Rambles at starchamber.com

Because I am a registered user of Keyhole’s “Ultimate Interface to the Planet”, also known as Keyhole 2 LT, I was invited to beta test the upcoming release of Google Earth (Keyhole was purchased by Google last October). Damn, is it good! The new Google Earth is pretty much like the old Keyhole application, but [...]

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My brother-in-law sent me this one today: PostSecret. The idea is to send an unsigned postcard with a secret on it. It’s an art project, and the cards the artist has put up so far are impressive little pieces of art in themselves. I have to guess he’s filtering out all the boring postcards on [...]

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The MATLAB contest got Slashdotted over the weekend. The Slashdot thread linked to our contest pages but also to my paper hosted here on this site: In Praise of Tweaking: A Wiki-like Programming Contest. So we’ll see how much extra traffic I get to my site as a result.

I have always thought that the contest [...]

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Here’s a stranger-than-fiction story about music lost and regained. Actually, it’s more like nonfiction-inspired-by-improbable-fiction. If you saw Blade Runner, you may remember how Deckard zoomed around a digital photograph with his computer until he located a tiny but critical detail with a ridiculous level of magnification. A similar scene occurs in the funny but less [...]

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Don’t Go is an anti-travel humor site. I kind of like their chirpy anti-rah-rah spirit (also, I kind of like saying “anti-rah-rah”). Anyway, I wouldn’t have heard of them, except for they asked permission to re-post one of my pieces, an anti-travel screed called Why Travel Sucks. You can find it here on the Don’t [...]

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Roughly every six months we run a MATLAB programming contest in which contestants are encouraged to steal the code that other people are submitting. Naturally, most people steal code from whoever’s leading, which makes the code churn and improve very quickly. This version of the contest, number ten, involves giving instructions to ants so [...]

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Oh boy, have I found a great way to waste your time. If I know you well (and I think I do), you’re going to blow ten minutes easy writing pangram haikus. What’s a pangram? I’ll let font designer Mark Simonson answer that one: “A pangram is a sentence or phrase which contains every letter [...]

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According to Plasticbag’s Tom Coates, “trackback is dead.” I’m inclined to agree. If you’re not familiar with the concept, trackbacks are a sort of blog-to-blog automatic signalling system. If I mention your blog in mine, then your blog gets notified automatically and records that fact in a visible record. The result is that your downstream [...]

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Lynn has a fascinating travelogue about her summer vacation in Siberia. It’s got some dandy pictures, too. Like every other Russian travel story I’ve read, nothing goes exactly as expected. I always end up asking the question, what in the world must it be like to live there?

Your special bonus reading comprehension question is: What [...]

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Google google google, all day, every day. It’s making the people at Yahoo crazy. But they’ve got their own buzz machine going over at Yahoo, and some good work is starting to come to light. This kind of thing makes you love capitalism-inspired competition. The latest news is Yahoo’s Video Search tool. For a long [...]

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