Four short links: 24 Apr 2009

Data, fonts, transparency, and exceptions:

1. Performance Comparison: Key/Value Stores for Language Model Counts (Brendan O'Connor) -- sort-of benchmarking for the various distributed key-value stores. One of the first efforts to systematically investigate in such a way that there can be informed comment on value and quality of the alternatives. (via mattb's delicious stream)
2. Typographica's Favourite Fonts of 2008 -- what it says. (via waxy)
3. Transparency is Bunk (Aaron Swartz) -- So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what’s really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a “success”: an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before.
4. To Except is Human, To Handle Is Divine (Marco Tabini) -- this is a great piece on how to write code that deals with exceptional circumstances. Sample headings: Errors as Opportunities and Break Before You Fix

Locavore's Open Data

Buster McLeod is taking an "open data" policy towards his latest project, Locavore the iPhone app, by revealing the first month's stats. Locavore is a great app that helps you eat locally by showing you what produce is in season near you and what farmer's markets you can buy it at. It's a well-designed app that I look forward to using this Spring and Summer. (Disclaimer: I am proud to call Buster a friend of mine)

Since launching on 3/17 he's had 5,681 sales for almost $12,000 in revenue (as of 4/21) -- that's about $5,000 for Apple. Locavore recieved a lot of press, but as you can see above it was getting featured on the homepage of the iTunes store that really made the app. On Locavore's most profitable day it had almost 1,000 downloads and reached #65 on the top raking chart.

Buster intends to add Facebook Connect in a future version. He shares some thoughts on usage data in the rest of his post.

So what can be learned from this other than get featured by the App Store team? It's hard to guess what exact process they use, but it seems very likely that they look for an app that is unique, useful, well-designed and well-priced. Locavore was the first of its kind for the app store. It's priced at $2.99, breaking it out of the bargain basement $.99 apps, but keeping it within impulse purchase ("Yes, I'll eat healthier with this and $2.99 isn't that much to spend to eat healthier"). In short if you want to be featured build something Apple can highlight proudly and I'm sure it doesn't hurt make some money from.

Four short links: 23 Apr 2009

Multitouch, visualizations, body hacks, and ubicomp:

1. Dell Demos Multitouch on the Studio One 19 (Engadget) -- the multitouch software on this baby is Fingertapps from the New Zealand company Unlimited Realities, whose founder was at Kiwi Foo Camp this year. Multitouch hits consumer PCs in a very mainstream way.
2. Circos -- open source Perl library to produce beautiful circular data displays. (via flowing data)
   
3. Brain Gain: The Underground World of “Neuroenhancing” Drugs (New Yorker) -- more on the body hacks theme of radical and literal self-improvement, as originally documented by Quinn Norton. What I found interesting was that when BoingBoing linked to it, they quoted the "Provigil might make us smarter" bit, and when MInd Hacks linked to it, they quoted the negative effects of amphetamine-based drugs.
4. Towards the Web of Things: Web Mashups for Embedded Devices -- slides and notes for a presentation given at MEM 2009. Basically saying that the Internet of Things should be built on JSON and REST, with demo. (via Freaklabs)

Windows 7 Starter Pushes the Web and IE

I run XP on my netbook and I've been looking forward to running Windows 7 on it. So I've been watching news about Windows 7 with interest. There is much discussion this week that the low-priced Starter Edition will only let you run three apps at a time. If you want to run more then you'll have to pay for the next level up.

Ed Bott's got a great post that details what it's like to use Windows 7 Starter and its limits. It's not as simple as just three apps. There are many utilities and minor apps that don't count. Windows Explorer, the Command Prompt, Task Manager, some services (like anti-virus software) and Desktop Gadgets don't count.

The most interesting move is that IE doesn't count towards your three apps. So using IE gets you that fourth app in a pinch. I wonder if this was a conscious decision on Microsoft's part to try to keep people using IE. Updated: I had misread a portion of Ed's post and IE is not exempt from the 3 app limit. My apologies. Thanks to Ed for pointing this out in the comments.

Of course limiting the apps will just push people to the browser for more things. Need a notepad then fire up Google Docs or Zoho. Need mail well, there's Gmail or Hotmail. This seems counter to Microsoft's goal of preserving the customer's relationship to Windows -- the more I am in the browser, the less I care about the underlying OS.

It's good to see Microsoft embracing the netbook market. They'd be foolish not to, but at the same time they have to be careful to not cannibalize Windows sales on high-margin machines. I don't think that the Starter Edition will be a non-starter as Information Week's headline reads. Though it will be bad for marketing purposes (I'm very curious about how they will position it on the Sales site), I ultimately don't think that the limit will matter for regular use.

Ignite Show: Jonathan Kahan on Samurai Swords as Cutting Edge Technology

A katana (commonly called a samurai sword) is a marvel of art and technology. In this week's Ignite Episode, Jonathan Kahan walks us through its creation and usage. This was filmed at Ignite NYC 3. The next Ignite NYC will be held on 6/1.

