Four short links: 23 October 2009

Beautiful Information, Teen Game Designer, Creative Science Writing, Open Source Schools

1. Information is Beautiful -- gorgeous descriptions of the design of infographics. For once, a design discussion that might be useful to mere mortals like me.
2. Australian Teen Crafts "Sneaky" Games -- video interview with a 16 year-old winner of the IFTF, Sun, and BoingBoing Digital Open. Great to see game design, a topic we've followed on Radar, getting uptake by the people about to enter the workforce. "I love index cards," says Harry, "And I was thinking -- hmm, how can I incorporate them into a project?" So he designed and printed these game cards, and "spread the seeds of sneakiness and espionage" into the unsuspecting pockets, math books, binders and bags and jackets of his schoolmates. (via BoingBoing)
3. Science Writing Shortlist -- the Manhire Prize is New Zealand's most prestigious award for creative science writing. The shortlisted entries are available via this link, and make for enlightening reading. Interestingly, there are two prizes awarded: one for fiction and another for non-fiction; New Zealand has a tradition of encouraging interaction between the arts and sciences.
4. Fedena -- an open source school management system, built in India, using Ruby on Rails. (via Brenda Wallace)

Four short links: 22 October 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Scaling, Chinese Blogs, CS Education for Growth

1. Eight Billion Minutes Spent on Facebook Daily -- you weren't using that cognitive surplus, were you?
2. How We Made Github Fast -- high-level summary is that the new "fast, good, cheap--pick any two" is "fast, new, easy--pick any two". (via Simon Willison)
3. Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and around 200 million blogs, according to Mao. Some blogs survive only a few days before being shut down by authorities. More than 80% of people in China don’t know that the internet is censored in their country. When riots broke out in Xinjiang province this year, the authorities shut down internet access for the whole region. No one could get online.
4. Congress Endorses CS Education as Driver of Economic Growth -- compare to Economist's Optimism that tech firms will help kick-start economic recovery is overdone.

Four short links: 21 October 2009

Battlefield Android, DIY Leukemia Hacking, Localisation, Bus Pirates

1. Raytheon Sends Android to Battlefield -- Google's OS sees deployment. Using Android software tools, Raytheon ( RTN - news - people ) engineers built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. [...] Every part of RATS is tailored for use on a battlefield. A soldier could make an unmanned plane a "buddy," for instance, and track its progress on a map using his phone. He could then access streaming video from the plane, giving him a bird's eye view of the area. Soldiers could also use the buddy list to trace the locations of other members of their squad. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. The Kanzius Machine (CBS News, video) -- inventor lost the race against leukemia, but his DIY RF therapy device is being developed "for real". (via Jim Stogdill)
3. Lost in Translation -- Will Shipley shows how to handle internationalisation and localisation. In this post I'm going to explain to you what internationalization and localization are, how Apple's tools handle them by default, and the huge flaws in Apple's approach. Then I'm going to provide you with the code and tools to do localization in a much, much easier way. Then you're going to think, 'That will never work, because of blah!' and I'm going to respond, as if I can read your mind or I've already had this argument with a dozen developers, 'It already did - I used these tools in Delicious Library and Delicious Library 2 and they've won three Apple Design Awards between them. (via migurski on Delicious)
4. The Bus Pirate -- interfaces to a heap of embedded hardware. The ‘Bus Pirate’ is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 20 October 2009

Politics in The Age of Social Software, Ethernet Patents, Free Book Fear, Programming Exercises

1. Poles, Politeness, and Politics in the Age of Twitter (Stephen Fry) -- begins with a discussion of a UK storm but rapidly turns into a discussion of fame in the age of Twitter, modern political discourse, the "deadwood press", and The Commons in Twitter Assembled. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new openness in our rule making, our justice system and our administration. Do not imagine for a minute that I am saying Twitter is it. Its very name is the clue to its foundation and meaning. It is not, as I have pointed out before, called Ponder or Debate. It is called Twitter. But there again some of the most influential publications of the eighteenth century had titles like Tatler, Rambler, Idler and Spectator. Hardly suggestive of earnest political intent either. History has a habit of choosing the least prepossessing vessels to be agents of change.
2. Apple and Others Hit With Lawsuit Over 90s Ethernet Patents -- unclear whether the plaintiff is 3Com (who filed the patents) or a troll who bought them. "We strongly believe that 3Com’s Ethernet technologies are being regularly infringed by foreign and some US companies," said David A. Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Ethernet Innovations. "We believe that the continued aggressive enforcement of the fundamental Ethernet technologies developed by 3Com against the waves of cheap, knock-off, foreign manufactured equipment is a necessary step in protecting the competitiveness of this American technology and American companies in general." (via Slashdot)
3. The Point -- someone's publishing Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python", which was published by APress under an open content license. Naturally this freaked out APress (it's easy to imagine many eyelids would tic nervously should such a thing happen with one of O'Reilly's open-licensed books). Mark's response is fantastic. Part of choosing a Free license for your own work is accepting that people may use it in ways you disapprove of. There are no “field of use” restrictions, and there are no “commercial use” restrictions either. In fact, those are two of the fundamental tenets of the “Free” in Free Software. If “others profiting from my work” is something you seek to avoid, then Free Software is not for you. Opt for a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” license, or a “personal use only” freeware license, or a traditional End User License Agreement. Free Software doesn’t have “end users.” That’s kind of the point.
4. Programming Praxis -- programming exercises to keep your skills razor-sharp, with solutions.

