Four short links: 12 May 2010

Secrets to Success, Sousveillance, Etherpad Lives, Personal Social Networks

1. The Ten Commandments of Rock and Roll (BoingBoing) -- ten rules that should be posted in every workplace as a guide to how to fail poisonously.
2. Snapscouts -- rather creepy sousveillance site. It's up to you to keep America safe! If you see something suspicious, Snap it! If you see someone who doesn't belong, Snap it! Not sure if someone or something is suspicious? Snap it anyway! I like the idea of promoting a shared interest in keeping us all safe, but I'm not sure SnapScouts is there yet. (update: Ha, it's a brilliant joke! See the comments for more)
3. Etherpad Foundation -- was open-sourced after Google acquired the company that offered it, has now acquired a life-after-death. Compare with the updated Google document editor which has a wordprocessing layout engine built in Javascript, and uses the algorithms behind Etherpad to offer simultaneous editing. (via Hacker News)
4. Diaspora Kickstarter Project -- team looking for seed funding to write an aGPLed "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network" (no news of dessert topping or floor wax applicability). Received 2.5x their requested funding in a few days.

Four short links: 11 May 2010

Computational Design, Instructive Games, Collaboration, and Good Bad Code

1. ToxicLibs -- an independent, open source library collection for computational design tasks with Java & Processing. (via joshua on Delicious)
2. RibbonHero -- a game for learning the new Microsoft Office. (via azaaza on Twitter)
3. Teambox -- open source project collaboration tool.
4. Google Web Security Tutorials -- the classes given to new recruits, including Jarlsberg, a bug-ridden very vulnerable demo app for would-be security gurus to fix. I like the idea of releasing antitheses, bad code that can be just as instructive as good code.

Four short links: 10 May 2010

Barcodes, Python's Innards, Informed Elections, and Data Literacy

1. zxing -- barcode library for iPhone, Android, Java, and more.
2. Guido's Python -- how the compiler and interpreter see your Python programs. It wasn't until I had this level of knowledge of Perl that I really know what the hell I was doing. (via Hacker News)
3. UK Election Data -- this was posted on the eve of the UK election and talks about the new data they had this election. There's been a lot of talk about Internet use by candidates to whip up votes, and by government to boost citizens, but this is data that helps citizens decide who to vote for. Very cool.
4. Why We Should Learn the Language of Data (Wired) -- We often say, rightly, that literacy is crucial to public life: If you can’t write, you can’t think. The same is now true in math. Statistics is the new grammar. (via imran on Twitter)

Four short links: 7 May 2010

Learning Languages, URL Mastery, Free as in Life, Heritage Remix

1. Flash is Not a Right (Ian Bogost) -- I worry that we're losing a sense of diversity in computation. This seems to be happening at both the formal and informal levels. Georgia Tech's computer science bachelor's degree doesn't require a language survey class, for example (although one is offered as an elective). This year in the Computational Media curriculum committee, we've been discussing the idea of creating a history of programming languages course as a partial salve, one that would explain how and why a number of different languages and environments evolved. Such a course would explicitly focus on how to learn new languages and environments, since that process is not always obvious. It's a wonderful and liberating feeling to become familiar with and then master different environments, and everyone truly interested in computing should experience that joy.
2. What Every Developer Should Know About URLs -- a lot of detail of how the pieces hook together. (via bengebre on Delicious)
3. Ryzom is an Open Source MMORPG -- existing game, now GNU Affero licensed code for server, client, and tools, with CC-BY-SA licensed assets. (via Slashdot)
4. Remix American High Style with Polyvore -- the greatest challenge to heritage institutions is irrelevance, not penury. Brooklyn Museum is unsurpassed in creating relevance for its collections and its existence, and they do it by reaching out, where people are and not expecting them to come directly to us. If you're at a gallery, museum, library, or archive and your first reaction is to protect what you've got, you're doing it wrong. Report to Brooklyn for make-up classes. (via auchmill on Twitter)

Four short links: 6 May 2010

Ethics, Regulation, TCP/IP, and Time Travel

1. Ethics and Economics -- This paper looks at the evidence that suggests that ethical behaviour is good for the economy.
2. FCC to Regulate Broadband -- Two FCC officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce Thursday that the commission considers broadband service a hybrid between an information service and a utility and that it has sufficient power to regulate Internet traffic under existing law.
3. TCP/IP and IMS Sequence Diagrams -- watch SYN, ACK, payload, etc. packets to and fro to understand what really happens each time you fetch mail or surf the web. This is what Velocity-type devops performance folks care about.
4. How to Build a Time Machine (Daily Mail) -- extremely readable article by Stephen Hawking about the possibilities of time travel.

