Blog Profile / Jon Udell
| URL : | http://blog.jonudell.net | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Programming / Web Development | |
| Posts on Regator: | 395 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.6 | |
| Archived Since: | June 30, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Upcoming is downgoing, Elm City is ongoing
Here’s Andy Baio’s farewell to Upcoming, a service I’ve been involved with for a decade. In a March 2005 blog post I wrote about what I hoped Upcoming would become, in my town and elsewhere, and offered some suggestions to help it along. One was a request for an API which Upcoming then lacked. Andy [...]
Community calendar workshop next week in Newport News
My next community calendar workshop will be at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, on Tuesday April 23 at 6PM. It’s for groups and organizations in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, including Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. If you’re someone there who’d like help change [...]
Walled fields of knowledge
My dad died of congestive heart failure in 2009. The last weeks of his life weren’t what they could have been had we known enough to get him into hospice care. But we didn’t know, and I’ve felt ashamed about that. If we had it to do over again things would be very different. We’d [...]
Networks of first-class peers
Last month ago I wrote a column for Wired.com, Rebooting web comments, that attracted some unsavory feedback. Had the flamers read beyond the second paragraph they might have seen that I wasn’t insisting everyone must use verifiable identities online. But they didn’t. So I wrote another column last week, Own your words, to clarify my [...]
Indie theaters and open data
Movie showtimes are easy to find. Just type something like “movies keene nh” into Google or Bing and they pop right up: You might assume that this is open data, available for anyone to use. Not so, as web developers interested in such data periodically discover. For example, from MetaFilter: Q: We initially thought it [...]
Let’s think about what we’re doing right
In The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker compiles massive amounts of evidence to show that we are becoming a more civilized species. The principal yardstick he uses to measure progress is the steady decline, over millenia, in per-capita rates of homicide. But he also measures declines in violence directed [...]
Flash Fill: Text wrangling for non-programmers
As Elm City hubs grow, with respect to both raw numbers of events and numbers of categories, unfiltered lists of categories become unwieldy. So I’m noodling on ways to focus initially on a filtered list of “important” categories. The scare quotes indicate that I’m not yet sure how to empower curators to say what’s important. [...]
Homicide rates in context
In U.N. Maps Show U.S. High in Gun Ownership, Low in Homicides, A.W.R. Hawkins presents the following two maps: From these he concludes: Notice the correlation between high gun ownership and lower homicide rates. … As these maps show, “more guns, less crime” is true internationally as well as domestically. The second map depicts homicides [...]
Scientific storytelling
It’s said that every social scientist must, at some point, write a sentence that begins: “Man is the only animal that _____.” Some popular completions of the sentence have been: uses tools, uses language, laughs, contemplates death, commits atrocities. In his new book Jonathan Gottschall offers another variation on the theme: storytelling is the defining [...]
Check your assumptions
In Computational thinking and life skills I asked myself how to generalize this touchstone principle from computer science: Focus on understanding why the program is doing what it’s doing, rather than why it’s not doing what you wanted it to. And here’s what I came up with: Focus on understanding why your spouse or child [...]
Why Johnny can’t syndicate (and what we can do about it)
Video of my recent talk at the University of Michigan is forthcoming. But since it’s the sort of talk I had to write in advance, I’ve posted the text and slides here. I managed to remain at the lectern for the duration, unlike my predecessor.
Friday talk at the University of Michigan
At noon on Friday I’ll be giving a talk in Ann Arbor, sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information. The previous speaker on the school’s calendar is Richard Stallman, who is scheduled for Thursday. Apparently we will both be talking about open source software and open data.
How John McPhee structures stories from his notes
John McPhee has lately been reflecting, in a series of New Yorker articles, on his long career as one of the world’s leading writers of nonfiction. In this week’s issue we learn that one of my favorite of his books, The Pine Barrens, was born on a picnic table. It was there that he lay [...]
Heating as a service: Xylogen points the way
I love a good story about a product becoming a service. Ray Anderson did it with floor covering, ZipCar does it with cars, Amazon and Microsoft are doing it with IT infrastructure. It’s a sweet model. Service providers own equipment and operations, earn recurring revenue, and are motivated to continuously improve efficiency and customer satisfaction. [...]
Calendar feeds are a best practice for bookstores
Bookstores, for all the obvious reasons, are hanging on by their fingernails. What brings people into bookstores nowadays? Some of us still buy and read actual printed books. Some of us enjoy browsing the shelves and tables. Some of us value interaction with friendly and knowledgeable booksellers. And some of us like to see and [...]
Harvard vs MIT
As I build out calendar hubs in various cities I’ve been keeping track of major institutions that do, or don’t, provide iCalendar feeds along with their web calendars. At one point I made a scorecard which shows that iCalendar support is unpredictably spotty across a range of cities and institutions. One of the surprises was [...]
Computational thinking and life skills
Surfing the Roku box last night I landed on the MIT Open CourseWare channel and sampled Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. In one lecture Prof. John Guttag offers this timely reminder: Focus on understanding why the program is doing what it’s doing, rather than why it’s not doing what you wanted it to. It [...]
Why I subscribe to the Ann Arbor Chronicle
The Ann Arbor city council met, most recently, on October 15. Why didn’t the Ann Arbor Chronicle’s story on the meeting land until October 24? It took a while for Dave Askins to compile his typically epic 15000-word blog post. It’s an astonishingly detailed record of the meeting — more and better coverage, perhaps, than [...]
The personal cloud series
In today’s column on wired.com I discuss ways to manage overlapping personal, team, and public calendars. It’s the 21st in the series, here’s the whole list: The future’s here, but unevenly distributed 2012-03-02 Kynetx pioneers the Live Web 2012-03-09 What’s in a name? In the cloud, a data service! 2012-03-16 The translucent cloud: balancing privacy [...]
A great disturbance in the force
If you’re a coach, parent, or student involved with high school sports, you may know of a site called HighSchoolSports.net. It’s a service used by many schools, including the ones in my town, to manage information about teams and schedules. For the elmcity project it’s been a stalwart provider of iCalendar feeds, enabling me to [...]