blog.philcrissman.com

I’m going back to Wordpress, for awhile, I think. I kept telling myself that the features I’d like to see in Mephisto, I would add. I think I could but I’m beginning to realize that I really don’t have the time, and I won’t have time for awhile.

So, back to Wordpress. Thanks for reading,

There was a lot of discussion awhile back about Facebook and its limit of 5,000 friends. The discussion, in case you (mercifully) missed it, was largely driven by social networking power users like Scoble.

I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Between now and then, I’ve thought a few times about social networks, and how they are implemented. Not the front end, but the back matter; the model. The database; users and connections.

A social network is fundamentally a graph. Most social networks are analogous to non-directed graphs – that is, there is no distinction which “direction” a connection goes. If you are friends with someone in Facebook or MySpace, they are also friends with you. Pownce and Twitter have taken a directed-graph approach, in which friendship (following) is not automatically mutual. I could follow you, but you might not follow me. And so on.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding what to build. No part of the work so cripples the resulting system if done wrong. No other part is so difficult to rectify later.
- Fred Brooks

Idris is a dependently typed language. You can visit the page to see what that means.

Io is “a small, prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).”

Someone has written a Doom Roguelike.

You can see the slides to an SXSW presentation on designing interactions.

Ozimodo is a Tumblelog written with rails. A tumblelog is something like Anarchaia (from which I found a few of the above links.

Can’t think of a good name for that class? No problem. Visit classnamer.com. There you will be inspired to call it things like “PrioritizedGridDispatcher” or “GenericMemoryBundle”.

There is at least one website full of UML Jokes. Who knew?

Can’t leave out Matz; there are a lot of interesting things over in Google’s Tech Talks YouTube account.