Laura’s “Stuffed Squash galore: Carnivale and Delicata” Kitchen Illiterate food blog post from November 30, 2008 just made in on Slashfood’s “Feast Your Eyes” column.
Exciting not only because it’s Slashfood, but also because Laura’s food photography is being recognized as well as her creative recipes. Here’s the screen shot:
Posted in food, praise | Tagged food, food blog, slashfood | Leave a Comment »
I always thought it strange that the Fenway Art Center is locates in the heart of the Back Bay. It’s been there a long time too. To the right is Cafe Jaffa which is intermittently open and may have a customer or two when you walk by.
Rent can’t be cheap, L’Espalier (one of the most $$$$ restaurants in boston–and worth it) was on this street until their recent move to the Mondrian hotel.
What gives?
Posted in one photo a day | Tagged back bay, boston, potd | Leave a Comment »
Posted in one photo a day | Tagged E60, potd | Leave a Comment »
Chill is in the air and though it’s not clear from the picture, the leave are turning on the Esplande.
Posted in one photo a day | Tagged E60 | Leave a Comment »
From the The Leusure Link web site comes news of a cool event in Jamaica Plain studio of the “A Far Cry” players:
The Leisure Link’s Launch in Boston:
A Fundraiser for Take Back Your Time
with special guest John de Graaf, National Coordinator of Take Back Your TimeTBYT is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.
Event Details:
Thursday, October 8th, 6:30-8:30pm
A Far Cry, 146A South Street, Jamaica Plain
RSVP to alison@theleisurelinkconsulting.com or 917-626-0344; suggested donation: $8-24
Posted in think | Tagged a far cry, events, jp | Leave a Comment »
With apologies to the GOTO statement, the recomendation below is truly harmful.
PAT CONROY ?!?!!?!
The flanking books I can see, but Pat Conroy? I admit that I once read “Prince of Tides,” but I was on vacation at a house with a limited library. Pat Conroy v. Danielle Steele; Conroy wins that one.
But how did Amazon find out? A less than discreet relative perhaps….
(ps. Check out the review snippet from Wapo in the second image)
Posted in books | Tagged books, funny | Leave a Comment »
I starred the year with the goal of reading 100 books. A couple of dense, lengthy ones in Q1 and Q2 combined with a slow two months in early summer, and I stand at 43. Far behind last year’s pace.
I’d have to averge 4.5 books per week to make it to 100. Time to reset. I’m going for 75. 2.5 books a week, any recommendations?
Posted in books | Leave a Comment »
Haven’t updated this since April, so of course my notes are a mess. Here’s the whole list, 2009 Q1-Q3;
Posted in books | Tagged booksiread | Leave a Comment »
Posted in i forgot | Tagged funny, potd | Leave a Comment »
Today’s Journal Report contains links to related articles from the MIT Sloan Management Review archives. Below is a handy list of the 24 articles that are currently available (sponsored by SAS).
MIT Sloan Management Review / Wall Street Journal Business Insight
Proactive Environmental Management: Avoiding the Toxic Trap
Managing Technology as a Business Strategy
Hurdle the Cross-Functional Barriers to Strategic Change
A New Strategy Framework for Coping with Turbulence
Do Customer Loyalty Programs Really Work?
Global Sustainability and the Creative Destruction of Industries
Saturn’s Supply-Chain Innovation: High Value in After-Sales Service
Linking Actions to Profits in Strategic Decision Making
The Great Leap: Driving Innovation From the Base of the Pyramid
The Era of Open Innovation
Creating Growth With Services
The Power of Innomediation
Memo to Marketing
The Roots of Sustainability
Discovering “Unk-Unks”
A Supply Chain View of the Resilient Enterprise
Four Keys to Managing Emergence
Growing Negative Services
How Management Innovation Happens
Sustainability Through Servicizing
Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution
Institutionalizing Innovation
Should You Build Strategy Like You Build Software?
Integrating Innovation Style and Knowledge Into Strategy
Posted in MIT Sloan | Tagged bus, business articles, business insight, business plans, mit, MIT Sloan, wall street journal | Leave a Comment »
Here’s some quick stub-code for shortening urls using PHP + cURL and the http://is.gd/ api.
function is_gd_shorten_url($url_to_shorten, $use_curl=false)
{
# uses cURL or fopen to return the short version of a URL
# fopen requries the php.ini setting allow_url_open=on which
# many web hosts don't allow, cURL requires PHP to be compiled
# with cURL support. Many hosts allow/provide cURL. check a
# phpinfo() page if you don't know which vs. to use.
$url_stem = "http://is.gd/api.php?longurl=";
$url = $url_stem . urlencode($url_to_shorten);
$shortened_url = '';
if(!$use_curl) {
$fp = fopen($url, 'r');
while (!feof($fp)) {
$shortened_url .= fread($fp, 8192);
}
fclose($fp);
} elseif(defined(curl_init)) {
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
# return the transfer as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$shortened_url = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
return $shortened_url;
}
Update: added support for fopen in addition to curl.
