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Re: Intro to Computational Media – Midterm Part 2

jorgeortiz85 — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:06:48 -0000

World Wind uses Java Applets, so in principle you should be able to produce an embeddable Applet.

Re: Web Idea – ISP Customer Mapping/Coordination

jorgeortiz85 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:07:01 -0000

Broadband ISPs (as opposed to telephone ISPs) have very high per unit/house/building infrastructure costs. It makes sense to only incur these costs once. This makes broadband ISPs very similar to utilities like water, gas, and electricity that also have local monopolies.

Unfortunately, broadband ISPs aren't regulated or operated like local utility monopolies.

Ideally, government would incur the (high initial) cost of wiring each home with broadband, then rent those wires to several service providers who can compete with each other on price and service to the consumer.

Of course, that would majorly upset existing phone and cable monopolies, so it probably won't happen any time soon.

Re: Web Idea – ISP Customer Mapping/Coordination

jorgeortiz85 — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:08:24 -0000

Also, you should probably link back to the original "web idea" post at the beginning of each new blog post, with a short description of what "web idea" means. If it's in italics, the reader can distinguish this "meta" content from the "real" content that follows.

Re: TwiTerra Files for Download

jorgeortiz85 — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:35:40 -0000

I'm pretty sure that, for the Mac version, the jars and jnilibs have to be in /Library/Java/Extensions

--j

Re: 4-in-4 Day 2 Project 2: TwiTerra in SF

jorgeortiz85 — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:21:54 -0000

Thanks for coming! I'll write this up for scala-blogs.org soon.

Re: Going Functional with Scala

jorgeortiz85 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:58:25 -0000

Steve,

I'm glad you're enjoying Scala, and I'm really glad that my little Actors program at JavaOne left an impression. For more Scala goodness, be sure to check out http://scala-blogs.org/

Thanks!

--j

Re: Programming A to Z – Assignment #9 Evolvocabulary

jorgeortiz85 — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:59:43 -0000

Very, very cool.

I would have filtered out "stop words" (frequently occurring words (like "and", "this", "if", "not", "of", "for", "is", etc) that don't add much meaning). Even better would have been attempting something like Amazon's "Statistically Improbable Phrases", though you would have needed to find some "baseline" corpus.

Re: Pimp My Lock: A case study in Scala API design

jorgeortiz85 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:50:19 -0000

Yes, thanks for the correction.

The code on github includes Condition, but I felt the blog post was getting long enough as it was. I'm planning a follow-up though.

Re: Pimp My Lock: A case study in Scala API design

jorgeortiz85 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:05:28 -0000

BGGA would have been a huge step forward for Java, but the Scala features that make this API nice are so much more than just closures. I also used traits, by-name parameters, syntax sugar for "apply", for-comprehensions, the Option class, the "this" type, curried parameter lists, and implicit conversions. Even with BGGA, this would look a lot uglier in Java.

Re: The Stream-Packet Duality of Content

jorgeortiz85 — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:04:38 -0000

See also: Information streams as musical scores http://biosimilarity.blogsp...

Re: Does pattern matching break encapsulation?

jorgeortiz85 — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:35:40 -0000

I don't understand. In the absence of pattern matching on sealed classes or on singletons, replacing a case class with a singleton that has the appropriate apply/unapply methods won't break client code. (You might also need a "type" declaration.) The only thing that could break would be if you explicit used the "new" keyword on the now-removed case class, but given that it's a case class you shouldn't be doing that anyway. (Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent it.) You'd also need to make sure any public methods available on the old case class were available on its replacement. (I omitted this step.)

About singletons, perhaps my point about Nil vs MyNil wasn't clear enough. If I wanted to replace the current implementation of List (with two subclasses, :: and Nil), there is no way I could get rid of the Nil subclass. I don't want to change the implementation of Nil... there's basically nothing in its implementation anyway. If I want to get rid of the existence of Nil as a subclass. Let's say I want just one class for Lists, namely List itself. It can be empty or full, but it doesn't have two different subclasses associated with it. I can make whole any user code that depends on :: through the use of a singleton with apply/unapply methods, but I can't recover anything that makes use of Nil in a pattern match. If I tried to replace the Nil object that extends List with a Nil object that -doesn't- extend List, I wouldn't be able to match a list against Nil to test if it was empty, I'd have to match the list against Nil(), which breaks user code.

Re: Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry

jorgeortiz85 — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:15:43 -0000

"Shellshocked" is exactly the right word.

At a lunch recently, I found myself sitting next to a Telefónica executive in Mexico, where iPhones and Androids haven't really taken off yet. We struck up a conversation, and I was showing him the Foursquare iPhone app (I work at Foursquare). He said the app looked cool and asked me what carriers we had deals with. When I said we didn't do deals with carriers--that we just developed for platforms and ran on any carrier--his eyes widened a bit. Then he asked me how much we had to pay each time someone used the geolocation feature. (Telefónica in Mexico provides a geolocation service on their phones, but they charge consumers for every use.) When I said we didn't have to pay, that it was provided by the platform and for free, he was visibly shocked.

It was an interesting reminder of what carriers in the US used to take for granted not too long ago, and of everything we as consumers and developers take for granted now.

Re: It All Changes When the Founder Drives a Porsche

jorgeortiz85 — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 13:12:01 -0000

Facebook has provided liquidity to early employees who wanted to cash out. There's no reason Groupon couldn't do the same.

Re: Feature Friday: Foursquare Radar

jorgeortiz85 — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 14:08:26 -0000

We think we can build products that are as useful and delightful to users as they are to merchants.

If my favorite coffee shop added pumpkin bread to the menu because it's fall, I might be excited to learn that. If my favorite bar has live music this weekend, I'd be delighted to hear about it. If the wine shop down the street just got a new shipment and is having a free wine tasting this evening, that's something I'd love to know about.

It's better for us, better for our users, and better for our merchants if we can build products that all parties enjoy. If we can do that, monetizing won't come at the expense of the user experience. And we think we can do that.

As far as push notifications go: you can turn them off at any time. If you don't like them, you don't need to get them.

Re: What’s not evil: ranking content fairly and letting public content get indexed

jorgeortiz85 — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:53:11 -0000

Indeed: https://twitter.com/robots.txt

Disqus - Friends of lehrblogger

Re: Intro to Computational Media – Midterm Part 2

Re: Web Idea – ISP Customer Mapping/Coordination

Re: Web Idea – ISP Customer Mapping/Coordination

Re: TwiTerra Files for Download

Re: 4-in-4 Day 2 Project 2: TwiTerra in SF

Re: Going Functional with Scala

Re: Programming A to Z – Assignment #9 Evolvocabulary

Re: Pimp My Lock: A case study in Scala API design

Re: Pimp My Lock: A case study in Scala API design

Re: The Stream-Packet Duality of Content

Re: Does pattern matching break encapsulation?

Re: Steve Jobs single-handedly restructured the mobile industry

Re: It All Changes When the Founder Drives a Porsche

Re: Feature Friday: Foursquare Radar

Re: What’s not evil: ranking content fairly *and* letting public content get indexed

Re: What’s not evil: ranking content fairly and letting public content get indexed