Hal Stern's thoughts on sports, work, technology, food, and life in New Jersey
From the category archives:
Aside from all of the unsettled feelings created by the Facebook Places privacy un-settings, there was other news coming out of the little “f” today: Facebook acquired Hot Potato. I’ve been a fan since Justin Shaffer first described the idea to me in the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. Anything that sounds good [...]
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About four years ago, I put a low-powered cell repeater into our basement. We live in a stucco house, which is an effective Faraday cage; I mostly work in the basement under a tile floor with very little direct outside exposure (yes, this explains oh so much). The cell repeater did its job [...]
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Disclaimers: I’ve written three technical books.
Background: Tim O’Reilly, via David Farber’s IP mailing list, pointed at Danny Sullivan’s posting that shed some much-needed light on the the arguments for regulating search. Sullivan’s object of satire was an op-ed piece suggesting that Google’s search algorithms be subject to scrutiny and therefore regulation. [...]
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I’m busy working on my tutorial for WordCamp Chicago that’s now tentatively titled “Parsing Strange” – as in “parsing strange on the way to HTML content”.
I’m basically picking apart the way WordPress takes a URL and turns it into an SQL query for the underlying MySQL database, getting into how and where taxonomies turn into [...]
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This morning I found out that my senior thesis advisor, Arthur Lo, passed away nearly two months ago. This came on the heels of a Facebook chat with a good friend who similarly found out her favorite professor and advisor died recently. Perhaps it’s a sign that we’re in that sandwich phase of adulthood, [...]
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Seems like at least once a week one of my (numerous) Facebook friends joins a group “protesting” that Facebook will start charging some nominal fee per month.
Facebook isn’t going to start charging users a monthly fee. They are (for now) advertising supported, and user fees would radically reduce the user population, which further [...]
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Along with co-authors Brad Williams and David Damstra, I’m making the trip to the Second City. Brad is presenting WordPress Security bright and early on Saturday, June 5, and I get the hangover slot (9:00am Sunday morning) to talk about how WordPress takes a URL and decides what content to display. My talk, [...]
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I’ll admit to a certain vanity with Facebook: I’ve been trying to build an audience for my blog, using a Facebook page to import blog entries and inviting just about everyone who’s a friend to follow the page. Facebook very nicely provides “insights” (analytics) on interactions with the page – number of comments, ratings, [...]
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Had breakfast with a friend this morning who commented on the state of the economy in and around our neighborhood by saying that “there are many free agents available.” He wasn’t talking about the Yankees, Mets, Devils, Rangers, Knicks, Nets, or any other sports franchise that funnels ticket revenue into the hands of free [...]
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I’m participating in a technology roundtable for one of the services industries this week; it’s a closed-door session with some pretty heated discussion. The economy is definitely hurting this segment and one of the recurrent themes is that personal (low volume) customers are going to be the growth engine, not business (high volume) [...]
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