A company's developed a hamster ball in which you run while wearing VR goggles. My initial reaction was scorn, but adopting Mom's best "who cares what others think of how you look?" attitude, I have to admit it's kind of... well, I can't bring myself to say that I …

Okay, this is pure gloating, but I get paid (or, at least, can justify time spent on...) to think about things as diverse as quantum computing, Ruby IDEs, and trustworthy Trackbacks. Even better, when Tina heard the humpback songstream she invoked a 'We live in Hawaii' break and we went …

I'm arranging an interview with a VP at D-Wave, the quantum computer company. Any topics I should be sure to cover?

My long-time favorite Java editor JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA has added a Ruby plug-in that supports Rails. My initial reaction is that the vitally important quality of code completion is well below that of both Ruby In Steel and Komodo. Don't be too excited by the presence of the Analyze and …

Hmm... If a site delays its association with a spammer until after it's been insinuated as a "friend" within target blogs, it can at a ripe moment trigger a slew of spammy FOAFbacks. Thoughts?

Sexy cetacean sounds... oh yeah, baby ...

Showing how clueless aggregator sites are, no one seems to be properly freaking out about the claims of D-Wave to be demoing a 16-qubit quantum computer with plans for a 1K-qubit computer within a year. CNet story here, straight link to company here.

The shocking thing about this is that …

An "official replica" of the movie bird was stolen from a restaurant in San Francisco.

The reward would be higher, but with a dollar of this, you can buy ten dollars of talk.

Dmitry Shecthman, who knows more about OpenID than I do, doesn't get why OpenID is important to making FOAF the validation route for Trackback. Here's my thinking, which has a 90% chance of being wrong (based on historical averages):

FOAF looks like this:

<foaf:Person>  <foaf:name>Leigh Dodds</foaf …

Is a limited recursion through a FOAF graph based on OpenID the solution to Trackback? If that sentence isn't understandable, don't worry about it, but if it parses, continue...

The big problem, of course, is the initial trackback from those outside the limits of the graph. In such a case …