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Greg Gaughan has put together a rather clever Python script that can take a pipe created and hosted on Yahoo! Pipes into a Python module. The resulting file allows you to run your pipe directly from your computer as opposed to relying on Yahoo!

What’s that you say? Another epic fantasy by Brandon Sanderson? Sold. I swear, the rate at which Brandon Sanderson produces his massive books is a bit intimidating. The added fact that they are so consistently good marks it as an indicator of an almost terrifying amount of talent and skill.

I will preface this post by saying that I know how close I am skating to social media douchebaggery by writing a post on a new Facebook feature, but I was reading about Facebook Questions today in a post from Dan Patterson, and as I began to pen my response I realized that I had more to say than what could be reasonably considered a comment.

Great interview with Ted Chiang, who happens to be a rather brilliant science fiction writer. Seriously, if you have not read his wonderful story "Exhalation", you have missed a gem. You can also hear an audio production of that story here.

Via Simon Willison: This is a really convenient way to add custom functions to model managers in Django. Way easier than defining custom managers each time you need extra functionality.

Last night I found myself looking through old blog posts on this site in an attempt to avoid thinking about any of the other things I need to get done. As I was looking back through the posts from 2004-2005, I was struck by how much my writing style changed when I switched from blogging anonymously to using my real name.

This is a great Wired article by Warren Ellis on the current state of space travel and sums up my feelings as well. Some gems from the article: The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

This YouTube playlist covers a wonderful lecture on story structure from Dan Wells. Wells is the author of the fantastic novel I Am Not A Serial Killer, which I urge you to pick up and read.

What do you get when you combine the genres of hard-boiled detective noir, spaghetti-western and urban fantasy set in L.A.? You get Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. This book was recommended to me by my friend Quentin, and my fiancé had also mentioned to me that she had read a promising review of the novel.

While I haven’t listened to the audio yet, the text of this NPR article on a results-only work environment (ROWE) caught my interest immediately. I’m pleased to see agencies beginning to experiment with different types of management styles, in particular for knowledge-worker positions, which don’t really fit well in our traditional manufacturing-based approaches.

Just a short post to say that I’m altering the Everything feed1 for this site. Previously, it contained all the blog posts, links and photos that appear here. However, as I am piping this feed into several external sites, notably Google Buzz, and until services like Buzz allow me to specify particular feeds for import, as opposed to using auto-discovery, I risk flooding my activity stream every time I do a mass upload to my Flickr account.

Love this demo video of the MikroKopter. The GPS integration in the device is slick, and I love that it’s an open source, DIY device. The parts aren’t even all that expensive considering what they are, but as a project it’s still a little too pricey and time consuming for me to tak on right now.

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media does a great job summarizing many of things going wrong at Techcrunch these days, and it’s an excellent overview of the issues at hand. In particular, Feldman points out a number of important unanswered questions still lingering in the wake of Michael Arrington’s supposed transparency regarding the MacBook Air scandal.

Google has released their own programming language, appropriately named Go. I haven’t had time to dig deeply into this yet, but I’m seeing some interesting stuff that I like such as fast compilation, garbage collection, easy to read syntax, built in support for multicore machines and of course an open source BSD-style license.

I have not been posting here much of late, which is partly due to the amount of stuff I’m working on, and partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing and posting stuff in other places around the web, since it is easier.

This is an enormous win for OpenID, but it is also a huge risk if anything goes wrong with such a high-profile project. Obviously, it will all depend on the implementation, and if all goes well it will give OpenID the push it needs to increase the number of consumers as opposed to providers, which is a ratio that is sorely lopsided at the moment.

I am not naturally a very organized person, which is something I’ve always struggled with. My tendency, from an early age, has always been to try and hold all my responsibilities, appointments and tasks within my head.

Quite simply, I think this is one of the greatest advances in library science and computing in recent memory. This isn’t just a toy or a search engine, this is a knowledge processor that makes any factual data in its system instantly computable.

Those of you who already read Ellis’ work will find no surprises in his first column for Wired UK, but this piece is worth reading regardless. There’s a lot of meat in this column, but it would be easy to discount it as simply strange.

Via grinding.be: Scientists at Osaka University in Japan have created a robot that learns in a similar manner to human infants. CB2 (Child-robot with Biometric body), uses it processor, eye cameras and touch sensors to learn from it’s designers similar to the way a child learns from its parents.