Four short links: 12 November 2009

CRM on Rails, Data Mining on Hadoop, Disappointing Keynotes, The Teapot Effect

1. Fat Free CRM -- open source (Affero GPL) Ruby on Rails CRM system.
2. Bixo -- open source data mining toolkit that runs as a series of pipes on top of Hadoop. Built on Cascading workflow system for Hadoop that hides MapReduce. (via kdnuggets)
3. Andy Kessler's Keynote at Defrag Stank (Pete Warden) -- I'm sorry to hear it, because I loved Andy's book How We Got Here about the intersecting histories of economics, finance, and technology. Read the book instead of reading about the disappointing keynote.
4. The Teapot Effect -- the thing I love about geeks is how their passion causes them to explore, ruthlessly and quantitatively, the everyday phenomena that the rest of us take for granted. Such as dribbling teapots: “Previous studies have shown that dribbling is the result of flow separation where the layer of fluid closest to the boundary becomes detached from it. When that happens, the fluid flows smoothly over the lip. But as the flow rate decreases, the boundary layer re-attaches to the surface causing dribbling.” Read the post and the research it talks about to learn how to prevent Dribbling Teapot Syndrome ....

Four short links: 30 September 2009

Smart Materials, Google OCR API, Teaching Webinar, HistEx

1. Smart Materials in Architecture -- Using thermal bimetals can allow architects to experiment with shape-changing buildings, Ritter said. Thermal bimetals include a combination of materials with different expansion coefficients that can cause a change in. Under changing temperatures this can lead one side of a compound to bend more than the other side, potentially creating an entirely different shape, he said. A little impractical at the moment, but think of it as hackers experimenting with what's possible, iterating to find the fit between materials possibility and customer need. (via Liminal Existence)
2. Google OCR API -- The server will attempt to extract the text from the images; creating a new Google Doc for each image. Experimental at this stage, and early users report periodic crashes. Still, it's a useful service. I wonder whether they're seeing how people correct the scan text and using that to train the OCR algorithms. (via Waxy)
3. My O'Reilly Podcast: Dan Meyer -- I'm not pimping this because it's O'Reilly (O'R do heaps of stuff I don't mention) but because it's the astonishingly brilliant Dan Meyer. For everything it does well, the US model of math education conditions students to anticipate narrowly defined problems with narrowly prescribed solutions. This puts them in no place to anticipate the ambiguous, broadly defined, problems they'll need to solve after graduation, as citizens. This webcast will define two contributing factors to this intellectual impatience and then suggest a solution.
4. Inflation Conversion Factors for Dollars 1774 to Estimated 2019 -- in PDF and Excel format. I've wanted such a table in the past for answering those inevitable "... in today's dollars?" historical business questions. (via Schuyler on Delicious)

Four short links: 29 September 2009

Bletchley Park No Longer Blech, Contest Mania, Palm Process Fails For Free Software, Open Source Web Analytics

1. Bletchley Park May Have a Future -- the UK birthplace of modern computing, where Alan Turing worked during WW II breaking German codes, is dilapidated and in need of major repair. They appear to have a supporter in the UK National Lottery, who have given them a grant to begin work and prepare for further grants. It should be secured for the future as a place of significant historical merit in the development of computing. (See also The Geek Atlas)
2. Google Opens Voting on Ideas to Change the World -- there are a lot of contests at the moment: Project 10^100, Apps for Democracy, Apps for America, a plethora of X Prizes, the Netflix prize, and more. I wonder whether contests are like communities: you need a manager to cultivate and boost interest, or else your contest withers on the vine.
3. My ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process (jwz) -- This is my story about attempting to simply distribute this free software that I have written, and how Palm has so far completely prevented me from doing so. Epic Palm fail. (via Hacker News)
4. Piwik -- Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. GPL-licensed.

Four short links: 23 September 2009

Video Art, Synthetic Biology Futures, Crowdsourced Personality, and an 1890s Startup

1. Projections (YouTube) -- the incredible video projection onto an old English manor house by Kiwi Foo Camp alums The Dark Room.
Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? (New Yorker) -- a thoughtful article about the possibilities and cautions of synthetic biology. . “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn”—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. “Same thing is going to start happening with energy,” he went on. “We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”
2. Business Cards and Crowdsourced Personality Assessments -- we scanned images of a person’s business card and asked crowdsourced workers from the Amazon Mechanical Turk channel to write five kind words about the person based on what they saw. I like the idea of being able to crowdsource a quick impartial aesthetic judgement about a design.
3. When Sears Was a Startup (Pete Warden) -- one of the first catalogues from Sears (1897) inspires comparisons to Amazon and other web startups. On a mission with a new business model. They can't stop talking about how they're cutting out the middle men who've been gouging their customers, with pages devoted to messianic rants against the monopolies trying to put them out of business. They contrast their order fulfillment process (dozens of clerks dealing with tens of thousands of orders a day) with the inefficient country stores full of assistants being paid to idly wait for customers, explaining how they can offer such low prices despite the shipping.

