Londonist has an interview with Mark Smith, creator of the excellent travel site Seat 61. Didn’t know he used to be the station manager at Charing Cross.
Danny Ayers points out how you can use a CONSTRUCT query for large-scale inference.
Nova Spivack has proposed GRDDLR, a GRDDL transform repository to help scrape sites. I’m working on a few transforms for GRDDLR.
I’m absolutely in love with Jon Hicks’ Google Reader Theme. It’s a testament to how great a technology CSS is (as well as Jon’s design skills, o’ course).
Jason Kottke has a clipping from The Brainded Megaphone which seems to be a pretty good channeling of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death mixed in with psycholinguistic anger.
And now for something completely different. Videos of Brian Suda running through a wall of boxes. Essential viewing.
Palm
One of Palm’s more ridiculous decisions has been reversed - and the Palm Foleo has been killed. I love my Palm Pilot, but Palm seem to be making a continued string of bad decisions.
Palm seem to have taken what should be reasonably straight-forward - make devices, sell them - and turned it into a minefield. The structure of the companies is so that there must be about ten different organisations that have to talk to one another in order to make something. So much so that their products have stagnated - nothing new coming out, no innovation, absolute dead zone. These were the market leaders, the people who started the business of making PDAs. And they are getting absolutely pwned.
Some examples: their developer programme is so utterly complex. It’s run through yet another business - the ACCESS Corporation, whoever the fuck they are. Their website is unnavigable, complex and often doesn’t work. All they have achieved is to fill my inbox with spam. I’m no closer to actually building a simple Palm app than ever. Surely, if you are making a PDA/smartphone platform like Palm/Treo is, you want to make it easy for developers to build stuff. Why don’t we have common platforms like Java, or nice scripting languages like Python running? That way, we could all build stuff that works. Instead, we have the ACCESS Corporation’s CGI nightmare to try and navigate.
The Palm website doesn’t reliably explain about peripherals. There are some really shady devices out there, like a particular brand of fold-out keyboard I bought which not only didn’t work, but the driver software wiped everything on my PDA.
Palm is a messed up company, and the Foleo is just a symptom of the underlying craziness.
