That's Annoying: HTTP Meta-Refresh In Feed Ads

I just glanced over at my RSS aggregator and was surprised to see a full-page Web ad for something I obviously wouldn't be interested in. I clicked the "back" button and saw the normal newspaper layout and a nondescript blogpost that had a Feedburner-supplied ad at the bottom.

Which, in …

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Apology: Difficulty Commenting

Several people have let me know that comments often fail to post / validate. I'm planning on updating to the latest das Blog in a few weeks, after I do some traveling. Until then, I cannot afford to turn off CAPTCHA and I know that not every comment fails. My suggestion …

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Content Aware Image Resizing: OMFG

This video of an image manipulation algorithm shown at SIGGRAPH is jaw-dropping. They calculate paths through an image that have low entropy and either delete or interpolate them, creating images that shrink or grow while not distorting the "interesting" elements. (via John Lam) Here's \<a href="http://www.faculty.idc …

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Lectures are Ineffective

I used to frequently attend, talk at, and help organize software development conferences. As a former magazine editor, I couldn't help but compare the "information bandwidth" (if not the ultimate efficacy) of lectures with magazine articles and books. I concluded that successful one-hour lectures provided about the information of an …

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BZ Media Among Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America

Congratulations to my friends (and employers) at BZ Media, which has made the cut for Inc. Magazine's "5,000 list," ranking the fastest-growing private companies in the US.

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C++0x to Incorporate Standard Threading Model

The working groups of the C++0x committee are working hard to complete a major new standard for C++ (there's a big meeting here in Kona in October). If you're not intimate with C++, you may be surprised that such an important language has not had a standard threading model …

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Tilera 64-core CPU: The Future Cometh

Looks like the only programming tools for Tilera's 64-Core CPU is a C compiler, but the day is fast approaching when we're going to start seeing more and more of these types of tools in the mainstream.

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Why Can't You Distribute The Social Graph?

I don't really follow the discussion about social networking (I guess I'm either a little too old or a little too antisocial to "get" it), but it seems to me that FOAF + OpenID is "ob hack." It seems to me that all that has to happen is that someone writes …

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DSL for the DLR?

(HOTEL_BLOCK_RESERVATION(HOTEL_ID (IATA_NODE MDW) (PHONE_NUMBER 708 563 0200) (HOTEL_NAME Courtyard by Marriot)) (DAY_BLOCK (DATE_NODE 08 31 07) (FLIGHT_BLOCK (PAIRING_NODE (PAIRI... etc...

"VisitorTests.parsesTheWholeThing(): Lex & Parse: 2765 ms. ReservationCountWalker 282 ms. to find 27327 reservations"

Man, if I could just get …

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Data Volumes Trumping Core Multiplication? Interesting Thought

Bill de h?ra makes an intriguing pitch that programming will be impacted by increasing data volumes more than by the transition to multi-/many-core. His basis is anecdotal -- we don't have the same metaphysical certainty that all of us will be dealing with much-larger datasets as we have the …

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