This week the show is introduced by Andrew Hyde of Ignite Boulder and Techstars. The next Ignite Boulder is 4/29.

The Ignite Show will feature a different speaker every Tuesday for free. It's available on YouTube (user: Ignite), on our Ignite site (subscribe) and via iTunes. It is being released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Nominations For Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2009

The 5th annual Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted at OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2008 include Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Gerv Markham, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Doc Searls, and Andrew Tridgell.

The nomination process is open to the entire open source community, closing May 22, 2009. Send your nominations to osawards@oreilly.com. Nominations should include the name of the recipient, any associated project/org, suggested title for the award ("Best Hacker", "Best Community Builder", etc.), and a description of why you are nominating the individual. Google and O'Reilly employees cannot be nominated.

Building Bridges with the U.S. Intelligence Community

Guest blogger Jeffrey Carr is a cyber intelligence expert, Principal of GreyLogic, columnist for Symantec's Security Focus, and author who specializes in the investigation of cyber attacks against governments and infrastructures by State and Non-State hackers. Jeff is the Principal Investigator for Project Grey Goose, an Open Source intelligence investigation into the Russian cyber attacks on Georgia in August, 2008.

About three weeks before the start of the Russia-Georgia war last August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a directive entitled “Analytic Outreach”. In it, DNI McConnell authorized members of the 16 agencies that comprise the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to reach out to people outside the IC, “to explore ideas and alternate perspectives, gain new insights, generate new knowledge, or obtain new information.”

As someone who writes about Intelligence and National Security matters, particularly in the area of Cyber Warfare, this Directive was pretty inspiring to me. I had long held the opinion that Web technologists and researchers had an important role to play in Government. Unfortunately, I had no way of communicating that vision to anyone who mattered so I just decided to act on my own and launched an Open Source Intelligence gathering effort called Project Grey Goose, which brought together an eclectic mix of hackers, spooks, and techies from inside and outside the Intelligence Community.

Imagine how happy I was six months later to hear about a formalized and much easier way to bring outside expertise into the IC thanks to the dedicated efforts of a few intelligence professionals and the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis. Appropriately enough, this project is named BRIDGE.

According to its creator, Dan Doney, BRIDGE hopes to do for Public-Private collaboration what the iPhone Apps Store has done for the iPhone and its customers--produce a mind-boggling explosion of innovative applications for use by the Intelligence Community. We aren't at the mind-boggling stage yet because BRIDGE is still in its infancy, but there are some pretty cool apps which I'll describe in a moment.

In addition to being a development sandbox, BRIDGE also allows intelligence analysts to interact with outside experts whether they be in industry, academia, or other government agencies at the Federal, State, Local or Tribal level. Alternative analysis has long been a recommended approach to avoid myopic thinking by specialists. BRIDGE provides a platform for debating alternative viewpoints and comparing evidence across agencies, specialties, and borders of all kinds.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 22 Apr 2009

Government, Bayes, SMS, and distributed keystores:

1. Government Projects the Agile Way -- Can It Be Done? (NZ Government) -- notes and audio from a workshop at the New Zealand State Services Commission looking to merge agile and government. The pullquotes are mostly generic about agile, but the important thing is that there are agile projects within government and their numbers are growing. Having witnessed the incredibly slow, cautious, and non-agile development processes of government, I know how good this shift can be for budgets and delivery.
2. DivMod Reverend -- general purpose open source Bayesian classifier in Python (the Ruby port is Bishop). Bayes theorem lies behind the 2000-era spam filters, and there have been plenty of open source libraries to do Bayesian classification, but this one caught my eye because it's from the very good DivMod folks who are behind the very good Twisted framework. (via noahgift's delicious stream)
3. RapidSMS -- a free and open source messaging framework for building SMS applications. Integrates with Django. (via straup's delicious stream)
4. Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores (Leonard Lin) -- he had to install and test distributed keystores for a client's project, and posted his notes. Distributed keystores are one of the recent spates of database-like tools intended to solve some of the problems of big data applications. The distributed stores out there is currently pretty half-baked at best right now. [...] Don’t believe the hype. There’s a lot of talk, but I didn’t find any public project that came close to the (implied?) promise of tossing nodes in and having it figure things out. [...] Based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is. (via straup's delicious stream)

Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains:

1. Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) -- Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. [...] "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil." As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things." One man's space junk is another man's Make project. (via BoingBoing)
2. My Students, My Cellphone, My Ordeal -- there's probably a market selling lightweight forensic tools to schools, specifically to avoid scenarios like this poor man's.
3. DIY High Speed Book Scanner From Trash and Cheap Cameras (Instructables) -- $300 of parts gets you a reasonably high-quality scanner. It doesn't have an automatic page turner, but it's still a step up on "open the scanner lid, change the page, close the lid, hit scan, wait, [repeat until braindead]". We have a huge legacy of analog, and we're going to need consumer-grade consumer-priced systems if we are to rip-mix-burn our cultural legacy. What would the Google Books settlement look like if we all had high-speed scanners to do to our bookshelves what iTunes did to our CD shelves? (via BoingBoing)
4. OpenCog Brainwave Projects in Google's Summer of Code -- in case you think GSoC is all about GNOME apps getting alternate shortcuts for DVORAK keyboards, there's some esoteric stuff being approved. I wish that when I was a college student someone had paid me to work on a Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project.

