Author Archives: ryan

I’ve just published webfinger-unofficial, a stand-in WebFinger server for major sites that don’t implement it themselves. It currently has implementations for Facebook and Twitter, deployed at these endpoints: facebook-webfinger.appspot.com twitter-webfinger.appspot.com It’s just a little side project, and it’s not hugely useful on its own, but it is a step toward implementing OStatus bridge apps for [...]

I hate forced idle time. I used to carry reading material with me everywhere, in case I had a few extra minutes. I still do that sometimes, but now I listen to podcasts more often. I break out the headphones at any excuse, even as little as walking between buildings at work, or while I’m [...]

My new Mindcandy DVD came in the mail the other day, and it reminded me all over again why I love the demo scene. Demos aren’t easy to describe. If you’re not familiar with them, think of them as graffiti art for computer geeks. They’re like music videos, with abstract, real time computer graphics…but more. [...]

I’ve added a new App Engine shell app for the Python 2.7 runtime: shell-27.appspot.com It complements the existing Python 2.5, HRD, and JVM language shell apps as well as other, even better third party projects like App Engine Console. Enjoy!

I’ve just released Bridgy, a little side project I’ve been working on. Got a blog? Share your blog posts on social networks? Wish comments on those shared posts also showed up on your blog? Bridgy copies them back for you.

I’m starting a cleanse today! It’s not a New Years resolution – I don’t tend to do those – but for the next three weeks, I’m cutting out alcohol, caffeine, sugar, wheat (gluten), dairy, and meat. Seafood is ok, and I’ll probably have the occasional piece of dark chocolate or lightly caffeinated tea, but that’s [...]

Unhosted aims to decouple webapps from their backend storage on a per user level. The status quo is that each webapp stores and manages all of its users’ data. Unhosted wants to turn that on its head and let each user store their own data, across all of their webapps, in a single provider and [...]

I had a great time at Dickens Fair, the Victorian England, Christmas themed renaissance faire that’s been held every year in San Francisco since 1970. It’s massive, and the production values are amazing. So many killer details throughout the whole place, so many great performances! We saw everything from full-on stage plays to impromptu street [...]

I just finished reading Charles Perrow‘s Normal Accidents, the classic book that examines why and how complex systems fail. When it was published in 1984, the Internet and large distributed software systems were still nascent, so he focused on nuclear power plants, chemical plants, and marine and air traffic control. Even so, the parallels are [...]

Hot on the heels of Thanksgiving moments, here are some Christmas moments we’ve captured in the last week or so. As before, some are predictable, some…less so.