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Nat blogs at:
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Four short links: 8 February 2012
February 08 2012
Mavuno -- an open source, modular, scalable text mining toolkit built upon Hadoop. (Apache-licensed) Cow Clicker -- Wired profile of Cowclicker creator Ian Bogost. I was impressed by Cow Clickers [...] have turned what was intended to be a vapid experience into a source of camaraderie and creativity. People create… read moreFour short links: 7 February 2012
February 07 2012
Integrated Content Editor (GitHub) -- a track changes implementation, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web, written by the NY Times team and open sourced. Data Tables -- featureful jQuery plugin for tables of data. (via Javascript Weekly) Creating a Developer Community (Slideshare) -- treat the… read moreFour short links: 6 February 2012
February 06 2012
Jirafe -- open source e-commerce analytics for Magento platform. iModela -- a $1000 3D milling machine. (via BoingBoing) It's Too Late to Save The Common Web (Robert Scoble) -- paraphrased: "Four years ago, I told you all that Google and Facebook were evil. You did nothing, which is why I… read moreFour short links: 3 February 2012
February 03 2012
Page Speed (Google Code) -- an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools. What Commons… read moreFour short links: 2 February 2012
February 02 2012
Beautiful Buttons for Bootstrap -- cute little button creator, with sliders for hue, saturation, and "puffiness". CMU iPad Course -- iTunes U has the video lectures for a CMU intro to iPad programming. Inspiring Matter -- the conference aims to bring together designers, scientists, artists and humanities people working with… read moreFour short links: 1 February 2012
February 01 2012
Cycles of Invention and Commoditisation (Simon Wardley) -- Explosions of industrial creativity rarely follow the invention or discovery of a technology but instead its commoditisation i.e. it wasn't the discovery of electricity but Edison's introduction of utility services for electricity that produced the creative boom that led to recorded music,… read moreFour short links: 31 January 2012
January 31 2012
The Sky is Rising -- TechDirt's Mike Masnick has written (and made available for free download) an excellent report on the entertainment industry's numbers and business models. Must read if you have an opinion on SOPA et al. Tennis Australia Exposes Match Analytics -- Served from IBM's US-based private cloud,… read moreFour short links: 30 January 2012
January 30 2012
Improvisation and Forgiveness (JP Rangaswami) -- what makes us human is not repetitive action. Human occupations should require human intellect, and there's no more human activity than making a judgement call when processes have failed a customer. Kinect Tech in Laptop Prototypes -- "waving your hands around at your laptop"… read moreFour short links: 27 January 2012
January 27 2012
Data Jurisdiction -- information from the NineFold hosting company in Australia. Has some Aussie-specific content, but would be great to see this internationalized. (via Lachlan Hardy) Anatomy of an Idea (Steven Johnson) -- people who think the Web is killing off serendipity are not using it correctly. Lovely glimpse at… read moreFour short links: 26 January 2012
January 26 2012
Every Day, More iPhones Sold Than Babies Born -- Malthusian explosion of iPhones predicted once there's an iPhone-to-3D-printer dongle. (via Luke Wroblewski) No Safe Harbour -- a collection of political essays, texts, and discussions that help explain and educate about Pirate Party positions. Available for purchase or free download, natch.… read moreFour short links: 25 January 2012
January 25 2012
Mobile Overtaking Web -- provocatively packaged extrapolations of ComScore and similar numbers to conclude that Americans spend more time interacting with mobile apps than with web sites. I'm sure you could beat an iPhone developer to death with the error bars. Best Privacy Policy Ever -- satiric privacy policy from… read moreFour short links: 24 January 2012
January 24 2012
fbootstrap (GitHub) -- HTML, CSS, and JS toolkit for Facebook apps based on Twitter's popular Bootstrap library. Focus on the User -- adds a bookmarklet "Don't Be Evil" which shows your Google search as it would have been before Google+ began artificially inserting itself into Google search results. Written by… read moreFour short links: 23 January 2012
January 23 2012
Adafruit Flora -- wearable electronics and accessories platform. (via Tim O'Reilly) Killed by Code -- paper on software vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices. Discovered via Karen Sandler's wow-generating keynote at linux.conf.au (covered here). (via Selena Deckelmann) DIY London -- fun little Budget-Hero game to make apparent the trade-offs facing politicians.… read morePowers of Ten Perspective on SOPA
January 21 2012
The IBM Powers of Ten video is a classic: as the stolid narrator ticks off powers of ten, the camera pulls back or zooms in and a new layer of complexity is revealed. We need a Powers of Ten video for SOPA. At the initial scale, Hollywood lobbyists convinced Congress… read moreFour short links: 20 January 2012
January 20 2012
On the Problem of Money, Politics, and SOPA (John Battelle) -- My first step will be to read this new book from Larry Lessig, an intellectual warrior who many (including myself) lament as bailing on our core issue of IP law to tilt at the supposed windmill of political corruption.… read moreFour short links: 19 January 2012
January 19 2012
Fragmentation is Not The End of Android -- full of trenchant insights, this post considers the many implications of the Android value chain. Only Apple directly profits from being an OS provider in the mobile ecosystem. For Google it is a cost center particularly struck me. Anyone know whether Google… read moreFour short links: 18 January 2012
