John Herren’s Blog

“Knowledge is after all a non-rivalrous good” - Mark O’Connor

When not fighting off Microsoft ninjas with his GPL katana, Richard Stallman likes to supaman dat ho.

Also, the Youtube ID for this video is ‘Pube5Aynsls’, which would be a great name for a punk/prog rock band.

The best developer conference on the planet just opened registration. Mashup Camp 4 will be held in Mountain View, CA on July 18-19.

Why is Mashup Camp the best geek/develop/hacker conference around?

• You’ll meet the people behind all of your favorite APIs, such as Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Amazon, and more. Get them to add functionality for you if it’s missing. They will!
• You’ll rub shoulders with the mashup developer community and make lots of friends.
• You will meet VCs and learn about that whole game.
• You will learn mashup tips and tricks for PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python, and more.
• You can how off your mashup during Speed Geeking and win a prize. I’ve won both times I participated!
• You will learn all about the mashup community at Mashup University
• You might get to hang out with Dave Berlind and Doug Gold!

Did I mention it’s free?

Google Labs has released Hot Trends, a daily list of the top 100 searches. This is prime mashup data that’s begging for some great visualizations. Unfortunately, the TOS states:

 2. Proper Use. The content and software on this Site is the property of Google and/or its suppliers and is protected by U.S. and international intellectual property laws. Accordingly, you agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content (except for your own personal, non-commercial use) from the Site. You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Site. Furthermore, the Site is provided to you for your own personal use, and it may not be used for any commercial purposes. For example, you may not do any of the following: use the Site to sell a product or service; use the Site to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Site and reformat and display them, or mirror any portion of the Site on your Web site; or “meta-search” the Site. If you wish to use any portion of the Site for commercial purposes, please contact us for more information. Any use of the Site that infringes upon Google’s intellectual property rights or that is for commercial purposes will be investigated and Google shall have the right to take appropriate civil and criminal legal action. [emphasis mine]

So, to be clear, you aren’t allowed to scrape or build a mashup from the data. Shame.

Here in Pennsylvania, lots of people have trouble remembering the state abbreviation for Mississippi is MS. That’s understandable, since there’s eight states that start with ‘M’. However, there are only two ‘T’ states, and the Monster ad I saw on Techcrunch today had Tennessee all wrong. Now if they just knew how to seek out a good copywriter…

In 5th grade, my class put on a play called “Fify Nifty United States” where one of the songs was the names of all the states in alphabetical order. I can still recite them to this day, and it’s come in handy on several occasions.

It’s frustrating the way we can remember things set to music. I’m amazed that I can recite every word to “Ice Ice Baby” but can’t do integral calculus with a gun to my head.

For the last several months, I’ve been using this wheelie bag to carry around my laptop and other gadgets. While it’s served me well, I’d like to buy a laptop-friendly messenger bag or backpack for when I’m places where it doesn’t make sense to wheel around my crap.

Any suggestions? I’ve heard a lot about Timbuk2 bags. What makes them particularly popular?

Here are a few I’m considering.