Creativity and Terror

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Deep within anyone who creates, you will find a lingering terror that one day, they will be outed as a fraud. Or maybe it’s just me.

"Because We're All Persons": Empathy and Open Source

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By the time you read this, or maybe as I write this now, last week’s drama in the Ruby community has likely been, in large part, forgotten. This is not an article about which is better, or what you should use, or why someone is right, or why someone is wrong. This is about something more universal, and infinitely more interesting: us.

Getting on the Goodfoot

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Goodfoot is an app that shows you what’s good around you. It’s a collaboration between myself) and Dave Rupert, Reagan Ray, & Trent Walton of Paravel. It hit the App Store today, and this post is my way of commemorating its release.

Introducing Austin.rb

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With so much growing interest in Ruby, it’s ripe time for Austin to expand its community. It’s my pleasure to announce Austin.rb, and to invite y’all to make it our place to commune, make cool things, and grow together.

Lost Recordings of _why's Last Lecture

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Of all of the presenters at art&&code, there was one who perfectly captured the spirit of it all. His name was why. He wore a blue flower on his lapel, and carried an autoharp around with him. He was and remains a hero and source of inspiration for me, and I was lucky enough to be his student (at least for a few hours).

Achievement Unlocked! Human Morality When Life Becomes A Videogame

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Loved by some and derided by others, achievement systems are nonetheless as essential to the fabric of videogaming today as power-ups were from the days of Contra, Super Mario Bros., and MegaMan. It is a trend unlikely to go away anytime soon, given not only its commercial viability, but—perhaps more importantly—its grounding in human nature. It’s not just fun and games, though. I believe that this is a matter of immense significance to the role of technology in our daily lives, with far-reaching implications into human morality in this brave new century.

Designing an IPA keyboard for the iPad

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With the iPhone, iPad, and similar devices, we are seeing a transition into a new paradigm of touch screen interfaces, wherein the physical interface becomes virtual, able to dynamically adapt as needed to fit any context. Imagine what that could do for a classically difficult problem of Linguistics: typing IPA

Tell Me a Story

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As a product of evolution, we humans are cognitively endowed with the ability to make sense of nature. Yet, we are a pre-historic being in a post-modern world. So how do we make sense of everything? Well, among other things, we tell stories.

Forgetting to Remember

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The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve describes the way humans retain knowledge. Learning is, in a way, just a process of continually not forgetting things.

Chroma-Hash, Revisited

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Based on a resurgence of interest in Chroma-Hash (hi reddit!), I thought it’d be useful to revisit this oft-misunderstood project.

Chroma-Hash: A Belated Introduction

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Yesterday, I posted Chroma-Hash, an experiment in how to visualize the live-input of secure fields, such as a password on a login screen. So far, I’ve received a lot of great feedback, as well as a number of questions that I thought deserved a proper response.

Game Over: Learning From Failure In Videogames

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Thinking through the contingencies of failure for an interaction is an exercise of empathy with the user. Whether in videogames or more traditional UIs, framing development in a mindset of failure allows you to get in the head of the typical user and design accordingly.

Commence

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Earlier in the year, as is the tradition at Carnegie Mellon, there was an open contest to be the class speaker at commencement. As someone who never identified strongly as a student qua student, I knew my submission would be a long shot. It was, but how much better to have tried and failed.

URL Shorteners Suck. Roll Your Own.

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So you’re all gung-ho about preventing the link-rot apocolypse of the internet. Sweet! Now what? Check out this simple way to implement a shortener on your own site.

Computational / Poetry Thesis Blog Post / Stanza 三: Haiku

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A wise man once said, that if you train an n-gram model with too much data, it will hurt. Bad. We’re talking Kurzweilian singularity ➡ grey goo ➡ ??? ➡ profit! kind of hurt. That’s the way I’ve felt over the last month or so, thinking about my thesis; there were so many directions I could go in, so many theoretically intriguing and clever avenues to venture.

What Can "Left 4 Dead" Teach Us About The Social Web?

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Valve’s implementation of achievements in Left 4 Dead demonstrate 4 primary uses of the achievement framework: to be Instructive, to be Prescriptive, to be Demarcative, and to act as Incentive. Looking at how achievements shape the gameplay experience, there’s a lot that can be applied in the context of social web applications, too.

Second Stanza: Of Phones and Phonemes

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That the creative processes of all writers—poets, novelists, academics, and the like—are completely hidden, is what makes NLP so frustrating. Such underdetermination is the reason why XKCD can (justifiably) dish beeves upon computational linguists with such pizazz. There’s just no way to know what the hell is going on underneath the hood with human language, and all we have to go on is what comes out on the other side.

The Magical Tale of My Computational Poetry Thesis, First Stanza

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In order to complete my BA Linguistics, I have to write a Thesis. My goal for this project is to develop a programmatic module that, given a subject — be it love, Paris, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—can produce a valid (and ideally tear-jerking or awe-inspiring) poem in the forms of Haiku, Limerick, and Fib.

10,000 Resolutions

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Every January 1st, as is the custom for millions of Americans, we enter into a collective delusion to commit ourselves to vague truisms that we already know to be good for us. This time around, I’m ditching resolutions for simple accounting.

I Want My MTV API!

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MTV just released an API for their entire music video collection. How does it stack up against the reigning champion Yahoo! Music? Read on to find out…

Discovering GeoPlanet

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Up until recently, the functional vocabulary of location-based software has been limited to latitude/longitude coordinates and bounding boxes. However, as location-awareness becomes an increasingly ubiquitous concept in software, it just won’t be enough to understand locations just in terms of coordinate pairs.

Y! Music Battle of the APIs in the Key of Ruby

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The Yahoo! Music API is impressive, but the question remains: How does it stack up to the reigning champion of music APIs? How does Yahoo! Music compare to Last.fm?

Gears, BrowserPlus, and Web 3.0, baby

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If you’ve heard of Gears or BrowserPlus, chances are you’ve heard them positioned as competitors in one way or another. Another Google vs. Yahoo! showdown. Truth is, that’s not the case at all, or at least doesn’t have to be. After taking a look at what these technologies actually offer, we can see that they’re actually two distinct approaches to an exciting new direction for the web.

Book Review: High Performance MySQL

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A lot has changed since the first publication of High Performance MySQL in 2004. At some point, the web turned 2.0, startups became cool again, and SQL became a bad word (regardless of how you pronounce it).

Book Review: Javascript: The Good Parts

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As weird as it is, there are a lot of good reasons to actually learn JavaScript, and not just pretend its some other language with C syntax. It takes a great deal of insight into this language to understand its true potential, and Douglas Crockford offers just this in his new book, “Javascript: The Good Parts.”

About

Mattt Thompson is a Hacker from the Rustbelt, living in San Francisco and working at Heroku.

When not writing in 3rd person (or breaking the 4th wall), Mattt occasionally writes on topics he's passionate about: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Programming, & Linguistics.