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Annotating DNS with personal information

I’ve always had a fondness for solutions that scribble in the margins of the Domain Name System. Today I saw a new one at the DEMO conference: Telnic, a service you can use to store basic personal or business information directly in the DNS. The service is associated with the .tel top-level domain. If you [...]

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08.09.2008 23:58:13 - Jon Udell

Hard link

21st century Yankee ingenuity

Serendipity brought me a copy of this article on Jock Gill’s vision of small-scale grass farming operations. He thinks they’ll be able to produce biomass fuel, in a sustainable and decentralized way, for local production of heat and power. We had a long talk about this, and related themes, which will appear in two upcoming [...]

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08.09.2008 07:22:01 - Jon Udell

Hard link

The World Bank’s web of data could be webbier

As Stefan Tilkov notes tearfully, the REST API for the World Bank data leaves something to be desired. The URI to fetch the list of countries looks like this: http://open.worldbank.org/rest.php?method=wb.countries.get In my review of the Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby book RESTful Web Services I summarized their best practices for making a service “look like the web”: Data [...]

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05.09.2008 14:12:40 - Jon Udell

Hard link

World Bank data now available through APIs

By way of David Stephenson I’ve learned that the World Bank now offers an API for several of its data sets on development, governance, and business conditions, plus a collection of photos. Here are the indicators you can explore, for many countries, going back to about 1960 (though the data are sparse in some cases): Agricultural land [...]

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05.09.2008 00:50:53 - Jon Udell

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Freebase, Wikipedia, Powerset

Athough I’ve explored Freebase in several ways, I hadn’t seen the way it is now integrated — along with Wikipedia — into the Powerset demo of natural language search. It’s quite eye-opening to see the answer to a deceptively simple query like Tim O’Reilly’s siblings. Assuming that a database goes to the trouble of actually knowing [...]

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03.09.2008 22:47:31 - Jon Udell

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Activating the web: One programming language or many?

Google’s newly-announced browser, which bakes in a JavaScript-specific virtual machine, reminds me of an earlier era in which the Netscape browser baked in support for the Java VM. It makes perfect sense for Google under the circumstances, but also serves as a reminder that language-specific runtimes aren’t the only game in town. From that perspective, [...]

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02.09.2008 18:31:33 - Jon Udell

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New England’s biomass-fueled home heating future, part 2

The essay I posted last winter about New England’s historic transition from oil-fired home heating to biomass-fired alternatives has been read consistently ever since. Here’s a Labor Day 2008 update. As is typical in New England homes, my 1870-era home isn’t conducive to space heating. Which makes you wonder why open plan wasn’t fashionable back then. [...]

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31.08.2008 17:10:44 - Jon Udell

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Trident: A workflow system for doing data-intensive science with reproducible results

Another of the many interesting stories coming out of Microsoft External Research these days is the one Roger Barga tells in this week’s installment of Perspectives. When Roger told me that Trident, the system he’s developing to automate scientific workflow, was inspired by Jim Gray, it was a déjà vu moment. Everywhere I turn, I [...]

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29.08.2008 16:13:41 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Specifying exceptions to recurring calendar events

Thanks to my calendar syndication project, I’ve gotten intimately familiar with how various calendar programs — including Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal — handle the entry of recurring events. They all make the task reasonably straightforward, but there’s one vexing problem. There isn’t a way to specify exceptions. My local YMCA, for example, is [...]

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28.08.2008 16:03:08 - Jon Udell

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The continuum of access styles in the emerging Microsoft cloud

SQL Server Data Services is a cloud-based data service that’s currently comparable to a combination of Amazon’s SimpleDB (for key/value storage) and S3 (for blobs). But as Soumitra Sengupta explains here, SSDS is indeed based on SQL Server and it aims to progressively open a wider channel to the capabilities of SQL Server and the [...]

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27.08.2008 13:43:31 - Jon Udell

Jon Udell

Annotating DNS with personal information

21st century Yankee ingenuity

The World Bank’s web of data could be webbier

World Bank data now available through APIs

Freebase, Wikipedia, Powerset

Activating the web: One programming language or many?

New England’s biomass-fueled home heating future, part 2

Trident: A workflow system for doing data-intensive science with reproducible results

Specifying exceptions to recurring calendar events

The continuum of access styles in the emerging Microsoft cloud

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