Four short links: 19 October 2009

YouTube Bandwidth, RFID Visualization, Social Software Arms Race, Google Voice to the Laptop

1. YouTube's Bandwidth Bill is Zero (Wired) -- they buy dark fibre and peer with the major ISPs.
2. Immaterials: The Ghost in the Text (Vimeo) -- visualising RFID fields. See also the blog post about the work by Timo Arnall from Touch and Jack Schulze from BERG.
3. The Commercial Speech Arms Race (Bruce Schneier) -- Whenever you build a security system that relies on detection and identification, you invite the bad guys to subvert the system so it detects and identifies someone else. Sometimes this is hard ­-- leaving someone else's fingerprints on a crime scene is hard, as is using a mask of someone else's face to fool a guard watching a security camera ­-- and sometimes it's easy. But when automated systems are involved, it's often very easy. It's not just hardened criminals that try to frame each other, it's mainstream commercial interests. Bad actors game systems, and social software is just another system to be gamed. It's very difficult to create a system with no incentive to misbehave or to accuse others of misbehaving.
4. A SIP of the Future (Tim Bray) -- he connected Google Voice with Gizmo5 so his Google Voice number forwards to his laptop. FTW.

Four short links: 16 October 2009

Audio Geotagging, SF Open Data Stories, Wave Use Cases, Hadooped Genomes

1. Wiimote Audio Geotagging -- match audio with the map movement and annotations made with an IR pen and a Wiimote. Very cool! (and from New Zealand)
2. San Francisco: Open For Data -- Two months after it launched, the project is already reaping rewards from San Francisco's huge community of programmers. Applications using the data include Routesy, which offers directions based on real-time city transport feeds; and EcoFinder, which points you to the nearest recycling site for a given item.
3. Google Wave's Best Use Cases (Lifehacker) -- not cases where people are using Wave, but where they want to. Read this as "the Web has not provided all the tools to solve these problems". Something will solve them, and Wave is trying to. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Analyzing Human Genomes with Hadoop -- case study from the Cloudera blog. Performs alignment and genotyping on the 100GB of data you get when you sequence a human's genome in about three hours for less than $100 using a 40-node, 320-core cluster rented from Amazon’s EC2. (via mndoci on Twitter)

Four short links: 15 October 2009

Open Access, Right to Broadband, Machine Learning Textbook, Javascript Performance Art

1. Open Access Week -- world-wide, dedicated to raising awareness of open access to research. (via Creative Commons Aotearoa).
2. 1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right -- Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection.
3. The Elements of Statistical Learning 2ed -- classic book (I have the 1st edition) that is now available as a free PDF download. (via Hacker News)
4. vi in Javascript -- yup, someone's written a vi clone in Javascript. (via monkchips on Twitter)

Four short links: 14 October 2009

Multitouch Demo, Secrets Site Secrets, Hadoop Futures, Becoming Lucky

1. 10Gui Video -- demo of a new take on multitouch, a tablet and new GUI conventions. (via titine on Twitter)
2. Behind the Scenes at WhatDoTheyKnow -- numbers and stories from the MySociety project, which provides a public place for Official Information Act requests and responses. The fact information is subject to copyright and restrictions on re-use does not exempt it from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (though there is a closely related exemption relating to “commercial interest”). Occasionally public bodies will offer to reply to a request, but in order to deter wider dissemination of the material they will refuse to reply via WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Southampton University have released information in protected PDF documents and the House of Commons has refused to release information via WhatDoTheyKnow.com which it has said it would be prepared to send to an individual directly.
3. The View from HadoopWorld (RedMonk) -- fascinating glimpse into the Hadoop user and developer world. Hadoop can be used with a variety of languages, from Perl to Python to Ruby, but as Doug Cutting admitted today, they’re all second class citizens relative to Java. The plan, however, is for that to change. Which can’t happen soon enough, in my view. It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Java, or its audience. The point, rather, is that there are lots and lots of dynamic language developers out there that would be far more productive working in their native tongue versus translating into Java.
4. Be Lucky, It's an Easy Skill to Learn (Telegraph) -- this one resonated with me, as it ties into some life hacking I've been doing lately. And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 13 October 2009

Open Source, Gov 2.0, Gaming, Education

1. Our Open Source School -- blog of Albany Senior High School in New Zealand, which only runs open source software.
2. Behind The Scenes at What Do They Know -- interesting post showing details behind the What Do They Know web site. In the last year there have been only seven significant cases where requests have been hidden from public view on the site due to concerns relating to potential libel and defamation. Three of those cases have involved groups of twenty or so requests made by the same one or two users. While actual number of requests we have had to hide is around 70 (0.4% of the total) even this small fraction overstates the situation due to the repetition of the same potentially libelous accusations comments in different requests. In all cases we have kept as much information up on the site as possible. Our policy with respect to all requests to remove information from the site is that we only take down information in exceptional circumstances; generally only when the law requires us to do so.
3. The Complete History of Lemmings -- a must-read for videogamers from the early 90s. Theres been much debate over the choice of colours as well, but the colours were selected, not because they were the easiest to choose, but because of the PC EGA palette. With the limited choice, it was decided the green hair was nicer than blue, and with that, the final Lemming was born. I was actually the next person to code up a demo on the Commodore 64, but I only got so far as having a single Lemming walking over the landscape before Dave put me onto another project.
4. Google Replaces TeleAtlas -- Tele Atlas confirms that Google has decided to stop using Tele Atlas map data for the U.S. Google will now use its own map data. Our relationship with Google for map coverage continues outside of the U.S. in dozens of geographies.

Four short links: 12 October 2009

DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail

1. Snowball -- a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)
2. Insider Trades -- a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)
3. Air New Zealand Slams IBM -- central point of failure in the outsourced IT. "In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client's customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.
4. Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers' Data -- Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.

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