Four short links: 20 Feb 2009

Accessibility, trails, Pacman, and power today. Have a fun weekend!

1. Social Accessibility Project -- clever IBM approach to solving web accessibility problems: a sidebar for Firefox that lets people with assistive devices like screenreaders say "hey, I had this problem with this page", and a crowd will help fix it. (via Derek Featherstone's Webstock talk, notes here)
2. Why I Want a Million Quid (mySociety) -- Tom's onto something. I am hooked by this vision of "systems where each person who is helped to solve a problem leaves a trail of advice, contacts, insider information and new user-friendly web services behind them". We're used to the data people leave behind being discrete and implicit (another purchase for the recommendation engine) rather than longitudinal and explicit (people who looked at this item eventually went on to find their answer here).
3. The PacMan Dossier -- everything there is to know about Pacman, from designer Toru Iwatani's inspiration and design process, through to the logic errors behind bugs and why it's better to move the joystick before you reach the turn. (via Grand Text Auto)
4. Two Stanford Students Rethink the Light Switch -- a power switch with a network connection and tactile feedback: teh awesome.

Four short links: 19 Feb 2009

Art, astronomy and more fun for you in today's four short links:

1. Found in Space -- there's an astronomy bot on Flickr that identifies stars in the night sky, and from the unique positions of the stars figures out what bit of the night sky is looked at and then adds notes for interesting parts of the sky visible in the shot. A brilliant use of computer vision techniques to add value to existing data. (via Stinky).
2. 99 Secrets Twittered -- Matt Webb is posting a secret a day from Carl Steadman's 99 Secrets, an early piece of art on the web. Matt's explanation is worth reading. Ze Frank really made me realize that every web app is a medium for art, for provoking human responses, and now I keenly watch for signs of art breaking out.
3. Internet Ephemera -- a brief muse on "if we start with the assumption that everything we put online is ephemeral, how does that change what we put online?"
4. Pockets of Potential (PDF) -- a 52-page PDF talking about opportunities for supporting learning with the mobile devices already in kids' lives (via Derek Wenmoth).

Four short links: 18 Feb 2009

A day of optimism (or is it pessimism), mobile, and local. Enjoy!

1. How Are You Coping With Anxiety Collapse? (BoingBoing) -- the economy, collapse, potential Depression, world to wrack and ruin was a repeating theme of Kiwi Foo Camp this year. We had a debate, the moot being "New Zealand is Fucked". You'll be glad to know that the opposing team won, but largely on the grounds that "the rest of the world will be worse off than us". Best line was at the end, when moderator Russell Brown said, "ok, let's head back for a drink" and the final speaker of the opposing team pushed his glass across the table and said, "here, have mine--it's half full." Anyway, a timely and pressing subject and the human stories in the comments are fascinating.
2. Let my board and me become as one: the Wii balance board/Google Earth mashup -- groovy UI hack that lets you surf the world via Google Earth.
3. Exporting the Past into the Future (Matt Jones) -- wonderful exploration of location-based services from an eminently human point of view. "Where you are right now has limited value".
4. Top 10 UK Android Mobile Apps -- how utterly banal the items on the list are, proof positive that Android has made it into the mainstream.

Four short links: 17 Feb 2009

Four Tuesday quickies:

1. The Technology Behind Coraline -- 3D stop-motion movie used a 3D printer to make the dolls and things like drops of water.
2. Some OSCON Proposal Tips (Alex Russell) -- good advice for anyone submitting a talk to a technical conference.
3. Oscar Predictions You Can Bet On -- Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight turns his attention to the Oscars.
4. Web Hooks and the Programmable Web of Tomorrow -- a epic presentation of different ways to offer and use callbacks, URLs on your site that a remote service can hit when something happens on their service. (via Stinky)

Four short links: 16 Feb 2009

A lot of Python and databases today, with some hardware and Twitter pranking/security worries to taste:

1. Free Telephony Project, Open Telephony Hardware -- professionally-designed mass-manufactured hardware for telephony projects. E.g., IP04 runs Asterisk and has four phone jacks and removable Flash storage. Software, schematics, and PCB files released under GPL v2 or later.
2. Don't Click Prank Explained -- inside the Javascript prank going around Twitter. Transparent overlays would appear to be dangerous.
3. Tokyo Cabinet: A Modern Implementation of DBM -- ok, so there's definitely something going on with these alternative databases. Here's the 1979 BTree library reinvented for the modern age, then extended with PyTyrant, a database server for Tokyo Cabinet that offers HTTP REST, memcached, and a simple binary protocol. Cabinet is staggeringly fast, as this article makes clear. And if that wasn't enough wow for one day, Tokyo Dystopia is the full-text search engine. The Tyrant tutorial shows you how to get the server up and running. And what would technology be without a Slideshare presentation? (via Stinky)
4. Whoosh -- a pure Python fulltext search library.