Where 2.0 Preview - DARPA's TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive

A modern soldier depends as much on good intel as a reliable rifle. Gone are the days when decision-making happened at the highest levels of command and the non-coms just did what they were told. In a modern world of insurgencies and roadside bombs, the soldier on the ground needs to have as much data as they can, as quickly as they can. And when DARPA decided to try and solve the problem, their solution was TIGR, the Tactical Ground Reporting System. Sam Earp, President of Multisensor Science, works as a consultant to DARPA and Mari Maeda is the program manager at DARPA. Both will be speaking about TIGR at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 Conference in May.

James Turner: Why don't you start by describing the problem that soldiers on the ground face today and how TIGR tries to help?

Mari Maeda: Okay. Well, just as you described, the problem is that in the past, the military has focused on feeding the information up the chain-of-command. The decision-makers are the colonels and generals, and so the soldiers on the ground are just collecting information so they can make big decisions. Now in Afghanistan and Iraq, really it's the patrol leaders, soldiers on the ground, lower echelon soldiers, captains, lieutenants who need to make decisions. Are they going to take this route or the other route? Should they knock on this door or that door? Has this person ever been seen before or cited before? Does he have useful information? All of those day-to-day decisions are being made at the lowest echelon and we really needed a tool to serve those low-level soldiers. And that's why TIGR was created.

JT: Can you describe a little bit about exactly what TIGR gives to the platoon level?

MM: Yes. TIGR has a map-based user interface. And so instead of having a folder full of reports telling you what happened here and who they met with, here's a patrol debrief, instead of having Word files or Power Point slides, TIGR's a map-based application where you can go and do searches by defining an area. It could be a rectangle, a circle, a polygon or a route even. And it'll pull back all of the events and people and places, information along that route or in that region. And it ranges from census collection that was done in the location, names of all of the schools, pictures of schools, videos of an attack that might've taken place. Very rich multimedia information will be returned to you for the area that you defined.

And so instead of just writing a patrol report that says this happened and hoping someone might read it, you're just really looking for geospatially relevant information for the mission at hand. If you're going to take this route and you're not familiar with this route that you're thinking of taking, you can look and see how many attacks have taken place; what kind of attacks have taken place; who's been there before. So all of that information is at your fingertips. Sam, do you have anything to add to that?

(continue reading)

The Lean Startup Talk From Web 2.0 Expo

One of our most popular talks at the Web 2.0 Expo SF was Eric Ries' The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products. I've embedded an audio version of his slides above. Eric recommends the talk for people who want to:

• Identify a profitable business model faster and cheaper than your competitors.
• Continuously discover what customers want to buy before building or making follow-on investments in new features.
• Ship new software at a dizzying pace: multiple times a day while improving quality and lowering costs.
• Build a company-wide culture of decision-making based on real facts, not opinions.

Eric has a follow-up to his talk and more thoughts about Lean Startups on his blog.

Importance of Innovation in Finance & BarCampBank

“Progress is not the mere correction of evils. Progress is the constant replacing of the best there is with something still better.” -Edward Filene

Two years ago, when we were organizing the first BarCampBank in the US, many people found it hard to believe that banks & credit unions could a place for meaningful grassroots innovation. Even crazier was the idea of organizing an unconference to begin bringing open source, transparency, identity, and community into the very closed world of banking & finance.

Since then the BarCampBank idea has turned into a movement. There have been over 14 events all over the world, and many of the ideas generated are beginning to turn into action.

To me, the global financial system is a platform that exists to “create more value than it captures”. Tim explained this in his Work on Stuff that Matters post, saying:

“A bank that loans money to a small business sees that business grow, perhaps borrow more money, hire employees who make deposits and take out loans, and so on. The power of this cycle to lift people out of poverty has been demonstrated by microfinance institutions like the Grameen Bank. Grameen is clearly focused on creating more value than they capture; not so the like of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, or WaMu, or many of the other failed financial institutions involved in the current financial meltdown.”

There has never been a more important time to bring meaningful innovation into the financial system, and there has never been more opportunity for our community to make it happen.

The next event is occurring this weekend (April 25-26, 2009) on Treasure Island in San Francisco.

After that, the following events are planned:

• BarCampBankVegas is set for May 2, 2009.
• BarCampBankCharleston2 is set for June 13, 2009
• BarCampBankGermany is set for October 23-25, 2009

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