Simon Willison's Weblog: jon-udell

Quoting Jon Udell

2024-08-10T17:57:37+00:00

Some argue that by aggregating knowledge drawn from human experience, LLMs aren’t sources of creativity, as the moniker “generative” implies, but rather purveyors of mediocrity. Yes and no. There really are very few genuinely novel ideas and methods, and I don’t expect LLMs to produce them. Most creative acts, though, entail novel recombinations of known ideas and methods. Because LLMs radically boost our ability to do that, they are amplifiers of — not threats to — human creativity.

— Jon Udell

Tags: jon-udell, ai, generative-ai, llms

Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings

2008-03-05T01:53:26+00:00

Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings

Intriguing idea: software that explicitly reveals the underlying business logic in end-user understandable terms. I didn’t find the example very easy to comprehend but the concept is fascinating.

Tags: jon-udell, ward-cunningham

.aspx considered harmful

2008-01-17T18:01:27+00:00

.aspx considered harmful

Jon Udell: “I guess I’m extra-sensitive to the .aspx thing now that I work for Microsoft, because I know that to folks outside the Microsoft ecosystem it screams: We don’t get the web.”—he goes on to mention that smart URL rewriting is thankfully built in to the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework.

Tags: aspnet, aspx, jon-udell, microsoft, mvc, urls

Quoting Jon Udell

2007-11-27T22:05:28+00:00

What do we call personal information management when it moves into shared online spaces? I asked myself that question, and the answer that came back was: social information management.

— Jon Udell

Tags: jon-udell, social-information-management

Why Guiness tastes better in Ireland

2007-11-22T15:41:37+00:00

Why Guiness tastes better in Ireland

Two reasons: it’s more popular so kegs empty faster (and you always get a fresh pint), and Guinness send someone round to every pub to flush the lines once every three weeks.

Tags: drinking, guiness, ireland, jon-udell, pubs

10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head

2007-06-09T17:36:12+00:00

10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head

A great list, with a positive conclusion.

Via Jon Udell

Tags: jon-udell, journalism, newspapers, ryan-sholin

Quoting Jon Udell

2007-05-24T16:38:24+00:00

Lacking a Strunk and White Elements of Style for URI namespace, we've made a mess of it. It's long past time to grow up and recognize the serious importance of principled design in this infinitely large namespace.

— Jon Udell

Tags: jon-udell, strunkandwhite, urldesign, urls

Quoting Jon Udell

2007-04-18T17:39:07+00:00

I believe this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. That's happening for an interesting and important reason, which is that the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools.

— Jon Udell

Tags: jon-udell

A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft

2006-12-08T14:16:20+00:00

A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft

Jon wants to bridge the gap between the alpha geeks and the mainstream.

Tags: jon-udell, microsoft

Jon Udell's The Screening Room: Dabble DB

2006-11-01T12:16:37+00:00

Jon Udell's The Screening Room: Dabble DB

Not quite as impactful as a “live” demo, but still really impressive.

Tags: dabbledb, jon-udell

The Screening Room #8: IronPython

2006-09-01T00:51:17+00:00

The Screening Room #8: IronPython

Screamingly cool demo, with commentary from Jim Hugunin and Jon Udell.

Tags: ironpython, jon-udell, python

The Screening Room #8: IronPython

2006-09-01T00:51:17+00:00

The Screening Room #8: IronPython

Screamingly cool demo, with commentary from Jim Hugunin and Jon Udell.

Tags: ironpython, jon-udell, python

Toolkits for user innovation

2005-11-03T13:30:35+00:00

Toolkits for user innovation

Jon Udell’s last two paragraphs resonate strongly with me:

Von Hippel advances the notion of user innovation toolkits. The Apache Web server, with its modular architecture, is an example of such a toolkit. In the hands of skilled programmers, Apache can be, and often is, tailored to specific needs. When such customizations are shared, other users benefit. But so do Apache's developers, who, by observing what's done with the toolkit, can more intelligently evolve the core product.

Web-based software delivered as a service is, at its best, another kind of innovation toolkit. Users bring the data; developers wrangle the code; more useful innovation happens faster than it otherwise could.

Via Jon Udell: Redefining hackability

Tags: jon-udell

Greasemonkey etiquette

2005-04-11T17:27:22+00:00

In Meme tracking with Greasemonkey, Jon Udell introduces a userscript which grabs the number of references from del.icio.us and bloglines and appends that information to the top of every page you visit. To be fair on Jon, the version he has released defaults to only doing this for pages on Infoworld.com but modifying it to run on every web page is trivial.

The obvious downside of this kind of script is the amount of additional web traffic it induces. Every page you load in your browser induces an extra HTTP request to both del.icio.us and bloglines. Times that by several hundred users and those sites are going to be serving thousands of requests every minute.

