Entries tagged “open source”

Four short links: 9 February 2012

Four short links: 9 February 2012

Web-based Visualization, Javascript Charting, Automating Education, Sniffing HTTP(S)

by  | @gnat  |  9 February 2012

  1. Weave -- web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. GPL and MPL-licensed. (via Flowing Data)
  2. Flotr2 -- MIT-licensed Javascript library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs. It is a branch of flotr which removes the Prototype dependency and includes many improvements. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Math Education Again And Again (Dan Meyer) -- nicely said: it's hard to test true understanding, easy to automate only part of the testing and assessment support for learners.
  4. mitmproxy -- GPLv3-licensed SSL-aware HTTP proxy which lets you snoop on the traffic being sent back to the mothership from apps.

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Four short links: 7 February 2012

Four short links: 7 February 2012

Version Control, Data Tables, Developer Communities, and Reality Mining

by  | @gnat  |  7 February 2012

  1. Integrated Content Editor (GitHub) -- a track changes implementation, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web, written by the NY Times team and open sourced.
  2. Data Tables -- featureful jQuery plugin for tables of data. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. Creating a Developer Community (Slideshare) -- treat the problem like a channel conversion funnel: turn visitors into downloaders, downloaders into users, users into contributors. His screenshots of shitty conversions are great! (via Kohsuke Kawaguchi)
  4. Sex Differences in Intimate Relationships (PDF) -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others use social graph analysis to analyze communications patterns in relationships. Notice that not only does the preference for an opposite-sex “best friend” kick in significantly earlier for females than for males (~18 years vs mid-20s, respectively), but females maintain a higher plateau value for much longer. More reality mining to understand ourselves. (via Sean Gourley)

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Strata Week: The Megaupload seizure and user data

Strata Week: The Megaupload seizure and user data

Megaupload's demise raises data questions and Bloomberg opens up its market data interface.

by  | @audreywatters  | +Audrey Watters |  2 February 2012

In this week's data news, Megaupload users face data deletion, Bloomberg opens its market data interface and Pentaho changes its licensing for Kettle.

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Four short links: 1 February 2012

Four short links: 1 February 2012

The Invention-Commoditisation Cycle, Software Estimations, Fullscreen Browser API, and File Formats in Javascript

by  | @gnat  |  1 February 2012

  1. Cycles of Invention and Commoditisation (Simon Wardley) -- Explosions of industrial creativity rarely follow the invention or discovery of a technology but instead its commoditisation i.e. it wasn't the discovery of electricity but Edison's introduction of utility services for electricity that produced the creative boom that led to recorded music, modern movies, consumer electronics and even Silicon Valley. However, utility provision of electricity did more than just create a new world, it disrupted existing industries (both directly and through reduced barriers of entry), it also allowed for new practices and methods of working to emerge and even resulted in new economic forms - such as Henry Ford's Fordism. This isn't a one off pattern. The cycle of invention/commoditisation repeats throughout our industrial history, following a surprisingly consistent pathway. Understanding this pattern is critical to anticipating the changes emerging in our industry today - whether that's the web, cloud computing or the future changes that 3D printing will bring. Simon explains the Business of the Internet in one blog post. Simon is king.
  2. Why Are Software Development Task Estimations Regularly Off By A Factor of 2 or 3? -- never a truer word spoken in parable.
  3. Using the Full-Screen API in Browsers (Mozilla) -- useful! The older I get, the more I like full-screen mode. I found myself wishing my email client had it, then someone pointed out that was called "mutt in a shell window". Fair 'nuff.
  4. File Formats in Javascript (GitHub) -- pointers to libraries for different file formats in Javascript.

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With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform

With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform

The U.K. moves from alpha.gov.uk to beta.

by  | @digiphile  | +Alex Howard | 31 January 2012

A new beta .gov website in Britain is scalable mobile-friendly, platform agnostic, uses HTML5, open source, hosted in the cloud and open for feedback. Those criteria collectively embody the default for how governments should approach their online efforts in the 21st century.

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Developer Week in Review: Sometimes, form does need to follow function

Developer Week in Review: Sometimes, form does need to follow function

Why remotes need buttons, lawmakers need a clue, and life-critical software needs many eyes.

by  | @blackbearnh  | +James Turner | 27 January 2012

The latest rumors have Apple eyeing the remote control market, but does minimalistic design work for remotes? Australia wants to impose requirements on ISPs, but at what infrastructure cost? And would you let closed-source software keep you alive?