Four short links: 21 August 2009

Moody Twitter, Future Geohistory, News Sucks, Whyless in Wonderland

1. TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious).
2. What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published; between 1066 and 1086 more than half of Dunwich’s taxable farmland had washed away. Major storms in 1287, 1328, 1347, and 1740 swallowed up more land. By 1844, only 237 people lived in Dunwich. Today, less than half as many reside there in a handful of ruins on dry land. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
3. The Three Key Parts of Stories You Don't Usually Get -- In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites. Take a look at that WaPo page again. Currently, a link sits on the far right side of the page, a third of the way down, labeled “What you need to know.” Click on that link, and you’re taken here: a linkless, five-paragraph blog post from May. This basically captures our approach to providing the necessary background to follow the news.
4. Eulogy to _why -- a pseudonymous Ruby character, _why the Lucky Stiff, recently vanished from the net: all his sites and accounts were deleted. It's possible this is because someone tried to identify him, it's possible that his accounts were hacked. Either way, this is a touching tribute to him from John Resig. I for one would like to see more appreciation while the people are still around. Today, tell two good people that you enjoy what they do. You know you can.

Four short links: 13 August 2009

1. Under the Hood of App Inventor for Android -- regular readers know I'm a big fan of visual programming language Scratch, and apparently Google are too. They've got twelve university classes testing App Inventor for Android, a visual connect-the-bits programming environment for Android. University classes probably because one of the co-creators is Hal Abelson, coauthor of the definitive programming textbook. Also found online: the PR-type announcement, a Professor using it, and @AppInv (nothing juicy on Twitter--it looks like might be a channel for tech support for the students). (via Hacker News)
2. Google Web Optimizer Case Study (Four Hour Work Week) -- GWO manages A/B tests for you, with a lot of statistical analysis. It's a fascinating read to see how these should be done. Every equation may halve the readership of a book, but every table of numbers and relevancy analysis doubles the value of a post like this. (via Hacker News)
3. Opening Up The BBC's Natural History Archive -- the BBC are releasing programme segments and a whole lot of metadata around their programming. Audio and video segmented, tagged with DBpedia terms, and aggregated into a URI structure based on natural history concepts: species, habitats, adaptations, etc. Gorgeous!
4. Yahoo! Term Extraction API to Close -- Internally, both services share a backend data source that is closing down, so the publicly-facing YDN services will be closing as well. I think it's the most significant casualty of Y! outsourcing search to MSFT, as this API was used by a lot of projects. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 10 August 2009

Propaganda, Computer Science, Web Science, CS History

1. The Propaganda Newspapers -- London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well.
2. Time for Computer Science to Grow Up -- publish in journals so conferences can be community events. I've seen academics at Sci Foo look around at the unconference structure, or lightning talks, and say "why can't my normal conferences be like this?!", and not just in computer science too. Science conferences need a heart transplant. (via David Pennock)
3. Science Online 2010 -- conference on science and the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, educators, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science. (via kubke on Twitter)
4. E.W. Dijkstra Archive -- a collection of over 1,000 manuscripts that EWD sent around during his career. EWD 1036, "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science". "From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 109" (via S. Lott)

Four short links: 6 August 2009

Ancient Language, NoSQL, Molecular Gastronomy, SQL Weirdness

1. Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols' placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language. (via ACM TechNews)
2. NoSQL: If Only It Was That Easy -- war stories of the problems with nosql systems to handle big throughput. We liked Tokyo Tyrant so much, we put it in production. In fact, every request to AboutUs.org hits Tokyo. One of the uses is as a persistent memcached replacement for caching 10 million+ wiki pages (as a json document of all the pieces of our page, which comes out to around 51gb(edited) of data), and it works great. It runs on a single server, it serves up a single type of data, very quickly, and has been a pleasure to use. We keep other ancillary data sets on some other servers too, and it’s great for this. Tokyo Tyrant is a great example of very performant software, but it doesn’t scale. (via straup on Delicious)
3. WillPowder -- Specialty Powders and Spices from Chef Will Goldfarb -- molecular gastronomy products from "the golden boy of pastry". (via joshua on Delicious)
4. What is the Deal with NULLs? -- In the past, I’ve criticized NULL semantics, but in this post I’d just like to explain some corner cases that I think you’ll find interesting, and try to straighten out some myths and misconceptions. [...] I believe the above shows, beyond a reasonable doubt, that NULL semantics are unintuitive, and if viewed according to most of the “standard explanations,” highly inconsistent. (via bos on Delicious)

