Gadgetopia

You may have heard of THOMAS, a service of the Library of Congress that provides an up-to-date online database of all of the legislative activities of your congressfolk. You may also have noticed that THOMAS was apparently created by consulting a team of usability experts on the best way to ...

Law of Demeter: I just finished reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas. I didn't think the book was all that good (see below), but it did talk about a really great principle that I've seen articlulated numerous times before. The Law of Demeter (LoD) is a simple style rule ...

University of Florida scientist, Thomas DeMarse, has grown a "computer" in a petri dish from living cells taken from a rat's brain, and has successfully interfaced the brain with a computer. The brain has learned to fly a flight simulator on the computer. "We're interested in studying how brains compute," ...

Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators": You know time management is in short supply when O'Reilly is writing books about it. Thomas A. Limoncelli's book Time Management for System Administrators is perhaps the first example I've seen of a book which advocates a GTD-style workflow with some modifications ...

Prosecutors: Nurse sent 'sick day' e-mail from husband's account after she killed him: Be careful that you address those emails correctly, especially after you've killed someone. The e-mail at issue, described to jurors by a state investigator, was sent from a Blackberry belonging to McGuire's husband, William, the morning after ...

Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft): Here's a great rant from Spolsky about what makes good design and how hard it is to get there. He has a great bit in the middle about the conflicts present when deciding whether or not to put a mute button on a ...

Ultra AP and Ultra 3T Concept/Experimental Armored Vehicles for U.S. Infantry: The venerable Humvee is due for replacement, perhaps with this vehicle being designed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute: The 3-ton ULTRA 3T will unite an array of advanced technologies in a single automotive package. Some of these technologies, ...

Apparently Apple isn't just taking people to court, they're also being sued by an unhappy iTMS customer. It seems Thomas Slattery is being "forced" to buy an iPod if he wants to use the songs he purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Last I checked you could listen to any ...

The Web, According to Google: An interesting look at what effect Google has on information retrieval. I will admit to checking Google and little else at times. "Were Google less influential that probably wouldn't matter. But as Americans, especially young ones, come to regard the leading search site as the ...

A Plan for Spam: In the last few months, we've talked about Bayesian-this and Bayesian-that quite a bit, but what does "Bayesian" mean? Here's a great article that explains the concepts behind Bayesian filtering for spam. It's long, but a worthwhile read. The Achilles heel of the spammers is their ...