Posted in code, webservices | Leave a Comment »
That’s sort of a visualization of the top tracks I’ve listened to and reported back to Last.fm. I’ve been wanting to do more research in the webservices area in anticipation of doing a larger collective intelligence type project, so when my friend Mark mentioned this python script called pylast I thought I’d try it out.
The pylast code is nicely done, but I didn’t see much in the way of documentation, so it took a little while to get this going, hopefully the links below will save you some time if you’re starting out hacking Last.fm’s API with Python.
pylast module source
pylast installation
pylast documentation (from PyDoc, e.g. pydoc -w pylast pylast.html)
A few things you’ll need (in addition to a Last.fm account with some data)
Last.fm API Account you’ll need you API Key, Secret Key, and Last.fm password
Last.fm API documentation
Here is the source code. to extract your top tracks from last.fm. (also below)
My top tracks overall
The wordle-ready file input file
Create your own Wordle
Please let me know how you’d improve this or if you have suggestions, links to / for cool things to do with Last.fm’s API.
#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import pylast
import re
from md5 import md5
user_name = 'mitsmb'
user_password = 'password_you_login_to_lastfm_with'
api_key = 'YOUR_LASTFM_API_KEY_GOES_HERE'
api_secret = 'YOUR_LASTFM_SECRET_GOES_HERE'
top_tracks_file = open('top_tracks_wordle.txt', 'w')
# to make the output more interesting for wordle viz.
# run against all periods. if you just want one period,
# delete the others from this list
time_periods = ['PERIOD_12MONTHS', 'PERIOD_6MONTHS', 'PERIOD_3MONTHS', 'PERIOD_OVERALL']
# time_periods = ['PERIOD_OVERALL']
#####
## shouldn't have to edit anything below here
#####
md5_user_password = md5(user_password).hexdigest()
sg = pylast.SessionKeyGenerator(api_key, api_secret)
session_key = sg.get_session_key(user_name, md5_user_password)
user = pylast.User(user_name, api_key, api_secret, session_key)
top_tracks = []
for time_period in time_periods:
# by default pylast returns a seq in the format:
# "Item: Andrew Bird - Fake Palindromes, Weight: 33"
tracks = user.get_top_tracks(period=time_period)
# regex that tries to pull out only the track name (
# for the ex. above "Fake Palindromes"
p = re.compile('.*[\s]-[\s](.*), Weight: [\d]+')
for track in tracks:
m = p.match(str(track))
track = m.groups()[0]
top_tracks.append(track)
# be nice to last.fm's servers
time.sleep(5)
top_tracks = "\n".join(top_tracks)
top_tracks_file.write(top_tracks)
top_tracks_file.close()
Posted in code | Tagged last.fm, pylast, python, webservices | Leave a Comment »
Christensen gave a keynote address today at the World Innovation Forum, here are three talks he’s given at MIT that are available via MIT World. (MIT World has over 630 video’s of significant talks given at MIT dating back to 2001).
May 13, 2008
Clayton Christensen
February 25, 2002
Moderator: Stephen W. Van Evera
Panelists:
May 23, 2002
Clayton Christensen
Posted in MIT World, think | Tagged christensen, Clayton Christensen, video, wif09, world innovation forum | Leave a Comment »
Here’s a list of articles that have appeared in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Wall Street Journal / MIT Sloan Business Insight or SMR blogs. I’m tracking the #wif09 Twitter hashtag to see if other articles we’ve published would be relevant to the #wif09 crowd (on-site or, like me, virtual).
Enjoy!
An interview with Clayton M. Christensen
December 14, 2008
Sure, the economy’s bad. But it’s a good time to innovate, according to Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who focuses on innovation. He is the author or co-author of a number of books on the subject, from “The Innovator’s Dilemma” to a book due out next month on health care, “The Innovator’s Prescription.”
An interview with Clayton M. Christensen
April 1, 2009 (registration required)
In the minds of many, the financial crisis has given innovation a black eye. Disruption theorist Clayton Christensen disagrees.
By Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Gerald Berstell and Denise Nitterhouse
April 1, 2007 (purchase: 6.50 or subscribe)
This article has three purposes: The first is to describe the benefits that executives can reap when they segment their markets by job. The second is to describe the methods that those involved in marketing and new-product development can use to identify the job-based structure of a market. And, finally, the third is to show how the details of business plans become coherent when innovators understand the job to be done.
By Stuart L. Hart and Clayton M. Christensen
October 15, 2002 (purchase: 6.50 or subscribe)
Billions of poor people aspire to join the world’s economy. Disruptive innovation can pave the way, helping companies combine sustainable corporate growth with social responsibility.
By C. K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy
July 15, 2003 (purchase: 6.50 or subscribe)
The next practices of innovation must shift the focus away from products and services and onto experience environments — supported by a network of companies and consumer communities — to co-create unique value for individual customers.
An interview with Dan Ariely
September 22, 2008
This Business Insight piece is a shorter version of the interview published in MIT Sloan Management Review (see below).