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Strata Week: A home for negative and null results

Strata Week: A home for negative and null results

Figshare wants research data, Accel makes a huge data investment, LinkedIn shares its DataFu.

by  | @audreywatters  | +Audrey Watters | 19 January 2012

Figshare relaunches with an eye toward making more research data accessible. Elsewhere, Accel invests $52.5 million in Code 42 and LinkedIn open sources DataFu.

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Four short links: 18 January 2012

Four short links: 18 January 2012

Nondeterministic Multicore, Cloning UI, jQuery Secrets, and MapReduce Alternative

by  | @gnat  | 18 January 2012

  1. Many Core Processors -- not the first time I've heard nondeterministic computing discussed as a solution to some of our parallel-programming travails. Can't imagine what a pleasure it is to debug.
  2. Pinterest Cloned -- it's not the pilfering of the idea that offends my sensibilities, it's the blatant clone of every aspect of the UI. I never thought much of the old Apple look'n'feel lawsuit but this really rubs me the wrong way.
  3. What You May Not Know About jQuery -- far more than DOM and AJAX calls. (via Javascript Weekly)
  4. Spark -- Scala-implemented alternative framework to the model of parallelism in MapReduce. (via Pete Warden)

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Four short links: 17 January 2012

Four short links: 17 January 2012

App Economics, Kickstarter Lessons, CSV Code, and Science Magic

by  | @gnat  | 17 January 2012

  1. 5 Is The New 10 -- I have limited sympathy for the "app developers can't predict their fortunes" complaint: creative arts have always been long tail hit-based businesses, possibly because hits have a large random component.
  2. Lessons for Kickstarter Creators (Mat Howie) -- great case study of a disastrous KS project. Preparation, research, and comms are what let this one down. (via Mat Howie
  3. CSV Kit -- commandline tools for working with CSV files. (via Hadley Wickham)
  4. Science of Magic -- magic tricks which help you teach students how to apply the scientific method. Magic and science both built off flaws in human perception and intuition: science tries to avoid them, magic to exploit them. (via Maria Popova)

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Four short links: 16 January 2012

Four short links: 16 January 2012

Computational Science, Bad Patents, Fasterscript, and Secure Social Software

by  | @gnat  | 16 January 2012

  1. Computational Science Stack Exchange -- q+a site for data-intensive computation-heavy science. (via Gael Varoquaux)
  2. An Open Letter to our Customers, Past and Future (Luma Labs) -- a reminder that poor patent examination hurts innovative startups working in physical goods, just as much as with digital goods.
  3. Javascript Performance (Steve Souders) -- JavaScript is typically the #1 place to look for making a website faster. Numbers and examples to show this, plus an interesting look at execution order of asynchronously loaded pages: Preserving execution order of async scripts makes the page slower. If the first async script takes a long time to download, all the other async scripts are blocked from executing, even if they download sooner.
  4. Retroshare (Sourceforge) -- GPL and LGPLed cross-platform, private and secure decentralised communication platform. It lets you to securely chat and share files with your friends and family, using a web-of-trust to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication. RetroShare provides filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels. I haven't tried it, but it's an interesting premise.

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Four short links: 10 January 2012

Four short links: 10 January 2012

Emotional Phone, Standup Desk, Mobile Sensors, and eBook Travails

by  | @gnat  | 10 January 2012

  1. Samsung Develops Emotion-Sensing Smartphone (ExtremeTech) -- By analyzing how fast you type, how much the phone shakes, how often you backspace mistakes, and how many special symbols are used, the special Galaxy S II can work out whether you’re angry, surprised, happy, sad, fearful, or disgusted, with an accuracy of 67.5% From a research paper from a research group on an unannounced product. Nice idea and clever use of incidental data, though 2/3 accuracy isn't something to write home about. Reminds me of Sandy Pentland's Reality Mining. (via James Governor)
  2. The $40 Standup Desk -- we've solved the usability of software, but hardware remains stubbornly dangerous to use. There's a reason nobody refers to "laptops" any more (if you use them on your lap, you might as well call them "wristkillers").
  3. funf -- an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices being developed at the MIT Media Lab [...] an open source, reusable set of functionalities, enabling the collection, uploading, and configuration of a wide range of data types. LGPL, Android.
  4. eBook Publishing Isn't That Easy -- list of the things you have to worry about when you self-publish. This line is gold: Locating a distributor. Amazon pays me 17 bucks for a 50-dollar book. Can you say "assholes?" LuLu pays me 43 bucks, but only if you buy on their site. Do the math. Platform vendors own authors and small publishers. (via Josh Clark)

