Monday, March 8, 2010

Endless Code




Bad Code from unclebob on Vimeo:

[vimeo 9981123]



FYI: The piece heard in this video is Atmosphères by György Sándor Ligeti, who intended the listener “to become lost in the depth of the texture and tone and become completely oblivious to the passage of time,” according to Wikipedia.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Feed Reader Problems

Garrett LeSage says that feed readers are not smart enough, and I agree. One of the problems I face is that not all feeds have the same "velocity," which I define as "number of posts per unit time." For example, I have a group of feeds in Google Reader that I read for work and professional development. However, I also read DZone.com and want to add its feeds to the group, but I don't, because its velocity is far greater than the velocities of any of the other feeds in the group. The result, of course, is that DZone dominates the group, and the posts from the other feeds get "crowded out." A feed reader should take into account how often I read the posts of a given feed, determine what those posts I read are about, and then filter accordingly (while offering me the opportunity to see the whole, unfiltered feed if I so choose). It should also offer suggestions of new feeds that I may find interesting.

No feed reader currently meets my needs---and it's not because there is a dearth of feed readers out there. Some come somewhat close, but none have yet done it right.