An Interview with Dan Ariely
January 7, 2009 (registration, purchase/6.50 or subscribe)
People aren’t stupid – they just often act that way. Noted behavioral economist Dan Ariely explains what that should mean for strategists.
Posted in MIT Sloan, publishing | Tagged C. K. Prahalad, christensen, Clayton Christensen, Clayton M. Christensen, Prahalad, wif, wif09, world innovation forum | Leave a Comment »
With the release of our book, Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers, I’ve been reflecting back on the start of the post-click marketing movement.
Our vision for post-click marketing as a new discipline — elevating the concept of landing pages into a more a holistic and strategic online marketing practice — was born in the spring of 2005. At the same time, I began a graduate program at MIT Sloan, and over the subsequent 2 years, interwove many of the latest management and marketing ideas from MIT’s best professors into our post-click marketing best practices.
Here are my top 3 “landing page secrets from MIT”, and who inspired them:
Read the full article “3 MIT-inspired landing page strategies – Post-Click Marketing Blog – ion interactive.”
Thanks to @MITSloanExecEd for the tip.
Posted in MIT Sloan, design, marketing | Tagged landing pages, post-click | Leave a Comment »
Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s post, I created a wordle visualization of my Tweets. Tweets were retrieved using this python script. Then I ran the output through this sed filter:
sed s/\<[^\<]*\>//g tweets > tweets.txtThe result:
Posted in social media | 1 Comment »
Title, (Author Last Name, Date of Publication) – Date Completed
Page count for March: 1,095 (36.50/day)
The list of books read in 2008 struggled its way to 66, I’m aiming for 100 in 2009.
2009 totals: 21 books, 6,254 pages, 52.12/day, on pace for 63 books, behind 12 books–OUCH.
The Amartya Sen book killed me, it started to take away my will to read anything…. Oh and baseball season started.
Posted in books | Leave a Comment »
From the list below I would highly recommend: Pollan’s In Defense of Food and Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.
Title, (Author Last Name, Date of Publication) – Date Completed
Page count for March: 1,545 (49.84/day)
The list of books read in 2008 struggled its way to 66, I’m aiming for 100 in 2009.
2009 totals: 19 books, 5,159 pages, 57.32/day, on pace for 76 books, behind 6 books.
Posted in books | Tagged books, books I read, culbert, epping, kamdan, kleiner, pollan, roy | Leave a Comment »
The following function returns true if the current user is one of the bots we consider “good.” (Not that they are better than other legit bots, but ones that we provide a special service to)
This code can be used to allow search engines to index content that is normally behind a registration form. For a good user experience, thought it should be used in conjunction with a “first click free” type implementation (which I’m still working on).
In a WordPress local install you can put this in your blogs functions.php page and then call it in the loop as part of the decision to output the_excerpt() or the_content().
# is the remote client (current web browser requesting page that calls
# this function) one of the
# search bots that we would like to serve alternate content to? (e.g.
# should they get full text version
# of content pages, or should we show them the preview + registration
# form?)
function is_good_bot()
{
# to avoid unecessary lookup, only check if the UA matches one of
# the bots we like
$ua = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
if(
preg_match("/Yahoo! Slurp/i", $ua) ||
preg_match("/googlebot/i", $ua) ||
# for testing purposes, put something from your current user
# agent string in below
# preg_match("/2009042315/", $ua) ||
preg_match("/msnbot/i", $ua)
)
{
# user agent contains one of the magic phrases, now do a
# forward and reverse DNS check
# each of the search providers that we use asserts that their
# bot domains will always
# end in the strings in the below preg_match(es)
# check forward/reverse to make IP address / hostname spoofing
# very hard.
$ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$hostname=gethostbyaddr($ip);
$ip_by_hostname=gethostbyname($hostname);
if ($ip_by_hostname == $ip) {
if(
preg_match("/\.googlebot\.com$/", $hostname) ||
preg_match("/search\.msn\.com$/", $hostname) ||
# testing: enter your hostname here
# preg_match("/example.com$/", $hostname) ||
preg_match("/crawl\.yahoo\.net$/", $hostname)
)
{
# good bot.
return true;
} else {
# bad bot, and possible bad person all around.
return false;
}
} else {
# bad bot, and possible bad person all around.
return false;
}
} else {
# If the UA of a prefered bot isn't present, just skip the 2x
# DNS checks
return false;
}
}
Posted in code, wordpress | Tagged dns, forward dns, googlebot, msnbot, php, reverse dns, slurp | Leave a Comment »
MIT Sloan Management Review (where I work) jointly produces a special report in the Wall Street Journal called “Business Insight”. It’s published in print and on WSJ.com & MIT SMR’s site.
For further reading on topics raised in Business Insight articles we include links to work SMR has published in the past. As part of the partnership, we “unlock” these articles and make them freely available PDF downloads (for a period of time).
Below is a list of the 17 articles from the archives that are currently available as free downloads.
Many thanks to this edition’s sponsor, MIT Sloan Executive Education, the authors and WSJ.com.
Posted in MIT Sloan, publishing, think | Tagged business articles, business insight, MIT Sloan, mitsmr, smr, wsj | 1 Comment »