Four short links: 29 July 2009

1. Bioweathermap -- crowdsourcing the gathering of environmental samples for DNA sequencing to study the changing distribution of microbial life. Another George Church project. (via timoreilly at Twitter)
2. We Are All African Now -- a great article about our genetic history and the computational genomics that makes it possible. (via Tim Bray)
3. Standing Out In The Crowd -- OSCON keynote by Kirrily Robert on women in open source. Excellent.
4. Energy Harvesting Powers Printed LED -- an interesting combination of two emerging technologies. Like an RFID, the circuit has a current induced by the presence of a changing RF field. The EL display and the RFID circuit are printed in organic compounds, whereas the power control is built with traditional circuit fabrication techniques. (via Freaklabs)

Four short links: 13 July 2009

1. IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit -- methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free download.
2. Bentham and the Privacy of the Grave -- [M]uch of what Bentham meant to address in the context of his Panoptic structures we now take for granted. In Bentham’s lifetime, Parliamentary deliberations were confidential. Bentham’s arguments forced them into the sunlight. Legal decisions and statute books were accessible only to lawyers and judges. Bentham’s arguments led to codification of the law, and increasingly accessible legal rules. Bentham was far ahead of his time — the first modern information theorist. The idea that all actions of government would be presumptively available for public review did not become part of U.S. law until the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1967. As we speak, it appears the English parliament is only now learning Bentham’s message about publicity. Bentham was an early transparency advocate, economist, and character. I first read of him in the excellent A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science. (via carlmalamud on Twitter)
3. Curated Twitter Feed for Projecting Over Speakers -- Guardian developed it for their "Activate Summit" and it's since been used in two other events. They've open sourced it.
4. Android Market Problems -- take heed, all ye who would build "the iPhone App Store of ...", it's not easy to deliver a great customer experience.

Four short links: 10 July 2009

Network File System, Internet Use, Lovelace Comic, Search User Interfaces

1. Ceph -- open source distributed filesystem from UCSC. Ceph is built from the ground up to seamlessly and gracefully scale from gigabytes to petabytes and beyond. Scalability is considered in terms of workload as well as total storage. Ceph is designed to handle workloads in which tens thousands of clients or more simultaneously access the same file, or write to the same directory-usage scenarios that bring typical enterprise storage systems to their knees. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Daily Internet Activities, 2000-2009 -- Pew Charitable Trust's Internet usage survey. We've finally broken 50% of Americans using the Internet daily. Twitter is almost a rounding error. (via dhowell on Twitter)
3. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage -- fantastic comic, with end-notes that explain how Babbage and Lovelace's lives and works are reflected in the action of the comic. (via suw on Twitter)
4. Search User Interfaces -- full text of this book about the different (successful and un-) interfaces to search. (via sebchan on Twitter)

Four short links: 26 May 2009

Databases, Sensors, Visualization, and Patents

1. Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through a semipermeable membrane, bind to the particles and cause them to clump together. That clumping can be detected by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The device is made of a polymer called polyethylene, which is commonly used in orthopedic implants. The semipermeable membrane, which allows target molecules to enter but keeps the magnetic nanoparticles trapped inside, is made of polycarbonate, a compound used in many plastics. (via FreakLabs)
3. Visualizing Data source -- the source code to examples in Visualizing Data.
4. The First Software Patent (Wired) -- was issued on this day in 1981, for a complex full-text storage and retrieval system. Tellingly, business strategy of the owner of the first software patent was ... to become a patent lawyer. A day that will linger in irritation, if not live in infamy. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

Up Close with an Enigma

At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take much to convince someone from the NSA to talk on-camera about the Enigma. (I did decide to submit the video to the NSA public affairs office for final review.) Reading through the accompanying historical pamphlet and listening to NSA staffers, I developed a better appreciation for the contributions made by Polish authorities (and mathematicians) towards breaking what was then, the most important cryptographic machine in the world.

Also from RSA 2009:

Four short links: 15 Apr 2009

Computer archaeology, Unix, mad science, and data mining:

