Pitos Blog

Check out Premature Evaluation?: Obama Wins Nobel Prize(from The BRAD BLOG:

“The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.” (from: Premature Evaluation?: Obama Wins Nobel Prize)

I say, hooray for us! Hooray for the USA. Why can’t we just be proud that our president was given this honor, instead of people taking potshots at him for ‘not having accomplished anything’ yet?

It’s silly. There have been many Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to encourage and support an effort, even before it has yielded results. I suppose if we look back at press coverage back then we’d see the same nonsense.

Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe captures it best for me:

“The Nobel Committee clearly was awarding Obama the Nobel for hauling America out of the pits of unilateralism. What had to come first was America fulfilling a major portion of the dream of another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Martin Luther King Jr. For that, America is worthy. The Nobel Committee in fact might have made a mistake. It said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.

It would have been better off proclaiming, “The Norwegian Nobel Committee awards its 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the United States of America for having the courage to come full circle 233 years after a slave-owning nation declared independence by saying all men are created equal” ” (from The Boston Globe)

Well said.

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Editors Note (that’s me, Pito): I’ve decided to change the name of this thing to “Decentralized Data Discovery - DDD” because I learned from more than one person that calling it Data RSS was misleading and confusing. I need to go back and update the papers and blog posts.

I’ve just finished writing part 3 of my series about DataRSS. Part 1 gives the background and justification for the concept, and Part 2 worked through a semi-believable scenario where having DataRSS would be a good thing.

In part 3 I try to get into more technical detail. I hope that you take the time to read it because that’s the only way I will get technical feedback on it. The reason I wrote the first two parts is that realistically I expect to lose 99.5% of you guys once you open up part 3. That’s why this post is labeled [GEEKY]. Here’s some of what I cover in part 3:

“Data RSS is a simple protocol and a simple data format. It can be implemented in any programming language.

Importantly, the Publisher and Accessor software need not know (can not know) what language the counterparties software is written in. ” (from DataRSS: Technical Overview)

and

“DataRSS is used between two parties, the Publisher, who ‘owns’ some data, and the Accessor, who wants to use that data. Publisher and Accessor are organizations with people in them. The Publisher wants to offer a technical means to allow an application program simple and standardized access to their data.

The Accessor wants to write an application program that accesses and does something useful with data coming from any Publisher. Accessor and Publisher don’t know each other. ” (from DataRSS: Technical Overview)

Delicious isn’t it? One final tease, I also have worked out some detailed examples of how DataRSS might work with the New York Times API, with the Sunlight Foundation API and with the Follow The Money API.

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I read in Personal Technology (Wall Street Journal) today that Foxmarks, the handy, free utility that synchronizes my Firefox bookmarks between several computers, now works with Safari as well. Great. I tested it, and it does work just fine.

This blog post is being written with another handy firefox plugin called Scribefire, which lets me post to my blog directly from a page in the browser. It works really nicely and I use it frequently. I recommend it. Unfortunately they don’t support Safari yet. So I am staying with Firefox, for now.

By the way, why am I even considering deserting Firefox? Overall it works very well and the new 3.1 Beta 2 seems very fast. There are two areas of discontent:

1. On Mac, the Print dialog box is non-standard, and who cares about that, except that the standard Print dialog on Leopard displays a very useful preview of the pages being printed, something that I frequently miss in Firefox.
2. For unknown mysterious reasons (I suspect Flash but I don’t know) Firefox will go into a frenzy and eat up all my mac’s compute cycles. It’s annoying when I see my computer get slow, I have to check activity monitor and find Firefox the culprit. I am forced to exit Firefox to get my speed back.

firefox, foxmarks, wsj, flash, safari

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Hey! If you live in Boston or Cambridge, and you like music, especially Folk music, then you’ve probably been to Club Passim in Cambridge - Harvard Square actually. It’s a lot more than a ‘Coffee House’ - it’s an institution where many of your favorite 70s acts got their start.

Passim is a tiny little folk music club in Harvard Square that’s existed years and years and where musicians like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan played at the very beginning of their careers. I am friends with various people at Passim, over the year we have attended lots of shows there.

We have been members for years and more recently even made some donations to them. For me, the place has a wonderful sense of history, not to mention that we are  big folk music fans. Passim has hit hard times over the years on several occasions, and this year’s economic downturn (did you read about it by any chance?) has hit them hard again.

I know I would hate to see Passim go under or have to curtail it’s programs even more than they are already doing. They have a fairly tiny budget as it is, and they do a lot for music in the area as well as nation wide.We go often and it’s amazing a place like that lives hand-to-mouth. You wouldn’t believe it.

How about it, lighten up your 2008 tax return a little and make a contribution. You will feel happy and Joan Baez will personally call you to say thanks. Whoops. There I go again. No she won’t call you. But I will

I’ve made a page where you can contribute if you are so moved. Click and Give!

Also you can send a check, made out to Passim Center to:
Passim Folk Music & Cultural Center
26 Church Street, Suite 300
Cambridge, MA 02138

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Jason Calcanis has stopped blogging and instead is doing an email only mailing list (yes, how 1999 of him.) I had heard about it but recently got me a copy of his most recent missive.

Interesting, opinionated, practical and easy to read. I recommend it!

I’ve never met Jason but I’ve been in his presence as he forcefully (and humorously) debated this or that luminary. Feisty guy, experienced and articulate. Most recently he founded Mahalo.com, which was well covered when it first launched but now I don’t hear that much about it.

Here’s where you sign up for Jason’s mailing list.

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Check out these 10 Commandments for Facebook Applications. They are pretty good commandments for software in general. I especially like:

“Make it simple. Users DO NOT read.”, from FaceReviews

Yup, I have seen that time and time again with BlogBridge. Hard to believe. But true. Of course there’s the 1 in a thousand who ask for more documentation, but they are very rare.

[if you are interested in Facebook, take a look at BlogBridge's Guide of Facebook blogs and feeds]

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Have you noticed? How frequently I’ve been posting?

I am using WordPress’s ‘post in the future’ feature so in one sitting I can rattle off 6 or 7 posts  and schedule them for publication in the coming days.

Very efficient

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This is a question I hear all the time. I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to the topic. Check out “The difference between a web site and a blog” on Squidoo.

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I just wrote a few brief tutorials that I thought might be of interest to you and, well, everyone. Please check them out - if you find them useful, please pass them on to your friends!

• “What’s the difference between a blog and a web site?” - That perennial question that people first discovering blogging often ask. My short and sweet explanation.
• “How to put a blog on my web site” - A brief explanation why anyone with a web site might want to consider adding a blog to it, and how you might do that
• “What are the best news blogs” - How do you go about finding the best blogs about current events?

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