Disqus - Latest Comments for bentrem

Re: The First 400 Pages of the HC Monstrosity

bentrem — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:55:22 -0000

You begin with "Since Congress doesn’t want to read the Health Care Bill and Obama, ACORN, Unions, Lawyers, & Special Interest Groups don’t want you to know whats in this monstrosity" ...
... so I guess I have to thank you for showing right off the bat that you're willing to twist, distort, and exaggerate.

Re: Google Wave is Coming: 100,000 Invites Go Out on September 30th

bentrem — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:42:12 -0000

I will not suck up. I do not suck up. I don't do "suck up".
*blink*
*WTF, this form doesn't allow ^V for paste?! C'mon ...*

Ok, I was gonna suck up w/http://bentrem.sycks.net/gw_review.html (dusty) but instead I'm gonna go back to Hell's Kitchen. Web2.0 not ready for *pfffffft* "prime time"?

Re: Zemanta

bentrem — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:33:50 -0000

"we are eager to see them open up this contextual recommendation engine to other web apps and services that content creators might like to add into their posts at the time of creation."

I think I keep returning to my own design for a "discourse-based document portal" because I always fail to understand that sort of thing. (I did MIL-SPEC nav_aid tech-docs, so I know I'm not completely out to lunch. But I still only rarely talk about "dialogical" and "dialectical" and "orthogonal" ... /that/ sort of thing seems verboten.)

If I may: strategy without tactic is the slowest road to success; tactic without strategy is the fastest path to calamity.

Re: Seesmic Launches the First Facebook Desktop Client Available Today

bentrem — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:16:26 -0000

Good to see you've a realistic appraisal of your abilities, Loic ... and so nice of MacNasty to keep you in touch with your many, many, many failings.
*grin*

Restez bon-vivant!

Re: Twitter Landing

bentrem — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 23:54:43 -0000

Some great light in the 60s Sanfrancisco scene had this to say about LSD, speaking in terms of "doors of perception": it opened a door that we could go through to explore what lay beyond. The point wasn't to come back, go through the door, come back, go through the door, come back ... again and again and again.
I feel somewhat like that about Twitter. "It's wonderful" is fatuous. "It can be wonderful" a bit more meaningful. "It has been wonderful and I am reasonably certain it will be wonderful again" is where I'm at.

Superficial people use things superficially. To expect otherwise is huh huh just plain silly.

Re: Twhirl step by step features screencast

bentrem — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:02:55 -0000

When I saw the colour scheme you were using I was reminded that I'd created one I call "BlueDay".
A couple of screen-grabs, one marked up for those who might want to hack their own:

http://bentrem.sycks.net/twhirl/

Re: The New Twhirl (preview release) for Team Seesmic-Twhirl

bentrem — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:29:15 -0000

*joined*

BTW I've been using my own custom skin for weeks / months; see http://bentrem.sycks.net/twhirl

Re: Friendship Test / Checker

bentrem — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:30:02 -0000

HiYa - Just heard about you.

Thought you might like to peek a classic in the LiveJournal community. (I don't remember exactly when I started using it ... prolly 2003.)
http://joule.marnanel.org/chart/lj/hfx_ben by way of example

cheers!
--bentrem

Re: What’s In a Checkbox: Part 2?

bentrem — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:26:27 -0000

Everybody should know the story I'm about to relate, if for no other reason than to save me typing it out.

Scenario: on the day a flag-ship high-rise is to be unveiled, the AC conks out.
Go through your scenario compacted into a 6 hour period.
A grizzled grumpy ace is called in.
He scours the blue-prints, plans, crawl spaces, and eventually asks for access to one closet (let's say).
Eye-balling the contents he draws up to one assembly and locks onto one module.
Going into his kit he pulls out a silver hammer and *whack!* everything purrs into action.

He submits a bill for $25K.
They balk, and ask that it be itemized.

* Hitting with hammer: $9
* Knowing where to hit: $24,991

I was solo on Pin 3 responsible for NORAD/SAC comms south to Cheyenne Mountain.
If comms failed nearest more expert was ?what? at least 12 hrs away.
When things went wrong I was expected to fix it in less than 3 minutes.
Almost as fun as tennis!
*grin*

Insight isn't to be confused with knowledge. The difference is like training contra education.

cheers

Re: Wear Your Rockstar Status With Pride

bentrem — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 10:18:41 -0000

Just curious, Chris, you write "DIY just as the web should be" but ... no transparency? I mean, you more than anyone else knows the power of such social gestures / trops ... but who's doing the selecting?

