Author: Jake

Hot on the heels of last week’s TED video on scary algorithms comes this piece from ReadWriteWeb (@rww) on Google Place’s new recommendations algorithm. Google’s New Traveler Recommendations Point Towards an Age of Algorithms As Marshall (@marshallk) notes, recommending places you might like based on what people similar to you like sounds pretty simplistic, but… Read More

So, this is a bit scary. Interestingly, he mentions the no-button elevators I encountered at the Oracle office in Portland, which apparently use a bin-packing algorithm to determine how to distribute elevator cars to floors. How algorithms shape our world

Earlier this week, I received a Chromebook, specifically the Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook, courtesy of Google for attending their IO developer conference in May. Of the goodies Google passed out this year, a Galaxy Tab 10.1, a Verizon MiFi and a Chromebook, I was least excited about the Chromebook, but after using it pretty… Read More

This post on TechCrunch caught my attention initially because of the obvious factor. Big Surprise! The iPad Trumps Android Tablets At The Office Further down, there’s an interesting passage: At the same time, my gut tells me this iPad craze has a lot to do with status. Back before the iPhone, business men carried around… Read More

While lulzing at Matthew Inman’s, a.k.a. the Oatmeal (@oatmeal), latest state of the web comic, I tripped over a statistic: Over 60% of Facebook’s traffic comes from people playing games and the average social gamer is a 43 year old woman. I don’t know exactly where this statistic originated, but it’s on the intertubes so… Read More

Doghouse Diaries (@willrayraf) is quite funny. I highly recommend you subscribe.

3D printing is one of those topics that has been floating around for a while, not quite grabbing my attention. It sounds fine, but the name makes it seems like paper models with no real value. Well Chet (@oraclenerd) got my attention with this excerpt from a National Geographic Channel program. Now this is cool stuff.… Read More

Thinking back to my college days, I fondly recall late nights spent at Tower Records, scouting new music, movies or comics, trips to Blockbuster to rent movies and games for marathon lost weekends, trips to Borders to get deals on books, read magazines and drink coffee, and epic browsing sessions at Circuit City, ogling gear and software… Read More

As a newish parent, I’ve come up against something that has baffled other parents forever: children don’t sleep. It doesn’t make logical sense, especially that my daughter cries more when she’s tired, rather than, you know, going to sleep. I hear it gets worse later, as children refuse to settle down for sleep when their… Read More

I love the internet of things because it opens up a crazy, Jetsons-esque world where technology helps you every day and actually makes life easier, rather than harder. Although, I’m really kidding myself on that latter point, but a guy can dream, right? So, check out this infographic from Cisco on the internet of things… Read More

While trying to get a Spotify invite today, I revisited Klout (@klout), which calculates a reputation score based on your social networks. If you read here, you might remember I’ve been waiting for someone to reputation and influence scoring for a few years. In fact, back in 2009 before we joined WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter) development, I wrote… Read More

While many of us tend to get caught up with Android and iOS device discussions, it’s very easy to forget that smartphones aren’t ubiquitous. In fact, the Pew Research Center just reported this week that 35% of American adults owns a smartphone, definitely a rapidly rising statistic, but still probably not as high as you… Read More

So, this is pretty neat. Loud Crow Interactive (@loudcrowinc) creates interactive versions of children’s books for tablets. This is like the pop-up book of the future. The video shows an iPad, but they just released an Android version. As a developer, I wonder if they’re doing native development or HTML5. We’ve seen HTML5 do realistic… Read More

Apps really don’t matter, but those who insist they do like to point to the dearth of so-called tablet apps designed to run on Honeycomb. One of the first things I noticed about Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom was that unlike iPhone apps running on the iPad, Android apps look just fine in large screen format,… Read More

Ostensibly, technology is supposed to improve our lives by making them easier. More frequently though, that’s just not the case anymore. Here’s a quick story. My wife’s old Canon point-and-shoot died last weekend. The button toggling between still and video shots wasn’t working, so we took this as an opportunity to buy a wifi camera,… Read More

After more than a year away, I may have to go back to iOS. After upgrading my EVO to Cyanogenmod 7 (@cyanogen), the Gingerbread release, I’ve been having numerous issues, the biggest of which is that I’m not receiving all my calls, which kinda defeats the phone’s purpose. I know, shades of AT&T iPhone complaints.… Read More

When I had lunch with Jason Grigsby (@grigs) a month or so ago, he mentioned an interesting point about Google’s competing browser problem, i.e. Chrome vs. Android. I’m glad he finally had time to post his thoughts because this is an interesting side plot to the more high profile company vs. company matchups. We Need… Read More

Wow, what a slow news week (month?), or maybe I’m just jaded beyond belief at what qualifies as interesting anymore. Might be the latter. I skim hundreds of posts most days, some days thousands, e.g. if I’ve been away or after a busy few days of development work, and lately, 99% of what I see… Read More

Ars has a long, but definitely worthwhile read addressing the recent kerfuffle about Mozilla’s new Firefox product lifecycle and enterprise readiness. Firefox update policy: the enterprise is wrong, not Mozilla For its part, Mozilla seems committed to matching the pace of innovation set by Google Chrome, even at the risk of angering its enterprise deployments.… Read More

Rich (@rmanalan) pointed me to this interesting walk through of the Mix (@oraclemix) Suggest-a-Session voting for this year’s OpenWorld. Data Science Fun with the OOW Mix Session Voting Data | Structured Data Greg Rahn (@gregrahn) does a nice job visualizing the data and pointing out some anomalies and the importance of having a social network to mobilize… Read More