Ramble On

From Ted Leung

Yahoo Pipes = RSS + Prograph + AJAX.

Nicely executed? Yes.
Useful? Yes.
Overhyped after one day? Yes.

obligatory self-history reference: When I was co-op’ing at GTE Government Systems from 1991-1995 while going to NC State. I, like 50 thousand people before me I’m sure, wrote a hardware and software asset inventory application. First in excel macros, then in HyperCard, and then I tried to write it in File Maker Pro when hypercard became irritatingly slow as more data was added. But FMPro didn’t have the visual constructs that HyperCard had. So I went looking for Graphical-oriented programming tools. When I first saw ProGraph, I thought it was going to be the greatest thing ever, and that all programming was going to evolve to using Visual Programming Languages. I think I even tried convincing my boss to buy it.

Then I tried it and realized that the Visual Programming Language revolution was never going to happen.

However, it still shows up in kid’s programming StarLogo - and I think that one of the Lego Mindstorms software tools is based on LabView. So maybe the VPL’s will one day rule (Heck, I keep wanting to do something cool in Quartz Composer)

So I have way too many IT and Computing syndication feeds filling up my newsreader and not enough photography-oriented ones.

However, I’ve seen a paucity of photography-oriented sites with syndication feeds (most of them seem to prefer to lock up most of their content in forums without feeds) but I think I’m just looking in the wrong places.

So can anyone suggest good photography-oriented blogs or bloggers or sites with feeds?

Here’s the list that’s currently in my photography folder (er, photography tag) in Google Reader:

• The feed for dpblogs.com
• The feed for dpreview.com
• The feed for The Flickr blog (I also have a number of group pools in my feeds)
• The feed for Chuq Von Rospach’s Imaging Reality blog
• A feed of sorts for kenrockwell.com (”of sorts” is because I haven’t quite figured out how he ties it to site content, it’s a third-party service that looks to be manually updated)
• The feed for Rob Galbraith’s site that seems mostly a feed for vendor announcements

Clearly, I need better ones (Chuq’s site and the dpblogs.com site are the only things I’d really call a photography blog out of that list).

I read the opening paragraph of this joke quoted from Phil Windley. And while readying the first paragraph, I started getting my dander up because I thought it might actually be a real life occurrence.

How sad is that that arresting someone at the airport with a ruler, protractor, set square, slide rule, and calculator could be completely plausible?

That said, if you like cheesy high school math humor (of which I do) - you’ll like the joke

p.s. In almost, but largely completely un-, related links - you too can save boston from offensive lite brites