Four short links: 8 July 2009

1. Stop Whining About Facebook's Redesign (Slate) -- How can I be so sure that you'll learn to like the redesign? Because you did the last two times Facebook did it. The conclusion is that sites don't say why they're redesigning, and that causes the resistance.
2. C# and CLI under the Community Promise (Miguel de Icaza) -- Microsoft have announced they won't pursue patents relating to C# or the .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI): It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions. You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications. Good news for Mono and other .NET-compatible projects.
3. app-engine-patch -- a patch that lets most of Django work on Google App Engine. (via caseywest on Twitter)
4. Scope -- talk by Matt Webb, given to Reboot 2009. Every ten slides I sigh happily as new mental connections slide into place, as only Matt can make them. Worth it just for finding this Stewart Brand quote, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." That one sentence could direct a lifetime of action.

Four short links: 24 June 2009

Open Source Kids, Crowdsourcing Lessons, Flickr Secrets, Hadoop Spatial Joins

1. The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers.
2. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like a game. "Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect," Willison said. "It’s kind of a fundamental tenet of social software. … If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around." (via migurski on delicious)
3. 10+ Deploys/Day: Dev & Ops Cooperation at Flickr -- John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's talk from Velocity. You tell any mainstream company in the world "10 deploys/day" and you'll be met with disbelief.
4. Reproducing Spatial Joins using Hadoop and EC2 -- bit by bit the techniques for emulating important operations from trad databases are being discovered and shared in the new database scene. (via straup on delicious)

Four short links: 20 May 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Data Centers=Mainframes, Django Microframework, and a Visit To The Future

1. Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 15000th Title Posted To Project Gutenberg -- a great use of our collective intelligence and cognitive surplus. If I say one more Clay Shirkyism, someone's gonna call BINGO. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Datacenter is the New Mainframe (Greg Linden) -- wrapup of a Google paper that looks at datacenters in the terms of mainframes: time-sharing, scheduling, renting compute cycles, etc. I love the subtitle, "An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines".
3. djng, a Django powered microframework -- update from Simon Willison about the new take on Django he's building. Microframeworks let you build an entire web application in a single file, usually with only one import statement. They are becoming increasingly popular for building small, self-contained applications that perform only one task—Service Oriented Architecture reborn as a combination of the Unix development philosophy and RESTful API design. I first saw this idea expressed in code by Anders Pearson and Ian Bicking back in 2005.
4. Cute! (Dan Meyer) -- photo from Dan Meyer's classroom showing normal highschool students doing something that I assumed only geeks at conferences did. I love living in the future for all the little surprises like this.

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: 10 Jan 2009

Here are four fun links to set the tone for your weekend: high risk money, productive failure, consumer-grade BitTorrent, and architecture criticism for the rest of us.

1. How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing -- perhaps "hack" is a little excessive, but it's a readable short account of how Porsche made a lot of money playing "millionaire's poker" against hedge funds. (via Ivan Krstić, the author of Apache Security former Director of Security Architecture for the OLPC)
2. Missteps in Django -- a Python programmer documents the mistakes he makes programming in Django. This helps other people as they face similar problems, and shows the Django developers where their expectations differ from those of mortal programmers. I think it's a great idea because it makes visible the useful mistakes that are how we learn. It also reinforces the idea that it's okay to make mistakes, we all do it, and they're as worth of discussion as successes.
3. Netgear Unveils TV Torrent Player -- consumer device with BitTorrent built in. The easier it becomes for mortals to get files through BitTorrent, the harder it is to ignore unauthorised file sharing through BitTorrent, and the more pressing a solution to the business problem will be. (via Glynn Moody)
4. How Buildings Learn -- if you haven't seen this show, you should. On-the-money criticism of architecture and architects, talking about what's important when you design things for people. (via Kottke)