Can this kind of thing scale? The Google toolbar retrieves the PageRank for every page you view, and the Alexa toolbar (and thousands of spyware applications) request information for every page viewed as well. The difference is that the developers host their own servers, and are responsible for their own bandwidth bills.

There are also very serious privacy implications involved in this kind of activity. Right now, Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us access logs are collecting a detailed history of Jon Udell's browsing history - and that of anyone else using the script.

This is a frustrating quandry, because the technique used in Jon's script can be extended in almost limitless ways. Sadly, in a world where bandwidth and server resources are limited such scripts must be approached with caution.

Tags: greasemonkey, jon-udell

Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation

2005-04-04T06:19:31+00:00

Content, services, and the yin-yang of intermediation

Jon Udell combines LibraryLookup and Greasemonkey in his latest screencast.

Via Jon Udell's Radio

Tags: greasemonkey, jon-udell

Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary

2005-03-30T18:53:07+00:00

In The architecture of intermediation, Jon Udell discusses the need for a mechanism for a high-level tool for adding custom features to web applications. In Jon's case, he wants to add a private bookmarks feature to del.icio.us. Jon thought about using a web proxy to intercept and modify del.icio.us pages, but ruled it out as too low-level.

Jon, you need Greasemonkey.

The latest release of the swiss army knife of Firefox extensions adds support for cross-domain XMLHttpRequest calls from greasemonkey scripts. What that means is that you can create a user script (a short JavaScript that will be executed whenever your browser loads specific pages) that can then pull extra data in from another server. This new ability is described in the greasemonkey documentation.

I'm using this for my final year project, a decentralised web annotation system that lets you annotate pages, storing your annotations locally and then sharing your public annotations as a feed (similar to the way RSS aggregators work). The trick there is to run a local web server on some port, then have the Greasemonkey user script (eventually a full extension) communicate with that local server to store and retrieve data. I'm using Ruby on Rails' built in WEBrick server to prototype the service, and it's working a treat.

This architecture could be easily adapted to add private bookmarks to del.icio.us - or to add any number of cool features to any number of other sites. Here's another example: Google's Desktop Search integrates results from your local drive with the search results page on Google. Using greasemonkey and a local web server tied in to OS X Tiger's Spotlight indexer, you could add this functionality to any search site you wanted to. Just be sure to lock down the web server to only serve requests from localhost, to avoid sharing search results for your data with anyone on the network who can see your machine.

When people asked me what I was excited about at SxSW, one of my answers was Greasemonkey. This kind of stuff is the reason why.

Tags: greasemonkey, jon-udell

The on-demand blogosphere

2005-03-07T21:31:35+00:00

The on-demand blogosphere

I get a bit-part in a Jon Udell screencast! This actually ties in to my final year project...

Tags: jon-udell

InfoWorld: Year of the enterprise Wiki

2005-01-06T16:42:57+00:00

InfoWorld: Year of the enterprise Wiki

Wikis for business collaboration make a whole ton of sense.

Via Jon Udell

Tags: jon-udell, wikis

Jon Udell: Pub/sub, tags, and human filters

2004-08-13T17:34:22+00:00

Jon Udell: Pub/sub, tags, and human filters

Maybe del.icio.us style labels scale better than I thought.

Tags: delicious, jon-udell

Jon Udell: del.icio.us

2004-08-12T17:03:31+00:00

Jon Udell: del.icio.us

Jon is doing some interesting things with the del.icio.us tagging system.

Tags: delicious, jon-udell, tagging

PythonCard scriptlets

2002-10-27T10:58:01+00:00

Kevin Altis on scripting applications written in PythonCard:

The entire object model of a PythonCard application is exposed, so if an app doesn't have the feature you want, you can probably extend it with a short "macro" in Python. All scripts are run in the shell, so they share the shell namespace and thus scripts can share variables since the namespace doesn't go away until the application is closed.

Kevin calls these scripts "scriptlets" and has posted an example scriptlet that can insert the current date and time straight in to any text file opened with the PythonCard codeEditor.

Sam Ruby was recently quoted as stating the following over on Jon Udell's blog:

While Java and C# battle over who is the rightful successor to C++, it is quite possible that a language like Python (or, dare I say it, Ruby) will ultimately be the one that wins out.

This is an interesting train of thought. Scripting languages such as Python undeniably lead to faster development times (no compile cycle, less book keeping syntax to worry about) and as computers continue to get faster and cheaper the overhead associated with these languages becomes less and less important. Kevin's concept of an application with an exposed object model that can be tweaked by the user is a powerful idea, and one that could bring real benefits; Python is not a difficult language to program in, and applications which can be scripted easily can become very popular (just look at the mIRC community for an example of that). Unfortunately the ability to script an application also leads to inherent security flaws, as have been seen with VBScript and Microsoft Office - although in the case of Office most of the problems stem from the ability to add macros to individual documents (there are surprisingly few mIRC security alerts despite the in built scripting engine).

Tags: jon-udell, python, sam-ruby, pythoncard