I was one of the early crowd who pointed out how digg distorts the field even when it isn't gamed; those who get attention are given attention which brings attention which justifies more attention. You know what I mean.

Re: What I Told the Higher Ed Conference People

bentrem — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:21:08 -0000

Rahm Emanual will serve Obama well; the new President can maintain his equanimity as Rahm wields his sharp elbows.
My point? Not everybody can hold the same position.

In an age of 24/7 marketing, what can we possibly understand about education?
IIRC it was in Phaedrus that Plato portrays Socrates using his method to bring a slave boy to an understanding of basic geometry. No lecture ... no pointed instructions ... edu.care (if I recall my etymology).

I encouraged my kidz to explore their interests ... to learn by doing ... to learn from failure. 4 of 5 are professionals (#2 is MD!!) and all are pursuing fields they find rewarding.

To be brutally frank, "Return On Influence" means always being mercenary ... always playing ulterior motives ... always manoevering for gain.
The harm? It comes to seem normal.
Ramifications? Civility becomes cost benefit analysis ... not justice. Perhaps generosity. Most likely pity.

There's a world of difference between education and training.

Re: Twine wants to collect your sh*t

bentrem — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:19:34 -0000

It wasn't perfect. It ended with a gunshot.
+5

I'll repeat my comment: Can haz more Candice?!

Re: Twitter does have track (Scripting News)

bentrem — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:21:48 -0000

Most/all I find on the topic relates to Comet e.g. "Amazon EC2 virtual servers; a single virtual machine was used as the Cometd server". Out of my depth here so wondering how FF deployed this.

Long shot: Orbited.org - "Orbited is a comet daemon that works on many platforms for many languages. It supports comet style long-polling as well as Iframe streaming. It also has a clear scaling path." Comment by Michael Carter (August 8, 2007) in Ajaxian.com

Addendum: My spidering has run out of steam on this: "FriendFeed become the latest site to enable real-time updates using the long-polling variant of Comet. The real-time Web was something of a theme at this year’s FOWA, with talks on message queues, XMPP and scaling Comet at Meebo." - SimonWillison . net 16th October 2008

Re: Twitter does have track (Scripting News)

bentrem — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:31:23 -0000

Long-polling came up in context of FriendFeed's "Real-time". That seems to me a very elegant technique.

Re: Mistakes Were Made And How To Handle Whatever Comes Up

bentrem — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:16:40 -0000

Interesting that psychopaths succeed (It's actually an adaptive "pathology". They are with us generation after generation.) with precisely that sort of (cold-blooded) pragmatism.

But yes, what might seem framed a certain way to be spiritual virtues are actually foundational to good craft.
I'll suggest that 90% of Sun Tzu is nothing more than that. (What came to mind just now was the warning on hair-dryers, "Do not use in bath or shower." heh)

Re: Mistakes Were Made And How To Handle Whatever Comes Up

bentrem — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:49:33 -0000

In a funny sorta way "The Knack: How Street Smart Entrepreneurs learn to Handle Whatever Comes up" kinda sums up what I took from Sun Tzu. It occurred to me at some point that pret'near everything he talked about was just to set the stage so you can cope when the wheels fall off, when things go pear-shaped, when the existential shit hits the paradigmatic fan.

Agility ... lithe development ... actual responsiveness rather than spin and sophistry. I mean, really, what separates the sheep from the fish better than the attitude that lets us plunge into what ever happens to be in front of us?

cheers!
--bentrem

Re: When More - Equals Less Usable Information

bentrem — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:37:52 -0000

"usable information remains tucked away in small nooks and crannies" ... I have to wonder if you realize how right you are!

