Blogs

The Watering Hole - Through a Scanner Darkly (With Butter)

Have you noticed, by the way, that all the nude microwave scanner pictures of women we've seen so far look vaguely like Persis Khambatta from Star Trek: The Motion Picture?

The Watering Hole - Through a Scanner Darkly (With Butter)

Have you noticed, by the way, that all the nude microwave scanner pictures of women we've seen so far look vaguely like

Strata Gems: Quick starts for charts

You know bar and pie charts can be ineffective, but where do you turn next? Here are some great starting points to make a start with more interesting and effective charts.

Head First Holiday Gift Guide

We're a bit behind the ball since Hannukah already started, but hopefully we're not too terribly late. As you can imagine, we're big fans of giving (and receiving!) books for presents (okay, we'd take an iPad too if you're feeling...

Strata Gems: Write your own visualizations

Visualization is a powerful way to turn data into a story. But if you're not a "graphics person", where do you start?

Add a Drop of Photoshop

Lightroom has a great feature called Presets. Presets allows you to set up certain parameters and save them. Once saved, the preset can be applied to thousands of images at a time. If built properly, multiple presets can be combined for different effects.As powerful as presets are there are things they just cannot do. Ah, but Photoshop can help there! You see, Photoshop can also save things for later use. We call these saved sets of steps actions. If you aren't familiar with Photoshop actions here is the briefest of explanations. Whatever you can do in Photoshop (well, almost whatever) you can save in an action. That action can be played back on another image (or thousand images). The steps are dutifully executed as if you were performing them manually. By now you must be thinking "So what! Actions are in Photoshop and we're talking about Lightroom." True. But Lightroom has a very elegant way of passing images along to Photoshop and then applying an action. Remember that Lightroom's full name is Photoshop Lightroom. The secret lies in Lightroom's Export Actions. So let's take a closer look at how to do this.

7 areas beyond gaming where Kinect could play a role

Microsoft's Kinect has implications that go beyond gaming. From medicine to learning to participatory art, Alex Howard considers ways Kinect's interface could shift our computing-based interactions.

Four short links: 3 December 2010

Data is Snake Oil (Pete Warden) -- data is powerful but fickle. A lot of theoretically promising approaches don't work because there's so many barriers between spotting a possible relationship and turning it into something useful and actionable. This is the pin of reality which deflates the bubble of inflated expectations. Apologies for the camel's nose of rhetoric poking...

Building a World Class Team - A Holistic View Part 5

This was actually more difficult to socialize and implement than when I implemented the changes for Comcast.net. This is because while Comcast.net has one tech lead, one project manager and one QA lead, the XFinity.com team is much larger, with three tech leads, two QA leads and three product managers.

A deeper dive into Do-Not-Track

The FTC has released a new online privacy report that could reshape advertising, media and business on the Internet. A key element of the report is the creation of a "Do-Not-Track" mechanism for web browsers.

Strata Gems: Use Wikipedia as training data

Wikipedia is an essential tool in the data scientist's armory. Today's Strata Gem shows how it can be used to help computers distinguish between different sense of common words.

Gov 2.0 events: Civic hackivists gather globally

This weekend, "civic hackivists" will be convening to work together on apps, ideas and platforms at the International Open Data Hackathon, Pulse Camp, City Camp CO and Random Hacks of Kindness.

Six months after "What is data science?"

Mike Loukides kicked off our data science coverage six months ago with his post, "What is data science?" Here's a look at the key stories and trends that have emerged since then.

Strata Week: Replaced by robots

In the latest Strata Week: StatSheet automates short sports articles, BlueCava uniquely identifies devices, ALADDIN implements distributed decision-making, and Needle helps you find just the data you're looking for.

Four short links: 2 December 2010

Glasgow University to License Its IP For Free -- while a small proportion of high value University of Glasgow IP will still be made available to industry through traditional licensing and spin-out companies alone, offering the bulk of IP to a larger audience for free adds value to the UK economy. (via Hacker News) Apollo 13 Spacelog -- the...

Strata Gems: Try MongoDB without installing anything

Want to dip your toes into the world of NoSQL databases? In the first of our Strata Gems series, find out how explore MongoDB through your web browser.

Accelerometer Events in Mobile Safari

Last week, Apple released iOS 4.2 to the general public. This was a much anticipated update for all iPad users, who finally have the ability to multitask. One feature available in iOS 4.2, however of much less fanfare is that it brought the ability to take advantage of accelerometer events directly within the browser, through JavaScript.

