Twitter, if you haven’t heard, is being indexed by Google and Bing, to include results in those search engines. I was trying to imagine how this might be helpful when a thought came: I would love my search queries supplemented by a Twitter query — but limited to the people I’m following, and maybe one level up; i.e., including those who are followed by the people I’m following. This would vastly improve signal to noise from, say, searching the entire Twitter stream. Bing, if you implement this, I’ll switch.

Sinatra

(No, not this guy)

[ edit: oops, I linked to Brando ;) ]

Sinatra is really, really cool for anyone with the slightest interest in writing web apps, especially if, like me, you feel comfortable with HTML and CSS but not scripting languages and frameworks like Ruby On Rails or Django.

Consider that:

first, Sinatra apps are written in Ruby, and Ruby has the good fortune to have an amazing beginner’s guide. I’ve said so before: it’s something you’ll actually read through in one sitting (unlike so many other lifeless programming books). And it’s free.

second, this is Sinatra’s “Hello World” app:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/hi' do
  "Hello World!"
end

that’s it, once you have Sinatra installed, no other files to deal with. This changes with complexity, of course, but it’s a great way to start.

third, deploying on Heroku, which is nearly painless and yes free. here’s how your code goes online:

sudo gem install heroku
heroku create appname
git push heroku head
heroku open

of course requires git (which is itself painless).

The point for me is that it’s unbelievably simple and cheap to get an app online. Going through the sequence above I had chopped up and running in a day — that includes learning the requisite Ruby and Sinatra. (I did cheat and buy this $9 screencast from Peepcode. I think it’s well worth it, though; Dan Benjamin is an excellent teacher.)

And lo there was A Logic Named Joe

The Guardian:

And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a “logic”:

“You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get … you punch ‘Sally Hancock’s Phone’ an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast [or] who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration … that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation … hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country … The only thing it won’t do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, ‘Oh, you think so, do you?’ in that peculiar kinda voice “

Only a tumblr post will atone for my failure to register.

Maine 2009 referendum questions:

1. “Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allow individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?”

[…]

5. “Do you want to change the medical marijuana laws to allow treatment of more medical conditions and to create a regulated system of distribution?”

Update: Well. A long time ago I registered to vote in Solon. Later I moved to Boston, and registered there. I just learned that Boston forgot to tell Solon about my registration, so technically I am registered twice. And since I am now back in Solon, I can vote today. I guess it worked.

Another good quote from the aforelinked piece:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.