Four short links: 29 October 2009

Learning Programming, Functional Javascript, Controlling Firefox, Kicking Ass (with SSDs)

1. Julie Learns to Program -- blog from our own Julie Steele as she learns her first programming language. The point is: it’s in me. I wasn’t sure that is was, and now I know—it is. And what, exactly, is “it”? It is the bug. It is the combination of native curiosity and stubbornness that made me play around with the code and take some wild guesses instead of running straight to Google (or choosing to stay within the bounds of the exercise). That might sound like a small thing, but I know it is not. I was determined to make the program do what I wanted it to do, I came up with a few guesses as to how to do that, and I kept trying different things until I succeeded (and then I felt thrilled). As much as I have to learn, I know now that I really am hooked. And that I’ll get there.
2. underscore.js -- new Javascript library of functional programming primitives (map, each, inject, etc.). (via Simon Willison)
3. WWW::Mechanize::Firefox -- Perl module to control Firefox, using the same interface as the WWW::Mechanize web robot module. (via straup on Delicious)
4. Anatomy of SSDs -- teeth-rattlingly technical Linux Magazine article explaining the different types of SSDs (Solid State Disks--imagine a hard drive made of rapid-access Flash memory). Artur Bergman told me that installing an SSD drive in his MacBook Pro gave the greatest performance increase of any computer upgrade he'd performed since he went from no computer to one.

Four short links: 15 October 2009

Open Access, Right to Broadband, Machine Learning Textbook, Javascript Performance Art

1. Open Access Week -- world-wide, dedicated to raising awareness of open access to research. (via Creative Commons Aotearoa).
2. 1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right -- Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection.
3. The Elements of Statistical Learning 2ed -- classic book (I have the 1st edition) that is now available as a free PDF download. (via Hacker News)
4. vi in Javascript -- yup, someone's written a vi clone in Javascript. (via monkchips on Twitter)

Four short links: 11 September 2009

Healthcare Fellow, Javascript Math, Web PDF Viewer, Tweeting Kegerator

1. Healthspottr Fellow -- outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit)
2. jsMath -- Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News)
3. Google's Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer -- Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online. (via Waxy)
4. Tweeting Kegerator -- network connected keg that tells you when it's about to run out.

Four short links: 8 September 2009

Mobile jQuery, API to Google Book Search, Open Learning, Popularity Algorithms

1. jQTouch -- jQuery library for mobile web app development. (via brian on Delicious)
2. GData API to Google Book Search -- search full text, get back metadata, modify "my library" collections, etc.
3. Open and Free Courses at the CMU Open Learning Initiative -- rather than just a lecture and handout dump, it has interactive exercises and questions to help you practice and figure out whether you've learned the subject. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You Can Be Proud Of -- description and brief analysis for the popularity algorithms in Hacker News, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Linkibol. A basic collective intelligence technique that's not obvious. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 5 June 2009

Kid Robots, US CTO, SCOTUS CSS, Javascript Infoviz

1. Visual Programming Environments for Kids -- detailed writeup of the research and coding done by Shone Sadler to build a visual programming environment for robots, so simple that kids can use it. (via steveweiss on Twitter)
2. The Nation's CTO Lays Out His Priorities -- it's still not entirely clear how the CTO and CIO's roles differ, as both are focusing on open data and "innovation platforms". CTO explicitly calls out economic growth through technology and innovation, though, which could be promising.
3. Redesigning the Government: The US Supreme Court -- the Sunlight Foundation offer a redesigned home page to the US Supreme Court, showing how it could be more useful. How long until the government's CSS is in a git repository where most people with commit access are outside the beltway?
4. Javascript Infoviz Toolkit -- Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via chrisblizzard on Twitter)

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Villainous Javascript, Funding the Arts, Peak Web, and Crowdsourced Quality Control at a Museum

1. Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy)
2. Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X] by Y and it takes $Z" and people can donate to your goal. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
3. Peak Web (Chris Heathcote) -- My biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong. I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web.
4. Crowdsourcing the Cleanup with Freeze Tag -- The Awe-Worthy Brooklyn Museum, like all cultural institutions, have more objects than they can add metadata to. They let users provide metadata through tagging, but all crowdsourcing projects permit vandals. Their solution: crowdsource the cleanup. My only question is whether this will become a game between vandals and janitors. Brooklyn Museum is noteworthy for their insanely great use of the web, check them out and please support them if you like what you see.

Warning sign of peak web

Four short links: 2 Mar 2009

You open the letterbox. Inside are four interesting links covering politics, mobile business, Javascript, and MySQL:

1. The Minimal Compact (Adam Greenfield) -- a manifesto on "open source constitutions for post-national entities". Sample: "Of interest are alternatives that are designed from the beginning to: Ensure the greatest freedom for the greatest number, without simultaneously abridging the freedoms of others; Permit individuals with common goals and beliefs to act in their own interest at the global level and with all the privileges afforded nation states, even when those individuals are separated by distance; Provide robust resistance to attempts to concentrate power, and other abuses of same."
2. Wireless carrier financial results (Matt Gross) -- Matt extracted the data from GigaOm's article on wireless carrier finances and presented them in simple tables for comparison.
3. jQuery Sparklines -- elegant micro-charting library.
4. How Friendfeed Uses MySQL to Store Schemaless Data -- another entry in the post-normalized database stakes. "We like MySQL for storage, just not RDBMS usage patterns."

