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Jon Udell
Personal blog · blog.jonudell.netprogrammingweb
Jon Udell's personal blog at blog.jonudell.net covers programming and web. Since 2007, 65 different Hacker News readers have linked it 147 times, most often “A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Strategies for Internet citizens
Most-linked posts?
- A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-10-24
- The Tao of Unicode Sparklines (2021)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-08-06
- A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database [2009]3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-07-23
- My New Library Superpower2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-14
- XMLUI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-19
- Open web annotation of audio and video2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-11
- Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-20
- Another way to think about geeks and repetitive tasks « Jon Udell2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-01-09
- Do Repeat Yourself, with Variations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-19
- Designing for least knowledge2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-12-28
What Hacker News says?
>Has anything like this been attempted? Might it work? It has been tried, and early attempts failed. Jon Udell was one of the drivers behind the Elm City Project, which merged many RSS feeds of calendar information into a uniform resource. [0] Maybe its time has come again. [0] https://blog.jonudell.net/elmcity-project-faq/
Comment linking /elmcity-project-faq/
on “Meetup.com alternatives”Submitted XMLUI as a story · 620 points
HN discussionInteresting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile. I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total. Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a he…
Comment linking /2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you-talk-to-a-person-with-hearing-loss/
on “Can't you just turn up the volume?”Submitted The Tao of Unicode Sparklines (2021) as a story · 106 points
HN discussionYou want PWP < https://blog.jonudell.net/2016/10/15/from-pdf-to-pwp-a-visio... > (Later aborted, and the group's work was rolled into EPUB3. As you note, there remains a genuine need for it.) On the other hand, there's nothing stopping you from using a double-barrelled file extension for denoting this sort of thing, e.g. "memex-opus.pub.html"; so long as it ends with something recognizable, double-clicking should st…
Comment linking /2016/10/15/from-pdf-to-pwp-a-vision-for-compound-web-documents/
on “Deurbanising the Web [pdf]”Submitted GitHub for English Teachers as a story · 73 points
HN discussionThere used to be a python spreadsheet that worked as a spreadsheet - Resolver One. It was .Net based but did not make enough money. I wonder if done now there would be enough support to open source something like this. For a review see https://blog.jonudell.net/2007/09/27/first-look-at-resolver-...
Comment linking /2007/09/27/first-look-at-resolver-an-ironpython-based-spreadsheet/
on “Pyspread – Pythonic Spreadsheet”Submitted Working with Postgres Types as a story · 65 points
HN discussionThat's a really good point. I wonder if folks would intuitively get it if you provided little data visualization (visible on hover or whatever). Like: Result 1: (4.5 ) Result 2: (5.0 ) edit: HN stripped out the unicode characters :(. I was using something like this: https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/05/the-tao-of-unicode-spar... .
Comment linking /2021/08/05/the-tao-of-unicode-sparklines/
on “How not to sort by average rating (2009)”Submitted My own personal AWS S3 bucket as a story · 57 points
HN discussionHypothesis is going strong. They have smart people working on it, it's fully open source with open APIs and data available over anonymous RSS, the culture is nothing like rap/bro culture, and the founder is independently wealthy from winning the startup lottery in a past life and seems to be running the thing as a passion project no matter how much it makes. (Their main commercial play right now is selling higher ed…
Comment linking /2021/09/03/notes-for-an-annotation-sdk/
on “Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M”Submitted Why the Maya used a 260-day calendar as a story · 51 points
HN discussionFollow up: Looking over the old SIMILE site I couldn't find the original project. Also David Huynh didn't mention it in his own website, but some searching yielded the original project, "Parallax" https://books.google.com/books?id=Y_FZPtpgntwC&pg=PA36 More from the era: https://blog.jonudell.net/2008/08/25/motivating-people-to-wr...
Comment linking /2008/08/25/motivating-people-to-write-the-semantic-web-a-conversation-with-david-huynh-about-parallax/
on “OpenRefine – free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data”Submitted Geothermal Power in the North Bay as a story · 48 points
HN discussionNever heard of it. Because it is silverlight, never would have been able to run it. Sounds like it did a lot less according to http://blog.jonudell.net/2008/02/14/popfly-and-pipes/ Lemme guess, you worked on it?
Comment linking /2008/02/14/popfly-and-pipes/
on “The Forgotten Yahoo Project That Inspired Two Recently Funded Startups”Submitted A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database as a story · 34 points
HN discussionThe timezone database is also a surprising amount of fun: https://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation...
Comment linking /2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-olsonzoneinfotz-database/
on “Tensions rise as Iranian dams cut off Iraqi water supplies”Submitted Notes for an annotation SDK (2021) as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI did a similar thing (with Bill Zeller and John Udell) as a ubiquity/twitter extension a couple of years earlier[1]... but in practice the low resolution of the standard unicode caracters makes them just a novelty; the technique's been reinvented several times but hasn't found a niche. Even this font doesn't quite hack it for me - the curves are too wide to take in the time series at a glance. [1] http://blog.jonud…
Comment linking /2009/01/13/fuel-prices-and-pageviews/
on “Histogrem: The Histogram Font”Submitted Awakened grains of sand as a story · 13 points
HN discussionAgreed, I used to read Jon a lot back in the magazine days. Glad to see he is still at it! This page will answer some of your questions: https://blog.jonudell.net/about/
Comment linking /about/
on “Working with Postgres Types”Submitted A California-sized solar panel as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI presume you are familiar with the long-time strategy among some professional photographers to put a starter pistol (technically a firearm) into their photography gear so make it less likely to go missing? https://blog.jonudell.net/2007/05/09/amazing-lifehack-pack-a...
Comment linking /2007/05/09/amazing-lifehack-pack-a-starter-pistol-to-deter-luggage-theft/
on “Air Canada returned lost bag, it now had knife,toiletries, ticket scanner inside”Submitted Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse as a story · 9 points
HN discussionJon Udell had a very interesting article recently on a related topic: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-... Jon's particular slant was reading the comments in the timezone database and reflecting on the political influences captured within. A fun read.
Comment linking /2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-olsonzoneinfotz-database/
on “What every developer should know about time”Submitted Web thinkers are not confused by shiny new things « Jon Udell as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI'm a fan, and documented my journey in a series of posts including: https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/07/24/pl-pgsql-versus-pl-pyth... https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/13/pl-python-metaprogrammi... https://blog.jonudell.net/2021/08/21/postgres-functional-sty...
Comment linking /2021/08/21/postgres-functional-style/
on “Ask HN: Python UDFs in SQL. Who is using?”Submitted What happened to simple, basic web hosting? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHere's what I'd seen before. Looks like it was discontinued as a product even when I first saw it years ago. http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/03/14/the-floating-arms-keyboa...
Comment linking /2009/03/14/the-floating-arms-keyboard/
on “Ask HN: Has anybody here ever used a completely split keyboard?”Submitted Mapping the decentralization movement as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