Developer Week in Review

In a somewhat slow news week, Nokia pulls the plug on the Symbian Foundation, the FSF gets hacked, and Wave goes to Apache.

Cloud computing's fear factor: Acknowledge, reduce, move on

A combination of negative messages and concerns about readiness have made cloud computing the most feared of the big technology innovations. There are legitimate reasons to approach the cloud with care, but we should not be consumed by irrational fear.

Four short links: 1 December 2010

2 Kinects 1 Box (YouTube) -- merging data from two Kinects in real time, to get astonishing 3D information. (via Chelfyn Baxter) Crowdsource is not Open Source (Simon Phipps) -- there are some businesses that don't understand this, and exploit community for their sole benefit in the name of open source. Ignorance of the four freedoms is dangerous. We...

Agile is Anal ... and that's good

I got dragged into an Agile project a few years back, and expected to hate it. My background is with fixed-price and (semi-)formal-methods projects, so I was wasn't expecting to enjoy the experience. I was pleasantly surprised: the people I...

Flash Player 10.2 Beta has landed at Adobe Labs

Quoted from Adobe Labs: "We’re happy to announce a beta release of Flash Player 10.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Flash Player 10.2 beta introduces a number of enhancements we’re excited to...

Great jQuery Carousels for people who don’t like them

I'm not a big fan of Carousels, so you can imagine my surprise when I found myself using them on a Web project. Here are the top 5 jQuery Carousels that made me a Carousel convert.

The data analysis path is built on curiosity, followed by action

Precision and preparation define traditional data analysis, but author Philipp K. Janert believes there's more to it than just that. In this interview, he explains how simplicity, experimentation and action can shape data work.

Four short links: 30 November 2010

libgit2 -- a linkable git library. Ruby and Python bindings. Open Data: How Not to Cock It Up -- Tom Steinberg lays it out. Algorithm and Crowd are Not Enough -- My point isn’t that Google, Netflix, Amazon, Yelp or any of the others are doomed. But I do think there’s an opportunity brewing for entrepreneurs, websites and companies...

An app for what?

Recently every business and organization wants to have a presence in the mobile world, and most think first to the world of mobile applications. Everyone else has an app, the thinking goes, so why don't we have an app too? Very little thought is given to what the app will do or why it needs to exist; we need an application because everyone else has an application, the thinking goes, so let's get those developers coding and let someone else figure out the details. In reality this is a very bad decision to make - recent studies have shown that marketing / branding-only applications result in bad perceptions amongst users and can even create negative loyalty. In this post we'll explore the results of one recent study and look at new ways to think about mobile applications that focus on utility and user experience.

Free to Choose ebook deal reveals the programmer zeitgeist

A list from O'Reilly's Free to Choose Cyber-Monday promotion offers a fascinating view of what's on the minds of the core audience.

Susan Landau explores Internet security and the attribution problem

Landau, a noted privacy advocate, is seeking new technologies and new policies to identify people on the Internet without onerous effects on privacy.

Don't be a micromanager!

I recently made a post on Building Better Software about micromanagement ("Demoralize Your Teams Quickly And Efficiently With Micromanagement") and how it drains a development team's will to live. I've been studying micromanagement for a long time—not often voluntarily. It's...

The Watering Hole - In Celebration of a Milestone

To celebrate our 300th strip, here's a special treat for the loyal readers who have put up with our somewhat erratic publishing schedule. Click here for a high-res PDF.

The Watering Hole - CCC

Or 0x12C for the more geekishly inclined (or 0o454 if you only have 3 fingers...)

HTML5 Recipes: More on Storage

In this recipe, we shall cover some more material on HTML5 localStorage and how you can store JSON objects and retrieve them. The examples that we shall see in this recipe will enable you to think in terms of complex...

For social search, similarity trumps friendship

Social search is similar to pre-Google traditional search: results feel arbitrary and unreliable. Altimeter Group founder Charlene Li says engines built around similarity -- who you're like, not who you know -- could push social search into a new phase.

Healthcare communication gets an upgrade

Most healthcare communication still involves faxes and paper copies. The Direct Project, formerly known as NHIN Direct, wants to change that through software and secure Internet transport of health messaging.

Four short links: 29 November 2010

Building a New Culture of Thinking and Learning (Vimeo) -- interesting farewell lecture from a university physicist disillusioned with the state of teaching. He went on to work on skateboarding video games. (via Kevin Marks) The Road Printer (BLDGBLOG) -- a machine that lays cobblestone roads, looking remarkably like a printer as it does so. Not the future, but...

