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Dating Design Patterns is the result of years of work—long ago, and far away. Suppressed for years because of the potential catastrophic harm to technological and economic advancement if the entire scientific community were out salsa dancing every night, it's finally available. The original patterns were dating design patterns. For the ultimate complex system needing a set of reusable solutions. For the ultimate scientific guide to spectacular dating interfaces.

With Dating Design Patterns, in either a container-managed or independent architecture, you can implement flexible, elegant, reusable, sneaky, and successful approaches to dating.

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In his annual State of the Union address, Mr Bush called on Congress to exercise spending restraint and promised to freeze increases in non-defence spending and limit the overall budget increase to 4% annually.

Excuse me while I vomit…

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A FOAF search engine.

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Note to self: listen Sunday 1/25, 9-11pm.

Today I received an email inquiry regarding a comment I had posted on Andrew Grumet's weblog. Since I thought the content of my response might be of interest to Andrew, I cc'ed him in my reply. (In retrospect, it was pretty a pretty simple question Andrew probably understood perfectly well; but I should try not to undermine the point of this post because of facts.)

Naturally, I thought the right place for my reply was not a private email message but the comments section of Andrew's blog (or on my blog linked from Andrew's with something akin to TrackBack). So that's why I think a useful feature will be a simple way to "Bcc your blog" when you are writing an email. This is especially useful when the blog becomes a central organizing tool, but is probably even practical when blog contain only occassional whimsy.

How to do this securely is another question, but as a decent last resort, you could just queue up emails to a secret blog address and ask the blog author to approve/edit/categorize them at his next visit to his own blog.

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Full text search. Coming soon to frassle.

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Hilarious! This guy writes great stuff!

Rex: r u on earth?

Hl4vot: no, still on mars.

Rex: whoah. No lag on the line.

Hl4vot:

Rex: shit - you guys got that portal working?

Hl4vot: yeah - pretty cool eh. All the earth content we want, none of the nasty time delays.

Rex: heh

Hl4vot: it was really screwing up our Tivos.

A wonderful Thursday at Berkman today. The meeting was long and packed: not only were the attendees more numerous than usual, but we had a special guest and some very cool presentations. Our guest was Hank Barry, former CEO of Napster and current partner at San Francisco VC firm Hummer Winblad. In contrast to what I've recently been reading about VCs, Hank was affable and had a personality. He also paid for dinner for our entire 17-strong group. Noticing that he was leaving early, I got up to introduce myself and thank him for the check. He said something along the lines of "what good is it being a VC if I can't buy dinner?"

A large chunk of the meeting was taken by Jay McCarthy, who demoed his blogging style. Let me tell you, it is not for the weak. Jay produces a digest of over 1000 blogs, reading 2000-3000 posts every day. I think this style is somewhat psychotic, but he is producing something cool and useful and some of his quirks are endearing.

Dave didn't talk a whole lot, which is unusual, but he did demo his work on Channel Dean. Dave and others got a bit excited when Andrew mentioned the Amazon-style recommendations he and I have been working on based on Share Your OPML. To be fair, Andrew is doing most of the work; all I did was give him a vague idea and some pseudocode. I'd love to help with the SQL and web interface but alas, collaboration is difficult.

I think that Dave showed a hint of disappointment when Hank explained that he was basically interested in making money from blogs (or at least in understanding if there was money to be made there), because Dave abruptly ended a conversation that several people were about to roll with. However I understand any potential apprehension against VCs or the like in a field that has so far been largely untainted by money-grubbing and built from the passion and toil of genuinely interested people.

Finally, dinner was great fun. Rick Heller tried to talk with me about politics, but I think I let him down as I am rather poorly informed and unwilling to take firm positions on political matters. (Aside from hating Bush, of course; I'd have to be a real dolt to miss that meme or the horrendous acts of misgovernment that reasonably prompted it.) I gave Critt and Steve a short demo of frassle over Steve's LifeBook and GPRS net link. The demo not only made me glad I had used almost no graphics but also netted me a valuable dose of encouragement as I continue to work on frassle.