January 18 2012
Many Core Processors -- not the first time I've heard nondeterministic computing discussed as a solution to some of our parallel-programming travails. Can't imagine what a pleasure it is to debug. Pinterest Cloned -- it's not the pilfering of the idea that offends my sensibilities, it's the blatant clone of… read moreFour short links: 17 January 2012
January 17 2012
5 Is The New 10 -- I have limited sympathy for the "app developers can't predict their fortunes" complaint: creative arts have always been long tail hit-based businesses, possibly because hits have a large random component. Lessons for Kickstarter Creators (Mat Howie) -- great case study of a disastrous KS… read moreJanuary 16 2012
Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we've sent you. Don't wait for the time machine, because we're never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer's convenience with contempt. read moreFour short links: 16 January 2012
January 16 2012
Computational Science Stack Exchange -- q+a site for data-intensive computation-heavy science. (via Gael Varoquaux) An Open Letter to our Customers, Past and Future (Luma Labs) -- a reminder that poor patent examination hurts innovative startups working in physical goods, just as much as with digital goods. Javascript Performance (Steve Souders)… read moreFour short links: 13 January 2012
January 13 2012
How The Internet Gets Inside Us (The New Yorker) -- at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like… read moreFour short links: 12 January 2012
January 12 2012
Smart Hacking for Privacy -- can mine smart power meter data (or even snoop it) to learn what's on the TV. Wow. (You can also watch the talk). (via Rob Inskeep) Conditioning Company Culture (Bryce Roberts) -- a short read but thought-provoking. It's easy to create mindless mantras, but I've… read moreFour short links: 11 January 2011
January 11 2012
Virtual Sweatshops Defeat CAPTCHAs -- I knew there was an industry around solving CAPTCHAs (to spam comments on blogs, sign up for millions of gmail accounts, etc.) but this is the first time I've seen how much you can be paid for it: employees can expect to earn between $0.35… read moreFour short links: 10 January 2012
January 10 2012
Samsung Develops Emotion-Sensing Smartphone (ExtremeTech) -- By analyzing how fast you type, how much the phone shakes, how often you backspace mistakes, and how many special symbols are used, the special Galaxy S II can work out whether you’re angry, surprised, happy, sad, fearful, or disgusted, with an accuracy of… read moreFour short links: 9 January 2012
January 09 2012
Mr Daisey and the Apple Factor (This American Life) -- episode looking at the claims of human rights problems in Apple's Chinese factories. OpenPilot -- open source UAVs with cameras. Yes, a DIY spy drone on autopilot. (via Jim Stogdill) mbox -- more technical information than you ever thought you'd… read moreFour short links: 6 January 2012
January 06 2012
shim (GitHub) -- a node.js-based browser-compatibility tool that lets you synchronize several devices/browsers and surf the same pages simultaneously on all of them. Useful, of course, for the painful business of ensuring browser compatibility of web apps. (via Tom Armitage) Moore's Law Squared -- John D. Cook found this great… read moreFour short links: 5 January 2012
January 05 2012
Google+ Is Going to Mess Up The Internet (ReadWriteWeb) -- Google thought I would prefer to click through Google+ to find my article than to go straight to it. Severe rip of the negative effects G+ has on the search experience. (via Hacker News) Behind the Scenes of a C64… read moreFour short links: 4 January 2012
January 04 2012
Compiling Android from Source (Jethro Carr) -- not as easy as you might think. The documentation is minimal, and each device has its own binary blobs of not-open-source crap necessary to make them work. Open source is supposed to let users continue to do good things with the device, even… read moreFour short links: 3 January 2012
January 03 2012
What the Sumerians Can Teach Us About Data (Pete Warden) -- money quote: Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information. I also loved the Sumerian boundary marker covered in the supernatural equivalent of "copying is… read moreFour short links: 2 January 2012
January 02 2012
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success (The Atlantic) -- Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. This is a magnificent article, you should read it. (via Juha Saarinen) impress.js (github) -- MIT-licensed Prezi-like presentation tool, built using CSS3 3d transforms. I've never been happy… read moreFour short links: 30 December 2011
December 30 2011
Hadoop Hits 1.0 -- open source distributed computation engine, heavily used in big data analysis, hits 1.0. Sparse and Low-Rank Approximation Wiki -- interesting technique: instead of sampling at 2x the rate you need to discriminate then compressing to trade noise for space, use these sampling algorithms to (intelligently) noisily… read moreFour short links: 29 December 2011
December 29 2011
The Coming War on General Purpose Computation (BoingBoing) -- Cory Doctorow's barnburner talk on how the only way copyright maximalists can win is if general purpose computers are locked down like infectious disease agents or fissionable material. Valve Price Experiments (Geekwire) -- The easiest way to stop piracy is not… read moreFour short links: 28 December 2011
December 28 2011