UI Spoofing Safari on the iPhone

Given how rampant phishing and malware attempts are these days, I hope Apple chooses to not allow arbitrary web applications to scroll the real Safari address bar out of view.

A look at jQuery mobile 1.0, alpha 2

Yesterday Matthew David gave an excellent overview of the growing jQuery tool kit. Starting from humble beginnings in what is now the jQuery core, jQuery has expanded out of model and controller logic to be a ui-layer tool as well. jQuery UI has been around for a while now and it provides a set of standard interface objects for web pages. Recently there's been a new addition to the jQuery family: jQuery Mobile. In this entry we'll talk about what jQuery Mobile is, what it does well, and the basic underlying structure of a jQuery Mobile site.

Building a World Class Team - A Holistic View Part 4

In my previous entry I discussed gating requests. In this entry I discuss communication with with QA.

Patching it all together - the different parts of jQuery

jQuery is no longer a single core library. Today, jQuery is built from many different pieces. Read this article for a 50,000 view of the frameworks that comprise the different pieces of jQuery

Making orientation-aware apps with Sencha Touch

In my earlier explorations of Sencha Touch I noted a lot of powerful features, including the ability to adjust your UI according to the size and orientation of user's device. After poking around in the examples a bit I noticed that the example Twitter app doesn't make use of these features and looks pretty bad on my mobile phone. Today I set out to see how easy it would be to hack into the example code and make a smarter app.

As3 Signals Resource Roundup

It sometimes seems like there's a constant flood of tools that we as developers should learn to stay current. Sometimes it seems like we spend so much time staying current that it's hard to get any real work done....

Announcing TOC Bologna

O'Reilly Media and the Bologna Children's Book Fair today announce the first Tools of Change for Publishing event at the Bologna Children's Book Fair. TOC Bologna will be a one day conference held on Sunday 27 March 2011, focussing on digital and mobile technology.

Keywords and Exported Images

Last time we looked at how keywords are stored in your Lightroom catalog and where they live once saved to the image file's metadata. So now let's take a look at how keywords work when you export images and create new files. Each keyword has three export options associated with it: Include on Export, Export Containing Keywords, and Export Synonyms. These options are found in the dialog you see when creating or editing a keyword. While the options appear to be self-explanatory whether they will have an effect depends on whether or not Lightroom hierarchies are used for export or not.

Sencha Touch JavaScript mobile UI framework, now free

Sencha, formerly Ext JS, is one of the most important companies innovating in the open technologies market on the web today. Sencha was founded just a few years ago as a simple AJAX framework provider but has since evolved to being the provider or content curator for some of the most powerful and important projects happening in HTML5 and JavaScript now. The company takes a similar strategy to Adobe by building tools for open content. They have a design tool for building Ext JS-enabled web content and a powerful HTML5 animation tool in the works. The company perhaps made it's biggest splash yet earlier this month when they announced that their new mobile UI framework, Sencha Touch, is now free.

Four short links: 25 November 2010

A Day in the Life of Twitter (Chris McDowall) -- all geo-tagged tweets from 24h of the Twitter firehose, displayed. Interesting things can be seen, such as Jakarta glowing as brightly as San Francisco. (via Chris's sciblogs post) British Library Release 3M Open Bibliographic Records) (OKFN) -- This dataset consists of the entire British National Bibliography, describing new books...

Never Give a Client Three Choices

In most design fields it's conventional wisdom that you should give a client three versions or "comps" of an idea, so they can choose their favorite, or maybe combine what they like best about two or all three of them....

A Look Back and a Look Ahead, My Work In Review and Independents Too

I write as William Stanek and Robert Stanek. My story may help you understand writers and independents a little better. As a technology journalist, I've written for PC Magazine, Dr. Dobbs, TechNet Magazine and a variety of other leading magazines....

Developer Week in Review

In the latest Developer Week in Review: A look at Java's divide and conquer approach to upcoming releases, the end of an era for Novell, and a common programming shortcut that can end up cutting your throat.

WP7 UX Introduction: Part 6

In this series we will explore the phone, it's UX and some early experiments I have done on the phone.

Publishing needs a social strategy

Up until now, ebooks have mostly been quick-and-dirty conversions of the print product. Joe Wikert looks forward to a future where social options, like recommendations and remixes, fully harness the ebook medium.