Four short links: 21 May 2009

1. Us Now -- UK documentary, available streaming or on DVD, about how open government and digital democracy makes sense. It's good to watch if you've not thought about how government could be positively changed by technology, but I don't think it's radical enough in the future it describes.
2. It's Gonna Be The Future Soon -- great video for the Jonathan Coulton song that's the Radar theme song, my theme song, and probably works well as an anthem for most of us goofy future-loving freaks. Taken from the DVD of a live show. (via BoingBoing)
3. Jetpack -- Mozilla Labs' new extension system. Mozilla Labs is building quite the assemblage of interesting hack tools, and it's interesting how significantly they're aimed at the developer and encouraging lots of add-ons and after-market extensions for the browser. I wonder whether this is a deliberate strategy ("community will beat off Chrome!") or whether it's a simple consequence of the fact that Mozilla is a developer organisation.
4. Sci Bar Camp -- Science topics, Palo Alto, 7 July 2009.

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: 2 Apr 2009

Predictions, PDF, source code control, and recommendation engines:

1. Wrong Tomorrow -- track pundits predictions and see how accurate they really are. From the ever-awesome Maciej Ceglowski.
2. PDFMiner -- Unlike other PDF-related tools, it allows to obtain the exact location of texts in a page, as well as other layout information such as font size or font name, which could be useful for analyzing the document. It also infers text running within a page by using clustering technique. Entirely written in Python.
3. Migrating from svn to a Distributed VCS -- to decide which distributed VCS to use, Brett Cannon gathered Python use cases and then showed how they'd be done with different dvcses. The result is a very useful comparison document for svn, bzr, git, and hg.
4. Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche -- interesting post summarising and explaining research into recommendation engines, drawing the conclusion that although Internet World recommendation engines show everybody lots of new stuff, we're all seeing the same new stuff and the end result is less the "riches of niches" Long Tail fantasy and more a monoculture.

Work On Stuff That Matters: Video Interview with Tim O'Reilly

Over the past few months I have been interviewing various people that are "on our Radar" so to speak. It recently occurred to me that we had never done a video with Tim. So last week Kirk Walter (bless him!) grabbed his camera and Tim and I took a walk behind the O'Reilly offices in Sebastopol. We had a wide-ranging discussion (from Government to Cloud Computing) but started off with the theme that ran through many of Tim's talks last year; "Work on Stuff that Matters" These videos are a companion piece to Tim's recent blog post, of the same name.

We will be releasing the other segments over the next few weeks. They will also live on at www.thefutureatwork.com (where the video series has a home).

Part One:

Part Two:

Four short links: 7 Jan 2009

Draw closer around the flickering firescreen, and hear four tales of brains, words, medical improvement, and the sharp ache of the wisdom teeth of the future poking through the soft gum of the 21st century as diagnosed by Dr Sterling.

1. Mind Bites - Flickr set of findings from neuroscience on top of beautiful photos. Mind candy meets eye candy.
2. Dr Johnson's Dictionary - the original dictionary of the English language, reborn as a word a day blog. Love the old citations, e.g.

   A’DAGE. n.s. [adagium, Lat.] A maxim handed down from antiquity; a proverb.
   Shallow, unimproved intellects, that are confident pretenders
   to certainty; as if, contrary to the adage, science had no friend
   but ignorance. Glanville’s Scepsis Scientifica, c.2.
   Fine fruits of learning! old ambitious fool,
   Dar’st apply that adage of the school;
   As if ’tis nothing worth that lies conceal’d;
   And science is not science ’til reveal’d? Dryd. Pers. Sat. i.

3. Peter Provonost - prevented untold infections in hospital procedures by instituting a simple checklist. This is a long article, but worth reading as it shows how to institute change. He was diligent, scientific, and worked with the teams instead of against them. For more like this, read The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming MedicineThe Best Practice by Charles Kenney, a fascinating look at the quality movement in healthcare.
4. Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2009 - I'm just skipping through reading Bruce's responses. Some fabulous zingers that make me look forward to his presence at Webstock in February: "The Americans don't have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their LABOR, that's dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes, finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death.. On urban reinvention: "Suppose you found some dead James Howard Kunstler strip-mall burg, bought it for a dollar, and turned it into "OpenSource-opolis" where every possible object and service was creatively commonized. Would that be heaven, hell -- or what we've got now only different?" On netbooks + cloud slowing the upgrade cycle: "I've been a computer "consumer" for decades now, in the sense that I follow the trade press and buy computers regularly, but I dunno: if a $300 netbook running freeware lets me get the job done, 2009 may be the year when I just plain vanish off the radar.". Oh forget it, as is always the way with Sterling every damn sentence is quotable—go read the whole thing yourself and enjoy.