I’ve been hearing about proximity beacons lately and thought it would be fun to try one of these inexpensive devices that broadcast a URL for a range of just a few meters via Bluetooth Low Energy (a.k.a. BLE, which I assume is pronounced “bleh”). Advocates often cite the use case of how a beacon device located near a work of art in a museum might broadcast a URL pointing to a web page about it—for example, one near Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed in New York’s Museum of…

I’ve been using Google Docs more because at work it’s great for collaboration, and also, for shopping lists and notes to myself, I can easily edit the same documents from my phone, tablet, and laptop. I found out that it’s pretty easy to add menus that perform custom functions, so I created a few menu choices… and then found out that they weren’t available on my phone or tablet. Still, it’s good to know how easy it is to automate a few things.

As I tweeted last July, I always learn so much about both the past and future of database computing from recent Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker. I recently learned that the latest edition of Readings in Database Systems, also known as the “Red Book,” is available for free online under a Creative Commons license—or at least the introductions to the readings are. With most of these being by Stonebraker, and quite up-to-date, I consider these 43 pages required reading for anyone…

I’ve been thinking lately about the visionary optimism of the days when people dreamed of the promise of large-scale hypertext systems. I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean linkless content down the middle of a screen with columns of ads to the left and right of it, which is much of what we read off of screens these days. I certainly don’t want to start one of those rants of “the World Wide Web is deficient because it’s missing features X and Y, which by golly we…