Four short links: 5 May 2010

Web IDEs, Timely Election Displays, Face Recognition, # Books/Kindle

1. Sketch for Processing -- an IDE for Processing based on Mozilla's Bespin.
2. British Election Results to be Broadcast on Big Ben -- the monument is the message. Lovely integration of real-time data and architecture, an early step for urban infrastructure as display.
3. Face.com API -- an alpha API for face recognition.
4. Average Number of Books/Kindle -- short spreadsheet figuring out, from cited numbers. (Spoiler: the answer is 27)

Four short links: 4 May 2010

Software vs Biology, Virtual Keyboards, Massive Sensor Network Scheme, and MTurk via JavaScript

1. Comparing genomes to computer operating systems in terms of the topology and evolution of their regulatory control networks (PNAS) -- paper comparing structure and evolution of software design (exemplified by the Linux operating system) against biological systems (in the form of the e. coli bacterium). They found software has a lot more "middle manager" functions (functions that are called and then in turn call) as opposed to biology, where "workers" predominate (genes that make something, but which don't trigger other genes). They also quantified how software and biology value different things (as measured what persists across generations of organisms, or versions of software): Reuse and persistence are negatively correlated in the E. coli regulatory network but positively correlated in the Linux call graph[...]. In other words, specialized nodes are more likely to be preserved in the regulatory network, but generic or reusable functions are persistent in the Linux call graph. (via Hacker News)
2. Virtual Keyboards in Google Search -- rolling out virtual keyboards across all Google searches. Very nice solution to the problem of "how the heck do I enter that character on this keyboard?". (via glynmoody on Twitter)
3. Information and Quantum Systems Lab at HP -- working on the mathematical and physical foundations for the technologies that will form a new information ecosystem, the Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE), consisting of a trillion nanoscale sensors and actuators embedded in the environment and connected via an array of networks with computing systems, software and services to exchange their information among analysis engines, storage systems and end users. (via dcarli on Twitter)
4. Turkit -- Java/JavaScript API for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. (via chrismessina on Twitter)

Four short links: 3 May 2010

Science Data Hacking, Obstructive Interfaces, 3G to Wifi, and Australian Gov 2.0

1. Science Hack Day -- Saturday, June 19th and Sunday, June 20th, 2010, in the Guardian offices in London. A meeting place for the designer/coder class and scientists, with datasets as the common language. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Facebook's Evil Interface (EFF) -- Facebook's new M.O. is to say "to better help you, we took away your privacy. If you are stupid and wish to attempt to retain your privacy, don't not avoid to fail to click here. Now click here. Now click here ... ha, moved it! Moved it again! Gotcha!". Attempting to use Facebook to talk to friends without having your friendships and interests pimped to the data mining Johns is as hard as canceling an AOL subscription.
3. Make Your Own 3G Router -- an easter-egg inside the new Chumby model (which O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures invested in).
4. Australian Government's Response to the Web 2.0 Taskforce -- it's all positive: all but one recommendation accepted. Another very positive step from the Aussies.

Four short links: 30 April 2010

BitTorrent Privacy, Censorship, Facebook Privacy, AV Programming

1. Exploiting Privacy Threats in BitTorrent -- INRIA researchers were able to identify big seeders and big downloaders and find downloaders' IP addresses through Tor. (via Slashdot)
2. Google on Internet Censorship -- text of a speech to the UN Human Rights Council. I won’t talk at length about the Global Network Initiative, but it’s something that our company and Microsoft and Yahoo have come together with human rights groups to put together, and we have in essence written a code of conduct for how information technology companies should operate in repressive regimes. It’s quite complex, it took a long time to do, you can imagine what it was like to putting those people in a room for two years together, but we have succeeded.
3. Facebook's Privacy Timeline (EFF). Must read--little editorial needed, it speaks for itself.
4. Cinder C -- a new C++ framework created by The Barbarian Group for programming graphics, audio, video, networking, image processing and computational geometry. Cinder is cross-platform, and in general the exact same code works under Mac OS X, Windows and a growing list of other platforms — most recently the iPhone and iPad.

Four short links: 29 April 2010

Leaky Phones, Clustering Tweets, CS Unplugged, and Margaret Atwood on Twitter

1. Researchers Show How To Use Mobiles to Spy on People -- Using information from the GSM network they could identify a mobile phone user’s location, and they showed how they could easily create dossiers on people’s lives and their behavior and business dealings. They also demonstrated how they were able to identify a government contractor for the US Department of Homeland Security through analyzing phone numbers and caller IDs. [...] The researchers have not released details of the tools they developed, and have alerted the major GSM carriers about their results. Bailey said the carriers were “very concerned,” but mitigating these sorts of attacks would not be easy. In the meantime there is little mobile phone users can do to protect themselves short of turning off their phones. Oh joy. (via Roger Dennis)
2. A Torrent of Tweets: Managing Information Overload in Online Social Streams (PDF) -- PARC and MIT built a Twitter client that clusters messages in a useful way. Publicly accessible client due in summer.
3. Interview with Tim Bell (MP3) -- author of Computer Science Unplugged, which teaches computational thinking in a fashion that can have five year olds understanding error correction codes, and one of the people behind a new high-school curriculum for CS in New Zealand.
4. How I Learned to Love Twitter (Guardian) -- fascinating piece from writer Margaret Atwood. The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It's something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden is one of my favourite things that's ever been written about Twitter but the whole article is delightfully written.

Recent Posts

• Four short links: 28 April 2010 on April 28, 2010
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