New Zealand Goes Black

The previous government in New Zealand enacted an amendment to the Copyright Act that required ISPs to have a policy to disconnect users after repeated accusations of infringement, over the objections of technologists. While it's possible to have a policy that requires proof rather than accusation, APRA (the RIAA of New Zealand) strongly opposes any such attempts at reasonable interpretation of Section 92. The minor parties in the coalition government oppose the "three accusations and you're offline" section and want it repealed. This is the last week before that law is due to come into effect and the Creative Freedom Foundation, a group formed to represent artists and citizens who oppose the section, has a week of protest planned to convince the ruling National Party to repeal S92.

The first day's action was blacking out Twitter and Facebook avatars. I did it, as did Channel 3 Business News, a Creative Director at Saatchi and Saatchi, oh and Stephen Fry. Kudos to Juha Saarinen who first put out the call. This is building up to a full Internet blackout day on February 23rd. I'm delighted to say that the idea was formed at Kiwi Foo Camp, and the folks who were at Kiwi Foo have been running wild with it--building banners, releasing templates, spreading the word.

Four short links: 13 Feb 2009

One work-related and three fun geeky links to set you up for the weekend:

1. Continuous Deployment and Continuous Learning -- I've been reading about the processes and structures that different organizations use to develop software, and this was interesting. "Our eventual conclusion was that there was no reason to have code that had passed the integration step but was not yet deployed."
2. Pixel Art with Book Jackets -- the perfect thing to do with a shelf of O'Reilly books ....
3. WhatTheFont -- take a photo of some text with your iPhone and this app will identify the font.
4. La Princesse in Liverpool -- an amazing piece of civic theatre. I am in awe of Liverpool for greenlighting it, and of La Machine, the French creators of La Princesse.

Four short links: 12 Feb 2009

Two links on visualization and two on life:

1. Myth of the Concentration Oasis -- Vaughan of Mind Hacks takes on the trendy notion that the Internet is turning us into brainless dullards who are unable to focus on any subject for longer than a 15s TV commercial. "The trouble is, it's plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case."
2. UUorld -- gorgeous map-based visual analytics environment for Mac OS X. Lovely to see something step beyond the "throw it onto a Google Map", which has become commonplace.
3. Why I Can't Afford Cheap -- great story about an octogenarian talking about her prized possessions. (via Titine's delicious stream)
4. Visualization Trends for the Noosphere (Jon Udell) -- thoughtful commentary on what's needed to make data visualization as simple as email. Viz is an incredibly powerful tool for translating data into understanding, but it's currently too damn hard to "mix the paint" (Udell's great term for the data hacking to convert, fix, etc. the data before they can be used). (via Titine's delicious stream)

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray.

1. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act of the highest folly, or all of the above? (via Matt Jones)
2. Reinvention Draws Near for Newsweek -- fascinating look at how Newsweek are refocusing their magazine. "If we don't have something original to say, we won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable." gives me hope. Newsweek are hoping to target fewer but richer advertisers, essentially a business strategy of tapping existing customers for more. This feels like they're ceding the contested parts of their business (commodity news stories) and doubling down on the bits that nobody else is fighting for yet (their columnists, pictures, whitespace). What else could they do? Possibly nothing (see Innovator's Dilemma), but the alternative is figuring out something new that people want and giving them that. Easy to say, hard for anyone to do.
3. Tinkerkit - a physical computing kit for designers. Arduino-compatible components for rapid prototyping. Sweet!
4. Stanford University YouTube Channel -- short interesting talks by Stanford researchers. Brains on chips, stem cells to fight deafness, and brain imagery are some of the first up there. The talks aren't condescending or vague, they're aimed at "a bright and curious audience", as the Mind Hacks blog post about them put it.

Four short links: 11 Feb 2009

Investment, search engines, iPhones, and a cool hardware hack. It could be notes from a pitch meeting last year but it's not, it's today's four short links:

1. The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan, Open Source Funding -- lovely criteria for a company that he'll fund. "8. You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download"
2. Introduction to Information Retrieval -- readable and real-world book on writing search engines, from three Stanford professors (one of whom happens to be the head of Yahoo! Research). Found via Greg Linden's glowing review.
3. The iPhone Becomes a Web Server (ReadWrite Web) -- I got a frisson reading this. There's something exciting in the idea that I can carry my web app around with me in my pocket. I can't say why, but I feel like having your mobile device offer services to other devices (be they mobile, laptop, desktop, or server) opens the door to different architectures. We played around with this a while ago with desktop web apps, but it didn't fly. I'll be watching this space.
4. Hemispherical Mirror Projection -- very cool, albeit non-trivial, hack to get a Mac's screen projected, with compensation for the distortion, inside a half-dome like a planetarium.

Recent Posts

• Four short links: 10 Feb 2009 on February 9, 2009
• Four short links: 6 Feb 2009 on February 6, 2009
• Four short links: 5 Feb 2009 on February 5, 2009
• Four short links: 4 Feb 2009 on February 4, 2009
• Four short links: 3 Feb 2009 on February 3, 2009
• Four short links: 2 Feb 2009 on February 2, 2009
• Open Source NG Databases (mailing list summary) on February 2, 2009
• Four short links: 30 Jan 2009 on January 30, 2009
• Four short links: 29 Jan 2009 on January 29, 2009
• Four short links: 28 Jan 2009 on January 28, 2009