In Bigger News: FCC Opens White Space & Frees iPhone

I was always baffled by Apple exclusively giving the iPhone to AT&T. It’s not in Apple’s DNA to tie the customer experience of their products to someone else. Exclusively or otherwise. Multi-year or otherwise. Apple’s built their reputation on owning and controlling the entire stack; OS, applications, hardware. Hell, Apple’s never been crazy about having …

Decision 2008, and My Vote Goes to…

Attention, St. Anthony Villagers, your sample ballots are here (Hennepin | Ramsey) My votes; Presidential & Vice Presidential: Barak Obama & Joe Biden U.S. Senator: Dean Barkley U.S. Representative District 5: Keith Ellison U.S. State Representative District 54a: Mindy Greiling Constitutional Amendment: Clean Water, Wildlife, Cultural Heritage and Natural Area: Yes. Overall, the decisions were …

How To Cache Highly Dynamic Data in Rails with Memcache – Part 1

There are a number of ways increase Ruby on Rails performance through caching. Caching works because things don’t change….or don’t change frequently. In Cullect, almost everything is dynamic, even Cullect’s HTML presentation format has 3 different states depending on access privileges and there are 8 other presentation formats available. The standard page, action, and fragment …

Information as Milk or Wine?

I’ve been thinking about information – ‘news’ if you will – quite a bit lately – in the context of other things we ‘consume’ – beverages. Milk   Wine Kids drink it   Adults drink it Paired with cookies   Paired with dinner Expires/Smells funny   “Gets better with age” Homogenized   Vintage Price varies …

Un-Plumb

We’ve been introduced to a number of crazy characters this election season; Joe Sixpack, Hockey Mom, Senator Government, and Joe the Plumber. Signs of Jumping the Shark #18: “Introduction of new characters to revive interest, particularly young, cute children who are clearly intended to replace regulars who once were but have grown up.” “In the …