Four short links: 16 Feb 2009

A lot of Python and databases today, with some hardware and Twitter pranking/security worries to taste:

1. Free Telephony Project, Open Telephony Hardware -- professionally-designed mass-manufactured hardware for telephony projects. E.g., IP04 runs Asterisk and has four phone jacks and removable Flash storage. Software, schematics, and PCB files released under GPL v2 or later.
2. Don't Click Prank Explained -- inside the Javascript prank going around Twitter. Transparent overlays would appear to be dangerous.
3. Tokyo Cabinet: A Modern Implementation of DBM -- ok, so there's definitely something going on with these alternative databases. Here's the 1979 BTree library reinvented for the modern age, then extended with PyTyrant, a database server for Tokyo Cabinet that offers HTTP REST, memcached, and a simple binary protocol. Cabinet is staggeringly fast, as this article makes clear. And if that wasn't enough wow for one day, Tokyo Dystopia is the full-text search engine. The Tyrant tutorial shows you how to get the server up and running. And what would technology be without a Slideshare presentation? (via Stinky)
4. Whoosh -- a pure Python fulltext search library.

Four short links: 26 Jan 2009

Pledges, phone, fake brains, and real brains. All here on your Monday dose of four short links:

1. Ada Lovelace Day - Suw Charman has kicked off a day of blogging about women in technology in honour of one of the greatest, Ada Lovelace. Of course, you should also feel free to blog about women in technology on days that aren't 24 March.
2. Get Multitouch Support on Your T-Mobile G1 Today - developer Luke Hutchison added multitouch support to his phone's operating system. It doesn't suddenly make the phone's apps work like an iPhone's but it's a hell of a testament to the utility of an open source operating system.
3. OCR and Neural Nets in Javascript - jQuery creator, John Resig, analyzes the Greasemonkey script that uses a neural network to solve one site's captchas. As John points out, the site's captchas aren't distorted, but it's nonetheless a sexy hack.
4. WSJ Recommends Four Books on Irrational Decision Making - the four books are Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Judgement Under Uncertainty, How We Know What Isn't So, and Predictably Irrational. (via Mind Hacks blog)

Four short links: 23 Jan 2009

Potty mouth, piracy, pointers to the future of the web, and Presidential technology woes, all in today's link roundup.

1. F*ck the Cloud - Jason Scott's brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without thinking about. Jason, an Internet historian, has a unique perspective and I think what he says makes a lot of sense. "[I]f you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service".
2. Pirating the Oscars - Andy Baio summarizes online piracy of the Oscar-nominated movies, as he has done since 2003. It's interesting to see what's new this year: movies are taking longer to leak, but more of them are being leaked.
3. Webkit Owns Mobile - Alex Russell lays out the case that Webkit "has mobile all sewn up". I've been saying for the last umpty years that the Web is at a Windows 286 stage of development--we need 3.1 to come along and standarize the widgets that presently everyone reinvents. I recognized that in this line from Alex: "If we look at the APIs of Dojo, Prototype, or jQuery as a set of suggestions for the APIs that the web should expose, then it becomes pretty clear that we’ve still got a long long way to go".
4. New Staff Find White House Tech in Dark Ages - they've gone from a startup to The Enterprise (not Star Trek, alas, just a big company) and now are learning the pain of IT rules that are bigger than they are.

Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

In today's edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps.

1. Echo Chamber - the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story's spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites.
2. Real Time Web-Based Power Charting - build the software and hardware to get a live chart in a web page that updates every 10 seconds with the instantaneous power usage for your entire house.
3. ActiveRecordJS - just what it sounds like, ActiveRecord for Javascript. AR is a complex subsystem of Rails, and it's interesting to see the functionality ported to Javascript.
4. I Am Here: One Man's Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle - a reporter tries all the location apps, and discovers the future isn't all here yet. Interesting: only three paragraphs of this long story are about the good bits of location services, the rest question its implementation, privacy, and utility.

Four short links: 13 Jan 2009

Apologies for the delay. Just remember Douglas Adams's great line: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

1. Misconceptions and Objections to Gaza Mapping - Mikel Maron deals to objections about the OpenStreetMap call for help to build an accurate free streetmap of Gaza. This is fantastic work from OSM.
2. Twenty Most Practical and Creative Uses of jQuery - I am generally loathe to link to linkbait ("X most Y Zs!") even though I'm guilty of it myself. This just pushes my jQuery love button, and the jQuery love button loves to be pushed.
3. http://rocketstrikes.iamnear.net - as you cruise around London, find out where the bombs struck in WW II. There are huge opportunities for locative services to open up historical geodata like this, in the same way that Pepys Diary Blog and Dear Miss Griffis have brought old diaries to life.
4. Differential Synchronization - the solution to the problem of "two people are editing the same document at the same time, and you need to make sure they're each seeing the same thing".