Chris Blow

A while ago I talked about a problem with long pages on the web due to excessive comments; quite often when looking at a blog post your impression of it's length from the scrollbar will be influenced by the number of comments. - Chris Blow

There’s a trend occuring right now where people are interested in collating sensor data and providing a nice Web 2.0 interface. I can count several projects besides Sensorpedia, including: Sensorbase (CENS), Sensormap (MSR), and Sensor.Networks (Sun). Sensorbase provides a nice interface to construct and query relational tables, while Sensor.Networks provide a nice interface to interact with Sun Spot devices. Sensorpedia, in constrast, emphasizes a loosely-coupled approach by which “sensors” simply publish data in their own format and register specific URLs. - Chris Blow

The comments on Jeff Atwood's complaint about how site commenters don't read instructions are pretty interesting. Basic gist is that Jeff thinks users are dumb for not understanding how to format their comments according to Markdown rules, while his readers think Jeff is dumb for introducing new rules to a simple text box. - Chris Blow

I spent the last few days working with a group of rural development specialists from UNITE and KAFRED in Bigodi, Uganda incorporating OpenStreetMap and Quantum GIS into their projects. The goal was to quickly identify a workflow and some best practices that would give them the greatest amount of flexibility with the lowest barriers to entry in terms of bandwidth requirements and complicated software to learn. This is just the start. - Chris Blow

I employed an interpolation method known as “blurring the crap out of them in Photoshop.” - Chris Blow

QR Codes are a popular type of two-dimensional barcode, which are also known as hardlinks or physical world hyperlinks. QR Codes store text, which can be a URL, contact information, telephone number, even whole verses of poems! - Chris Blow

Today, Meedan, is releasing the first publicly available open licensed Arabic/English Translation Memory (TM). This release comes as a part of Meedan’s ongoing commitment to improving the state of Arabic language machine processing research and supporting translators and machine translation researchers. - Chris Blow

So The New York Times gets to provide its users real-time information from Waco’s NewsChannel 25—and NewsChannel 25, in turn, gets to have its reporting amplified to the readers of the paper of record. Win and win. (And, taking the audience into account: win again.) - Chris Blow

This service is inspired by Typekit, which already started doing the same for English fonts. - Chris Blow

They choose to accepts certain blogs and just ignore others, and there is nothing on their site that says what is the criterion they use to accept or refuse blogs - Chris Blow