Terrier IR -- open source (Mozilla) text search engine, now with Hadoop support. s3ql -- open source (GPLv3) Linux filesystem which stores its data on Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. (via Adam Shand) Esprima -- open source (BSD) fast Javascript parser in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly) Hogan.js -- open… read moreFour short links: 27 December 2011
December 27 2011
Write Logs for Machines -- argues that services should log in a format suitable for automated analysis, not for humans to read as has been the custom in the past. tmpltr -- Javascript template previewer, open source on github. Dspace Badge -- what my son and I are building this… read moreFour short links: 8 December 2011
December 08 2011
Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter (PLOSone) -- Tweets involving the ‘fake news’ comedian Stephen Colbert are both happier and of a higher information level than those concerning his senior colleague Jon Stewart. By contrast, tweets mentioning Glenn Beck are lower in… read moreFour short links: 7 December 2011
December 07 2011
Don't Be a Free User (Maciej Ceglowski) -- pay for your free services, else they'll go away. Katta -- Lucene for massive data sets in the cloud. (via Pete Warden) Old Weather -- crowdsourced transcription of old nautical journals to yield historical information for climate researchers. (via National Digital Forum)… read moreFour short links: 6 December 2011
December 06 2011
How to Dispel Your Illusions (NY Review of Books) -- Freeman Dyson writing about Daniel Kahneman's latest book. Only by understanding our cognitive illusions can we hope to transcend them. Appify-UI (github) -- Create the simplest possible Mac OS X apps. Uses HTML5 for the UI. Supports scripting with anything… read moreFour short links: 5 December 2011
December 05 2011
VP Trees -- a data structure for fast spatial searching. A form of nearest neighbour, useful for melodies (PDF) and image retrieval (PDF) and poetry. (via Reddit) iYou -- iTunes plugin to show you all the stuff your phone collects about you. Bar Camps in Primary Schools -- NZ teacher… read moreFour short links: 2 December 2011
December 02 2011
Challenges in Teaching Biology -- everything that Alison says about teaching biology is true of teaching computer science. Read, learn, evolve. First Open Source Netflix Projects Released -- ZooKeeper is a high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. It exposes common services - such as naming, configuration management, synchronization, and group… read moreFour short links: 1 December 2011
December 01 2011
Cutting Their Own Throats (Charlie Stross) -- DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. This essay is gold and so very true. Read, believe. v1.0 of Arduino Out -- this is the dev environment, with language additions and lots of features… read moreFour short links: 30 November 2011
November 30 2011
An Illustrated Guide to Crypographic Hashes -- exactly what it says: learn how hashing works and how you'd use it for passwords, digital signatures, etc. The Age of Fanfiction -- We live in a time where copyright means very little to younger people, and it's not just because they want… read moreFour short links: 29 November 2011
November 29 2011
Reconstructing My Grandfather (JP Rangaswami) -- this is how libraries will be used in the future, by ordinary people (i.e., not professional researchers) reconstructing their families. See my library essay for more thoughts on this. Physical Conservation vs Digitisation for Preservation (Leeds) -- they chose deliberately compromised paper materials (acid-riddled… read moreFour short links: 28 November 2011
November 28 2011
Twine (Kickstarter) -- modular sensors with connectivity, programmable in If This Then That style. (via TechCrunch) Small Sample Sizes Lead to High Margins of Error -- a reminder that all the stats in the world won't help you when you don't have enough data to meaningfully analyse. Yahoo! Cocktails --… read moreFour short links: 25 November 2011
November 25 2011
Continuous Three-Dimensional Control of a Virtual Helicopter Using a Motor Imagery Based Brain-Computer Interface (PLOSone) -- direct brain control is becoming a reality, tiny step by tiny step. Also: HELICOPTERS! Forward Secrecy for HTTPS -- Google contributed a better HTTPS cipher suite to OpenSSL, one that doesn't share keys between… read moreFour short links: 24 November 2011
November 24 2011
Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong -- I was asked to provocatively help focus librarians on the opportunities offered to libraries in the Internet age. If I ask you to talk about your collections, I know that you will glow as you describe the amazing treasures you have. When you… read moreFour short links: 23 November 2011
November 23 2011
Massive Wikimedia Donation -- I missed it when it happened, but the State Library of Queensland made the 4th largest ever donation of high-resolution out-of-copyright images to the Wikimedia Foundation. The image metadata are available through Wikimedia under liberal licensing terms, too. This is what your national and state libraries… read moreFour short links: 22 November 2011
November 22 2011
Facebook is Gaslighting the Web (Anil Dash) -- interesting to see the way in which Facebook is attempting to embrace and extend the web, as opposed to AOL's doomed attempt to set itself up in competition and opposition to the web. As Molly's piece eloquently explains, what Facebook is calling… read moreFour short links: 21 November 2011
November 21 2011
Steve Jobs in Early NeXT Days (YouTube) -- documentary footage of the early retreats at NeXT, where Jobs talks about plans and priorities. Very interesting to watch this knowing how the story ends. I'm astonished by how well Jobs spoke, even then, and delighted by the glimpses of impatience and… read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
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