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Four short links: 9 January 2012

Four short links: 9 January 2012

Apple Factories, Open Source Spy Drones, Mail Files, and Text Topic Extraction

by  | @gnat  |  9 January 2012

  1. Mr Daisey and the Apple Factor (This American Life) -- episode looking at the claims of human rights problems in Apple's Chinese factories.
  2. OpenPilot -- open source UAVs with cameras. Yes, a DIY spy drone on autopilot. (via Jim Stogdill)
  3. mbox -- more technical information than you ever thought you'd need, to be saved for the time when you have to parse mailbox files. It's a nightmare. (via Hacker News)
  4. Maui (Google Code) -- Maui automatically identifies main topics in text documents. Depending on the task, topics are tags, keywords, keyphrases, vocabulary terms, descriptors, index terms or titles of Wikipedia articles. GPLv3.

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Four short links: 4 January 2012

Four short links: 4 January 2012

Android Source, Javascript Language, CSS3 Progress Bars, and Computational Science

by  | @gnat  |  4 January 2012

  1. Compiling Android from Source (Jethro Carr) -- not as easy as you might think. The documentation is minimal, and each device has its own binary blobs of not-open-source crap necessary to make them work. Open source is supposed to let users continue to do good things with the device, even if the vendor disapproves (cf Stallman's Printer). Jethro's experience is that with Android, not so much. Even the Google AOSP supported phones can't run a pure open source stack, proprietary downloads are supplied by Google for specific hardware components for each model and for a specific OS release. Should Google decide to stop supporting a device with future Android versions (as has happened with earlier devices) you won't easily be able to support the hardware. (via Don Christie)
  2. Javascript Objects, Functions, Scope, Prototypes, and Closures -- an extremely readable yet concise guide to these topics in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. CSS3 Progress Bars (GitHub) -- gorgeous and useful. (via Juha Saarinen)
  4. To Know But Not Understand (David Weinberger) -- excellent excerpt from his new book on big data and computational science. We can climb the ladder of complexity [...] to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved. Preordered his book! (via Alexis Madrigal)

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Four short links: 2 January 2012

Four short links: 2 January 2012

Finland Schools, Open Source Prezi, Debit Cards for Hackers, and Sensor Startups

by  | @gnat  |  2 January 2012

  1. What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success (The Atlantic) -- Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. This is a magnificent article, you should read it. (via Juha Saarinen)
  2. impress.js (github) -- MIT-licensed Prezi-like presentation tool, built using CSS3 3d transforms. I've never been happy with the Prezi because I fear data lock-in. This might be a way forward. (via Hacker News)
  3. Facebook Offers Debit Cards to White Hat Hackers (CNet) -- paying vulnerability bounties without handing out cash. I figure it's the start of a loyalty program. Will Facebook learn what the hackers spent the money on? Interesting possibilities opened up here.
  4. Green Goose -- interesting startup selling consumer sensor hardware. My intuition is that we're platforming too soon: that we need a few individual great applications of the sensors to take off, then we can worry about rationalising hardware in our house. The biggest problem seems to me that we're talking about "sticking sensors on milk cartons" rather than solving an actual problem someone has. ("There are no sensors on my milk cartons" is not an oft-heard lament)

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Four short links: 30 December 2011

Four short links: 30 December 2011

Hadoop 1.0, Approximation Wiki, Printer Firmware Attacks, and Cotton Circuits

by  | @gnat  | 30 December 2011

  1. Hadoop Hits 1.0 -- open source distributed computation engine, heavily used in big data analysis, hits 1.0.
  2. Sparse and Low-Rank Approximation Wiki -- interesting technique: instead of sampling at 2x the rate you need to discriminate then compressing to trade noise for space, use these sampling algorithms to (intelligently) noisily sample at the lower bit rate to begin with. Promises interesting applications particularly in for sensors (e.g., the Rice single pixel camera). (via siah)
  3. Rise of Printer Malware -- firmware attacks embedded in printed documents. Another reminder that not only is it hard to write safe software, your mistakes can be epically bad. (via Cory Doctorow)
  4. Electric Circuits and Transistors Made From Cotton -- To make it conductive, the researchers coated cotton threads in a variety of other materials. To make conductive “wires,” the team coated the threads with gold nanoparticles, and then a conductive polymer. To turn a cotton wire into a semiconductor, it was dipped in another polymer, and then a further glycol coating to make it waterproof. Neat materials hack that might lend a new twist to wearables.