After untold years beavering away at every aspect of ontology/taxonomy/cognition I threw my hands up. But reading a text on AI allowed me ?what? a notion: what if the thingies that reside in those nooks and crannies behave as, well, as "strange attractors". If we keep fractals in mind, we realize that zooming in on any thingie won't yield clarity ... it's an infinite regress ... at best we'll find something like a constellation, at worst a mass of fuzz. (Like Julia sets, yes? *grin*)

That's what allowed me to couple Jurgen Habermas' "discourse ethics" and John Willinsky's work on OpenAccess to derive a design for "participatory deliberation" ... dialectical analysis on utterances, verbal gestures. *beam*

--bentrem

Re: The Beauty of Pirate Ships

bentrem — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:00:29 -0000

Just a little refinement ... mebbe just a quibble. Non-linear dynamics, yaa? When a dynamically balanced system is perturbed beyond it limits it goes through changes that are unpredictable. I mean literally so ... how it's going to reconfigure itself can't be gauged by the initial conditions. Yaa, I mean fractals. So: "This isn’t about chaos. It’s not about throwing everything away. It’s about knowing which parts are vital to moving through the waters, versus the pieces we keep around because that’s what we always did." To be strict, that's precisely about chaos. The situation is information rich, not entropic ... so there are chunks and bits and pieces that are very much worth grappling on to in order to "move through the water". Thing that makes it tricky is that big slabs may be relatively worthless while small pieces may play key roles as out-liers.
It's all about feed-back/feed-forward! *grin*

--bentrem

Re: Internet 2.0, Suck it Up and Lead

bentrem — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:14:04 -0000

Mashups of a sort? "IBM considering financing IT project partners because of banking crisis"

Re: Findability is a Legitimate Concern for Bloggers

bentrem — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 01:35:22 -0000

What can challenge Semantic Web more than the blogosphere? Else-wise one might draw an inference from the rest of a site's content ... and that might work with some blogs. But with the peregrinations many/most blogs record, the taxonomy/ontology applicable to one post might not apply at all to the next.

BTW: good to see you posting such as this!

Re: 10 Communications Objectives of Social Media

bentrem — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:49:05 -0000

I intended to comment before reading Christina Favreau's response, but find myself echoing her sentiment.

This list is surely a representation of commercial ideals, but I'm struck by how it's empty of any sort of social awareness, of what moves individuals to act.

Perhaps that's the thing about mere careerism and mere mercenary opportunism: it doesn't challenge neo-realist myths and fictions. That would explain how that attitude spreads like kudzu.

"Don't be lucid and ironic. People will turn that against you saying, 'Ah-ha, you see? I told you he wasn't a nice person!'" --Albert Camus

And yet I can help thinking that real entrepreneurship is more responsive to actual human motives. (I mean beyond primitive self-interest.)

Re: Dear Twitter: It’s Over. And It’s for The Best

bentrem — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:47:22 -0000

If you didn't really care it wouldn't really matter to you ... and apparently it does ... so you really care.

Since you really care then it seems kinda cold the stay away.

--bentrem

p.s. see you tonight on TalkShoe

Re: We're all ops people now

bentrem — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:57:44 -0000

Thanks for the pointer to Puppet! Most exciting thing I've encountered for quite a while!

Re: What the semantic web is for

bentrem — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:30:21 -0000

Contrary n8k99 our history is marked by collaboration, whether that's pyramid building or the slave trade. (Good thinking suggests social activity is the reason our brains are as they are.)

But to your point: I've blazed my own trail to some large part in reaction to TimBL's vision, grand dream that it is; rather than striving for a system that would make discoverable every single datum, however trivial, I set out to design a system that would array declarative statements. (E.g. "War is about fighting with the army you have, not the army you wish you had" is fine rhetoric, but it's not subject to reasonable contradiction. "Iraq has substantial WMD capabilities and was connected to those who bombed the WTC" is the sort of statement that demands our concerted attention, along with "Global climate change is a myth created by doom.and.gloom tree-huggers" and "The world was created 7000 years ago by an intelligent designer".)

Re: In search of agile infrastructure for web applications

bentrem — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:22:07 -0000

*edited*
This is funny ... working with multiple instances of Firefox, each with multiple tabs, in this window I posted the following comment after huh huh having read about Puppet minutes before, in another tab, without realizing it was you yourself who'd brought it to my attention! Talk about asynchronous communications!

Apologies as required. *grin*

I'm out of my depth here, but it seems to me that Puppet could really have a role to play here, keeping the dev box configuration in sync with the live environment.