get my telephone number yet.

These are the days I wish I'd been an eskimo instead
These are the days I wish I'd stayed in bed

- 'These are the days', Human Radio (Ross Rice), 1990

«» (0) comments

"Build Your Own Web Archive" at OSCON

Tomorrow, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, I'll be presenting a session about the Internet Archive's open source web archiving tools. Full details:

Build Your Own Web Archive: archive.org's Open Source Tools to Crawl, Access & Search Web Captures
Gordon Mohr (Internet Archive, Web Group)
11:35am Friday, 07/25/2008
Web Applications
Location: E145

The Internet Archive, with support from other libraries around the world, has helped develop a collection of open source tools in Java to support web archiving. These include the Heritrix archival web crawler, “Wayback” for replaying historic web content, and extensions to Nutch for web archive full-text search. This session will explain the design and capabilities these tools, and quickly demo their use for the creation of a small personal web archive.

Heritrix has been designed for faithful and complete content archiving but has also found use in other web search contexts. Wayback allows URL-based lookup and follow-up browsing of archived web content. Nutch, as applied to archival web crawls, allows Google-style full-text search of web content, including the same content as it changes over time. Together, they provide everything necessary to archive and access accurate historical records of web-published content.

Also: last month James Turner of O'Reilly Media spoke to me in advance of OSCON. You can read or hear the interview at: Gordon Mohr Takes Us Inside the Internet Archives.

Labels: heritrix, internet archive, nutch, nutchwax, open source, oscon, speaking, wayback

«» (1) comments

The Presidio, a land of beauty and danger, "rendered safe"

We heard a loud "boom" at the office this afternoon...

SJMN: World War I mortar shell found in San Francisco Presidio

A San Francisco police bomb squad determined that a suspicious device found in the city's Presidio this morning was a World War I mortar shell, Sgt. Wilfred Williams said.

At about 10:20 a.m., a person walking a dog reported seeing the device in the Presidio area at Inspiration Point off of Arguello Boulevard.

U.S. Park Police responded, deemed the device it to be suspicious and notified San Francisco police.

According to Williams, authorities cleared out the surrounding area as they investigated the device. The bomb squad determined the device was a World War I mortar shell and it was rendered safe at about 2:45 p.m.

Labels: bomb squad, explosions, presidio, ww1

«» (0) comments

Animated regular-expression prime test in faster Regex Powertoy

This thread at News.YC motivated me to deploy some recent improvements to Regex Powertoy. It's now noticeably faster, especially for animating regex matching, and 'matchmarks' more reliably capture the entire syntax/display/animate settings.

Considering the prime-testing regex mentioned in the thread:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/

We can watch this match number 49 -- essentially discovering a factor and confirming that 49 is not prime -- by visiting this matchmark:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

We can watch the regex fail to match 47 -- confirming its primality -- with this matchmark:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

We can further fancy things up by including a substitution string to replace not-prime numbers, and use the 'show edits' highlight mode:

s/^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/not prime/
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

Note that clicking on the matched range brings up a detail view showing subgroup matches -- in this case the group's length is the factor found.

Note that Regex Powertoy requires Java -- a hidden applet makes use of Java's better-than-Javascript regex engine. (The recent changes have included replacing an old version of Prototype with the latest jQuery, and minimizing the slow JS-to-Java callouts by returning results in batches.)

Labels: applet, javascript, jquery, prime numbers, regex, regular expressions, rexexp

«» (0) comments

TV-B-Gone Gone Wild

Gizmodo: Confessions: The Meanest Thing Gizmodo Did at CES

Labels: gizmodo, prank, television, tv, tv-b-gone

«» (0) comments

AppleTV that's really TV and really Apple?

BusinessWeek strings together some 2008 predictions that are plausible without being mundane: Ten Likely Events in 2008.

One in particular rings true:

While Apple TV has been a dud, Steve Jobs & Co. will make an aggressive play this year for the most important screen in the house. Perhaps Apple will even make a gorgeous TV itself, with all the necessary Net capabilities inside. And if Apple can't do it, someone else will.

A real television is such an obvious fit for Apple's entertainment strategy that a 'surprise' announcement at MacWorld wouldn't surprise me. The existing AppleTV is a weak, confusing offering: a set-top box, really, that just mirrors things from a nearby computer's ITunes to a TV -- without even offering top-of-the-line 1080 HD output.

A real internet-capable TV makes more sense. So what might it look like? Big-screen LCD, full 1080 resolution, and an independent capability to connect to ITunes, for sure -- so it can be the sleek hub of home entertainment, rather than a peripheral.

