My coworker Bob Amen was killed in a motorcycle accident on Thursday night, leaving behind a wife and child. He was the IT Director at one of my client's and I spoke with him daily. We'd never met in person, so the only way I really knew him was as …

From John Montgomery comes word that Microsoft's Popfly project has been cancelled. I was bullish on Popfly, predicting that it would become the power-user's entrance to Silverlight.

I have had a history of wishful thinking about "restoring the bridge between power users and programmers." I think Microsoft's Powershell is incredible …

I love my original Kindle. But the Achilles Heel of the Kindle has always been technical publications. The original Kindle does not have the screen real estate and formatting engine to properly deal with equations, graphs, and, most importantly for programmers, source code. Although it is possible to view some …

Apropos my recent discovery of camera heading in iPhone metadata comes word of a petition for Apple to create functions that would allow Augmented Reality development on the iPhone:

http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/07/02/open-letter-to-apple-let-us-augment-reality-with-the-iphone/

Augmented Reality are applications that combine computer-generated imagery (or text) with imagery generated from …

Further to last night's post and based on some carefully aligned photos, I am a little disappointed to conclude that the EXIF value GPSDirectionRef that the iPhone 3Gs inserts is (only) the camera's magnetic heading expressed as a rational number and not (as I'd hoped) the camera's 3D orientation in …

On a hunch I checked the EXIF data attached to my first photos from my new iPhone. The intriguing news is that it has values such as:

GPSImageDirection : 2535/383
GPSImageDirectionRef: T

The GpsImageDirectionRef = "T" appears to be a constant.(Update: signifies True and not Magnetic north.)

Pointing the camera …

Driven by the mocking of a colleague for never having done the stupid gruntwork of rewriting my old DasBlog-based permalinks, I stole Jon Udell's python code and ran it over the 8+ year history of Knowing.net. I think it mostly worked, although internal links between posts remain broken, since …

CompuServe Classic is shutting down. I had no idea they were still extant. I wonder if the CLMFORUM and AIEXPERT message boards are archived...

Coincidentally, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to become Product Review Editor at Computer Language and AI Expert …

David Beazley's Python Essential Reference, 4e

Jason Venner's Pro Hadoop

Amateur astrophotographers recorded more than 1TB of data in the creation of this high-res image of the surface of the moon. Pretty.