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Four short links: 28 December 2011

Four short links: 28 December 2011

Text Search, Cloud Filesystem, Javascript Parser, and Twitter Templates

by  | @gnat  | 28 December 2011

  1. Terrier IR -- open source (Mozilla) text search engine, now with Hadoop support.
  2. s3ql -- open source (GPLv3) Linux filesystem which stores its data on Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. (via Adam Shand)
  3. Esprima -- open source (BSD) fast Javascript parser in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
  4. Hogan.js -- open source (Apache) Javascript templating engine from Twitter. If it proves anywhere near as good as Bootstrap, it'll be heavily used.

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Four short links: 27 December 2011

Four short links: 27 December 2011

Log for Machines, Javascript Template Previews, Arduino Kit, Reconstructing Price of Persia

by  | @gnat  | 27 December 2011

  1. Write Logs for Machines -- argues that services should log in a format suitable for automated analysis, not for humans to read as has been the custom in the past.
  2. tmpltr -- Javascript template previewer, open source on github.
  3. Dspace Badge -- what my son and I are building this week, our first Arduino project.
  4. Prince of Persia C64 Development Blog -- fascinating account of a chap reconstructing Jordan Mechner's classic "Prince of Persia" game from Mechner's notes. The original source was lost.

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Four short links: 26 December 2011

Four short links: 26 December 2011

Text Analysis Bundle, Scala Probabilistic Modeling, Game Analytics, and Encouraging Writing

by  | @gnat  | 26 December 2011

  1. Pattern -- a BSD-licensed bundle of Python tools for data retrieval, text analysis, and data visualization. If you were going to get started with accessible data (Twitter, Google), the fundamentals of analysis (entity extraction, clustering), and some basic visualizations of graph relationships, you could do a lot worse than to start here.
  2. Factorie (Google Code) -- Apache-licensed Scala library for a probabilistic modeling technique successfully applied to [...] named entity recognition, entity resolution, relation extraction, parsing, schema matching, ontology alignment, latent-variable generative models, including latent Dirichlet allocation. The state-of-the-art big data analysis tools are increasingly open source, presumably because the value lies in their application not in their existence. This is good news for everyone with a new application.
  3. Playtomic -- analytics as a service for gaming companies to learn what players actually do in their games. There aren't many fields untouched by analytics.
  4. Write or Die -- iPad app for writers where, if you don't keep writing, it begins to delete what you wrote earlier. Good for production to deadlines; reflective editing and deep thought not included.

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Four short links: 23 December 2011

Four short links: 23 December 2011

Preview Colourblindness, Commandline Datamining, Open Source Indexing, and Javascript Time Series

by  | @gnat  | 23 December 2011

  1. See the World as a Colour-Blind Person Would -- filters that let you see images as protanopes, deuteranopes, and even tritanopes would see them. I am protanoptic (if that's a word) and I can vouch that the "after" pix look the same as "before" to me. Care, because about 8% of men have some form of colourblindness and hate you and your "red is bad, green is good" visual cues. (via Flowing Data)
  2. Waffles -- seeks to be the world's most comprehensive collection of command-line tools for machine learning and data mining.
  3. LinkedIn Open Sources Index and Query Services -- full-text index and retrieval engine, APIs, and a framework to manage indexes on infrastructure-as-a-service.
  4. Rickshaw -- a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs.

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Four short links: 22 December 2011

Four short links: 22 December 2011

Fuzzy Text, Big Data Crime, Map Visualization, and Attacking Server-Side Javascript

by  | @gnat  | 22 December 2011

  1. Fuzzy String Matching in Python (Streamhacker) -- useful if you're to have a hope against the swelling dark forces powered by illiteracy and touchscreen keyboards.
  2. The Business of Illegal Data (Strata Conference) -- fascinating presentation on criminal use of big data. "The more data you produce, the happier criminals are to receive and use it. Big data is big business for organized crime, which represents 15% of GDP."
  3. Isarithmic Maps -- an alternative to chloropleths for geodata visualization.
  4. Server-Side Javascript Injection (PDF) -- a Blackhat talk about exploiting backend vulnerabilities with techniques learned from attacking Javascript frontends. Both this paper and the accompanying talk will discuss security vulnerabilities that can arise when software developers create applications or modules for use with JavaScript-based server applications such as NoSQL database engines or Node.js web servers. In the worst-case scenario, an attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to upload and execute arbitrary binary files on the server machine, effectively granting him full control over the server.

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