One or more IPod docks on top -- so it can be used to charge, load or playback from the whole family's personal media devices. A camera and so-simple-grandma-can-use-it interface for video calls.

And the remote? An IPod Touch -- or just use any existing IPhone/Touch, which discovers the TV via wifi, or the possibly-embedded AirPort access point.

Now THAT would fit the name and brand promise of 'AppleTV'.

And since this is all just wild speculation, maybe it'll also have some funky new gestural interface, driven from the camera, infrared sensors, and/or inertial sensors. Then controlling your TV could be as fun as flicking through the IPhone interface, or playing a Wii game. Hell, make it so you can play Wii-like motion games DURING your video call with grandma.

I wouldn't bet on it but I'd love to see it!

Labels: apple, appletv, iphone, ipod, itunes, macworld, predictions, wii

«» (0) comments

Regex Powertoy fixes

Some combination of Firefox updates in the 1.5.x range or perhaps Java updates had left Regex Powertoy in a state where it usually wouldn't initialize properly, leaving it non-functional.

It's been updated with a new way to delay initialization until the necessary background applet is surely available. Also, a couple bugs with replace backreferences and replace matchmarks have been fixed. If it's seemed flaky the last time you tried it, give it another whirl.

(For more background on Regex Powertoy, see this post.)

Labels: powertoy, regex, regexp, regular expressions, tool

«» (1) comments

Gaming for hearts and minds

Video games can now involve a serious physical workout...

Economist (March 8): Let's get physical - Video games: “Exergaming”, which combines on-screen action with physical exercise, shows that gamers need not be couch potatoes

Or, no physical exertion whatsoever...

Economist (March 15): Mind games - Brain-controlled games and other devices should soon be on sale

Tags: exercise, exergaming, exertainment, video+games

«» (0) comments

Eureka! Free Lotto!

A judge in northern California has ruled that you don't have to pay gambling debts in California:

A Daly City couple who allegedly wrote $43,000 in bad checks to casinos in California and Nevada got bailed out today by a judge, who said gambling debts are unenforceable in California courts.

Despite the state's increased acceptance and legalization of various forms of gambling, its courts will not recognize lawsuits by casinos that extend credit to gamblers, said Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp, a retired jurist who heard the case in San Mateo County.

"Enforcement of such claims is prohibited as against California's public policy," Kopp wrote. He cited a 1993 ruling by a state appeals court in San Francisco that found what the court described as a "critical distinction between public acceptance of gambling itself and California's deep-rooted policy against enforcement of gambling debts -- that is, gambling on credit."

I'm planning to celebrate my state's principled stand against gambling by buying $43,000 worth of California Lottery Scratchers with bad checks and credit cards I'll never have pay down. Thanks Judge Kopp!

Tags: facetious, gambling, california, debt, lottery, hypocrisy

«» (1) comments

Crossing Over, with John Edwards

Maybe Presidential candidate John Edwards and ghost-whisperer John Edward aren't so different after all. Encouraged by the opening question in an interview at BeliefNet, Edwards is now channelling Jesus:

[interviewer] What parts of American life do you think would most outrage Jesus?

[John Edwards] Our selfishness. Our resort to war when it's not necessary. I think that Jesus would be disappointed in our ignoring the plight of those around us who are suffering and our focus on our own selfish short-term needs. I think he would be appalled, actually.

And just last week a Pastor in Florida helpfully answered the age-old question, WWJF? ("Who Would Jesus Fire?") Namely, Jesus would not employ a City Manager planning a sex-change operation:

"If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he'd want him terminated," said Pastor Ron Saunders of Largo's Lighthouse Baptist Church. "Make no mistake about it."

Edwards' Jesus and Saunders' Jesus might have some stern words for each other if they were to be jointly-booked on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Asked for comment, James Cameron's Jesus responded by pointedly not spinning in his ossuary.

Make no bones about it: if Jesus were here today, he'd thank everyone for speaking on his behalf while he was away.

Tags: facetious, Jesus, channelling, ghosts, James Cameron, John Edward, John Edwards, religion

«» (0) comments

I, for one, welcome our Wii-trained sword-wielding... *swish* *slash* 'Ayyyyye!'

YouTube: WiiBot

We took an industrial robot, strapped a tennis racket and a sword to it, and put it under the control of a WiiMote. We ran very light pattern recognition on the WiiMote, so it would copy our sword swings.

Previously: I, for one, welcome our new... *rat-tat-tat-tat-tat*

Tags: scary, robots, wii, swords, save+us,+john+connor, youtube

«» (0) comments