Jobster has a number of openings in software engineering. I may be a little biased, but I think we’ve got a great team here, so if you’re interested in hard challenges and working with a strong, close knit team please get in touch with us.

I usually steer clear of politics here but I just have to link to this:

Read Mark Aiken’s post on the signing statement that the administration attached to the anti-torture amendent to discourage enforcement by the executive branch or via lawsuits.

This is the amendement that was passed with the backing of John McCain and a strong majorities from both parties in congress.

Who thinks that developing a reputation as supporting torture is good for the United States?

In the Alito hearing today, a senator supportive of the Alito nomination made mention of the internment of Japanese Americans as an example of a spectacularly wrong decision supported by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, he didn’t give Alito a chance to comment on the decision.

How are the powers now being claimed by the executive branch for indefinite internment in the war on terror any different (or less wrong) than those claimed in World War 2?

This is pretty neat– Structured Blogging is a Wordpress and Movable Type plugin that makes it easy and convenient to create nicely formatted and machine readable blog posts for different types of content– events, for-sale ads, etc.

Machine readability is provided by a number of supported microformats – microformats are a very lightweight way to embed machine readable data in XHTML markup.

The benefit to you as a user is that content formatted in this way is not only easy to create and looks good but becomes easily indexable and searchable by crawlers. For instance, rather than having to post your conference announcements to a host of different sites, you could just post it to your blog. Crawlers could automatically and reliably read the conference title, dates, organizer, etc. and make it available on their site.

Installation was easy and trouble free for me — just drop the files into your Wordpress installation.

Structured Blogging adds a number of new post types into Wordpress (reviews, events, lists, audio, video, people and group showcases, etc.)

Each different post type provides a customized form for the type of data relevant to that posting. Several of the forms have some whizzy AJAX going on, like in the in-place search in the reviews form.

The resulting post for a conference has a nicely formatted table describing the conference information in addition to your post about the conference. Round-tripping works well- when you go back to edit the post Wordpress continues to use the appropriate specialized form.

Structured Blogging is free and supports Wordpress and Movable Type, I think it has great potential. As a blog author, I’d much rather post the things i care about to my blog and let Googlebase and other sites pick them up with their structure intact, rather than having to post in multiple places.

While at the airport in Tokyo, I noticed an interesting bit of cell phone technology I’ve never seen in the states, QR Codes.

Here’s a blog description I found:

QR codes are 2D barcodes that are widely available in Japan. Consumers, for example, use their cell phones to take a picture of a QR code and automatically access a corresponding website.

According to a recent research conducted by C-NEWS, more than 70% i-mode cell phone users knew QR codes and almost 60% people actually used QR codes. Not surprisingly, QR codes are more popular among younger people (<29 years old). This research is based on questionnaires answerd by 400 users of the following i-mode cell phones: 900i, 506i, 505iS. (via ITMedia, October 25, in Japanese)

QR codes could be generated by anyone with access to a printer, unlike RFID or other more sophisticated technology. They have the potential for making the mobile web a lot more useful by delivering locally relevant information without requiring typing. It seems possible that QR Code reader could be built as an application on top of existing camera phones. (Not that I have one…) Would be a great hack for someone to pursue.

(I’m writing this, by the way, from the Yahoo Cafe at Narita Airport. Free internet access– thanks Yahoo!)

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of John Langdon’s Wordplay for Christmas this year; Wordplay deals with the art, science and philosophy of ambigrams, word art that appears identical when rotated 180 degrees.

I was inspired to attempt to create an ambigram of my own by way of a New Years Greeting. The result is amateurish indeed, but the exercise gave me a good appreciation of the challenge of what the artists achieve.