1. NASA Images Saved By Volunteers -- Pictures from the mid-1960s Lunar Orbiter program lay forgotten for decades. But one woman was determined to see them restored. One woman and some keen hardware hackers who built Frankenstein's tape reader to recover the images. Not just a reminder of how ephemeral our media, but also the huge amount of useful work that falls outside the interest of Official Groups to fund. (via Tim's twitter stream)
2. The Art of Unix Programming and The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (PDF) -- one loves Unix, the other ... not so much. It's interesting to read both books consecutively and realize the vast gulf that existed between Good Enough and Perfect, and how Perfect has been well and truly vanquished by Good Enough. The original Unix solved a problem and solved it well, as did the Roman numeral system, the mercury treatment for syphilis, and carbon paper. And like those technologies, Unix, too, rightfully belongs to history. (TAoUP via bengebre's delicious bookmarks)
3. Theo Gray's Mad Science -- a book full of Make-like charismatic megascience that you could theoretically do if you were sufficiently patient, provisioned, and safe. Projects include making your own nylon, turning beach sand to steel, and making salt by spectacularly combining sodium and chlorine. (via BoingBoing)
4. Microsoft Offers Data Mining Tools in the Cloud (Byteonic) -- Microsoft offers some data mining functionality of SQL Server 2008 with no local analysis services server in the cloud. The service is offered in two flavors: a cloud service and as a plug-in for Excel. The tools are forecasting, prediction, and "analyze key influencers". Interesting to see Microsoft offering this higher-level service than the simple Spreadsheet-in-the-Sky offered by Google.

Four short links: 16 Jan 2009

Toys, telegraphs, transparency, and travel in today's roundup of short interesting links.

1. New Law Could Wipe Out Handcrafted Toy Makers - CNN story on a new consumer safety law that mandates expensive quality tests for components of toys, even those handmade in the US by micro-businesses. It's not clear what a solution looks like: mass-produced in China or micro-produced in the USA, a lead-filled toy is still unsafe. However, if the cost of proving safety prevents safe toys from reaching the market, the consumer has lost. I wonder what Make and Craft have to say about it.
2. Bio of Samuel Morse - he was more interesting than I realized. He also came up in Andy Kessler's How We Got Here, which I just finished reading and thoroughly enjoyed. See also Steven Johnson's guest post Joseph Priestley and the Open Flow of Ideas on BoingBoing. Understand the history of technology if you wish to understand its future.
3. Ze Frank's Explicit - a serious blog by Ze, where he talks about how he does what he does. I had always thought of Ze as a funny guy, based on his video podcasts, but when I met him at Foo Camp I realized he was a performer. George Clooney isn't a bankrobber like Danny Ocean. Sarah Michelle Gellar doesn't slay vampires like Buffy does. Miley Cyrus isn't a teen musical superstar like Hannah Mon... ok, some actors are like their characters, but most aren't. Ze takes performance seriously whether it's on the web, on video, in person, or on Twitter--he consciously approaches it as a task, and deliberately chooses how he does it. Think of this as "Inside the Actor's Studio" for the Internet age.
4. The Dopplr Personal Annual Report - a beautiful PDF report of your travel, automatically generated using the Prawn PDF library. Their sample travel report is that of Barack Obama. Internet businesses are able to capture lots more data than was possible in the past, and one way they differentiate themselves is by reflecting it back in useful and beautiful ways.

Baby's 60th Birthday

Radar's predictive sense is drawn from the 'wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst' as we seek to collectively surface the emerging trends of the technology sector. However, from time to time, it's appropriate to look back at the milestones that have shaped the digital industries which we all inhabit.

One of these milestones falls tommorow in the Northern city of Manchester, Great Britain, as the city honours the sixtieth anniversary of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the world's first stored-program computer, affectionately known as 'Baby'. Baby executed its first program on 21st June 1948, as part of an experiment utilising four cathode-ray tubes (the Williams-Kiilburn tube) as storage devices, incidentally also enabling random access to this stored memory. The program itself, was was designed to find the highest factor of 2¹⁸, taking almost an hour and 3.5m operations to establish a solution.

A replica of Baby was revealed in 1998, celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, and is located at Manchester's Museum of Science & Industry, coincidentally the venue for this week's b.TWEEN conference of the UK's creative and digital industries.

The implications of Baby's inception were profound, not only enabling the storage of data, but also program code and the means to process it electronically; all the characteristics of what we take for granted as a computational machine. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, where Baby was born, was subsequently party to many other firsts, including the floating point machine, transistor-based computers and virtual memory. Along with the University of Bradford (my home town!), forty miles east over the Pennine Mountains, these universities were amongst the first to teach computer science in the UK.

It's no coincidence that this region of the UK was at the forefront of technology - during the Victorian era, the cities of Northern England were the 'Silicon Valley' of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester has long been a global influencer culturally, economically and technologically.

Places such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield are undergoing a modern renaissance with an explosion of grassroots geekery, BarCamps, coworking communties, OpenCoffee meetups, tech conferences, even a Google office and the emergence of regional venture capitalists and startup culture. These may be the weak signals of an emerging technology hub - can this region produce another Baby?

You can find out more about Baby's background, specifications and its inventors at the 60th anniversary celebratory site - www.digital60.org and also watch the BBC's original news coverage.

(Coincidentally, George Dyson's TED 2003 talk on the Birth Of The Computer was just posted a few days ago).