Some good thoughts on the evolution of the web:

• Joe Gregorio on XHTML + XForms + XLink = Xanadu (as in complex mess) – also see Shirky In Praise of Evolvable Systems
• Sterling Hughes asks Isn’t It Supposed to Get Easier?
• Mark has been writing some XHTML 2.0 articles, the latest is about dropped elements: All That We Can Leave Behind

Hmm, looks like Stanford likes our Events Calendar layout much more than we do. (overhauling as we speak – well, not when I’m writing the blog instead of working, but yeah).

A fascinating Analysis of Netflix’s DVD Allocation System. I’ve been subscribing for about a year now, and have been really happy with Netflix. Turnaround is around 2-3 days, and the one time a DVD didn’t arrive, it was a breeze (a few clicks) to deal with.

ETCON’s started yesterday. Cory’s been posting some notes on boingboing. Also:

• ETCON Wiki
• ETCON Trackback
• Confab – An Ad-Hoc Conversational Space for the ETCON

I put in a rewrite rule to block outside referers in my junk folder. It wasn’t so much the bandwidth that was the problem (it was minimal anyway), but it struck me as sort of obnoxious for people to be linking to that stuff willy nilly.

XMPP rises to face SIMPLE standard – good to hear XMPP (Jabber) is gaining support, it really does beat the pants off of SIMPLE.

the World as a Blog – Weblogs.com + geocoding + RSS

AMD launched the Opteron today. I found Ace’s Hardware’s review (stupendous server performance coverage) and AMDZone’s review (regular workstation numbers) the most informative.

Based on the Ace’s reviews, it looks like the Opteron blows away the competition on Linux. Check out the MySQL performance on that sucker.

FiringSquad also has a great interview with Tim Sweeney on the impact of 64-bits on gaming:

In Unreal Tournament 2003, we built 2000-polygon meshes, texture map them, and use them in-game with diffuse lighting. That was a simple process, which didn’t require any memory beyond that taken up by the mesh and texture maps.

In our next-generation technology, we are building 2,000,000-polygon meshes, and running them through a preprocessing program that analyzes the geometry and self-shadowing potential of the mesh based on thousands of incident lighting direction using per-pixel floating point math, and compresses all of this data down to texture maps, bump maps, and 16-component spherical harmonic maps at as high a resolution as possible.

This process uses many gigabytes of memory, and implementing it on 32-bit CPU’s places a lot of constraints on the size of meshes we can preprocess and the resolution of maps we can generate. With onerous programmer gymnastics, this kind of algorithm could be made disk-based or Address Windowing Extensions aware, but these approaches require an order of magnitude more development effort, and aren’t practical given the frequency with which we change and improve our algorithms.

This layout needs rethinking. I think I may have to go all absolute.

The True Cost of Hegemony: Huge Debt

Foreign investors now have claims on the United States amounting to about $8 trillion of its financial assets. That’s the result of the ever-larger American balance-of-payments deficits — totaling nearly $3 trillion — since 1982. Last year, the balance-of-payments deficit, the gap between the amount of money that flows into the country and the amount that flows out, was about 5 percent of gross national product. This year it may be larger still.

An interesting article that raises some questions. Niall Ferguson, the author also raises the spector of the rising Euro (Krugman disagrees). See also: concerns about fiat systems, national debt

Via Ming, who’s been covering all sorts of relatedness lately.