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Category Archives: Thoughts

DecentralizedAddresses Chrome extension

After much discussion around the @replies subject I started thinking about a system that could automatically resolve social network addresses no matter where they appear. I then decided to try the approach of writing a Chrome extension that could do the job.
The DecentralizedAddresses extension is in development and is available on github for anyone to [...]

More on the @replies subject

I just stumbled on a Buzz by DeWitt Clinton about a possible solution to the use of decentralized @replies. From the Buzz:
I want to throw some ideas out there about how it can someday be done in a decentralized fashion using open technologies such as WebFinger, Portable Contacts, AtomPub, and Activity Streams. (And maybe Salmon. [...]

On the use of the @ syntax by Google Buzz

Just a quick note to archive the way Google Buzz is using the @ syntax. From “Google Buzz Tips“:
If you’d like to send a private message to someone, type @ and use Gmail’s autocomplete feature to find the email address of your contact.
In practice, you address other users by typing an @ symbol followed by [...]

For free? Why?

Great post by Pedro Pinheiro about making a business around art. I particularly like this excerpt:
For free? Why?
Because the money to be earned is not on things that can be copied. That’s a lost battle. If you’re a musician, you can make more money on concerts and events. If you’re a photographer, more money [...]

Re: Twitter URLs: Are Microformats The Answer To A Real Problem?

Stowe Boyd writes about a possible approach to address different user profiles on different clients. After exposing a possible microformats based approach he talks about a microsyntax solution to the problem:
A microsyntax approach would be something visible in the stream, like including a prefix in front of an @mention or retweet to denote original or [...]

Cliqset FeedProxy and the ActivityStreams format

Great news:
the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.
Read the original: The [...]

Mirror Worlds

A comment to my recent post “Streamnets” caught my attention to dig further because it mentioned the concept of Mirror Worlds, a written work by David Gelernter. It’s a fascinating book, quite ahead of its time — it was published back in 1993.
According to Gelernter, “[Mirror Worlds] are software models of some chunk of reality, [...]

Streamnets

IDEA
The Internet is the infrastructure needed to interconnect machines to one another and guarantee that they’re online most of the time. According to Wikipedia, the Internet “is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, [...]

To REST or not to REST

Yesterday @esjewett pointed out that tarpipe’s API 2.0 might not be considered RESTful. Quoting the previously written article “A RESTful ESME API“:
REST is often seen as an alternative to RPC APIs, or “Remote Procedure Call” APIs. At root, the difference as described by Wikipedia is that RPC is about telling an application to do something [...]

Performance oriented FFT

Worth checking out. Quoting the FFTW Home Page:
FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e. the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST). We believe that FFTW, which is [...]