Wired 12.06 : Cracking the Code to Romance

Annalee Newitz writes about geek approaches to online romance in the June 2004 issue of Wired magazine. The article starts on page 156, and is now online. Christopher Filkins and his FOAF-based Dating Syndicate. Marc Canter’s People Aggregator is mentioned as another dating engine built on FOAF. Kevin Burton is named “The Sniffer” for his use of AIM Sniffer to pick up women in wireless Internet enabled San Francisco cafés. Jonathan Moore is profiled as “The Stalker” for his use Unix shell scripts and Netcat to pull e-mail addresses from wireless networks and match the data with a Friendster profile….

New Technorati APIs and SDK

Technorati released a new version of its APIs tonight. Details are available on the Technorati developers wiki. Use apibeta.technorati.com for now but, if there are no major issues, beta will end in about a week. Technorati will now return your query as RSS if you specify your format parameter. Data are returned in UTF-8 format. The new API has better error handling, including appropriate HTTP responses for bad data or no data. Outbound links are sorted by dates and duplicate links stripped. The new API also allows you to limit the number of returned items….

Code that Kills

Scott Rosenberg of Salon attended the Systems and Software Technology Conference to research the military’s dependence on software code. The average acquisition cycle for a military product, according to conference speakers, is 10 years — and that’s an optimistic figure. Between the time the Pentagon commissions a system and a contractor delivers it, whole generations of private-sector computing software and hardware have come and gone. XML and Web services are crucial for protecting America. If you’re writing software today for a system that’s going to take years to deploy, you have no choice but to plan on everything changing around…