Four short links: 11 November 2009

Participation Tools, Open Data Requests, Go Programming Language, Why Open Source is Better

1. ParticipateDB -- database of online tools for public participation. Closed alpha now, with 32 tools and 15 projects in the database. (via Sara Winge)
2. DataTO -- like data.gov, but it's where users request data sets. (In this case, from the Toronto municipal government)
3. Go -- new language from Bell Labs and Unix central figures Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, who now work at Google. Bits of C, bits of Google, it compiles to native binaries and runs nearly as fast as C. Built with concurrency and memory management as central figures. Not used in production at Google yet, but grew from a 20% project to something worthy of public release.
4. On Commit Bits (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- that day-one-commit-bit is one of the starkest differences between the corporate and the open source development model. [...] Granted, Django’s very conservative when it comes to granting that commit bit, but I’m not aware of a single open source project under the sun that’d give out a commit bit on a contributor’s first day. I’ve seen developers who’ve been hired to work full time on open source work for months without commit access to the project they’re paid to develop! One of several posts that Jacob's made about why open source makes for (on average) better software.

Four short links: 5 November 2009

Heat Maps in R, EC2 Blackhat Tricks, Snickersome Unicode, and Decoding Statistics

1. Heat Maps in R -- We used financial data here because it's easier to access than the airline data, but it's actually a pretty interesting way of looking at a financial time series. Weekend and holiday effects are a bit more obvious, and it's a bit like being able to see the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly closes all at once (by scanning your eye over the calendar in different directions). Includes source code. (via migurski on Delicious)
2. BlackHat and EC2 -- Theft of resources is the red-headed step-child of attack classes and doesn't get much attention, but on cloud platforms where resources are shared amongst many users these attacks can have a very real impact. With this in mind, we wanted to show how EC2 was vulnerable to a number of resource theft attacks and the videos below demonstrate three separate attacks against EC2 that permit an attacker to boot up massive numbers of machines, steal computing time/bandwidth from other users and steal paid-for AMIs. (via straup on Delicious)
3. Funny Characters in Unicode -- I never get tired of the wacky stuff in Unicode. I love the thought of a Unicode committee somewhere arguing passionately about the number of buttons on the snowman .... (via Hacker News)
4. Statistics to English Translation -- The terms sensitivity and specificity generally refer to diagnostic or screening procedures, such as an HIV or allergy tests. The sensitivity of a test is its true positive rate; the specificity is its true negative rate, although it can be more intuitive to think of specificity as the complement of the false positive rate. This matters. Bandying around numbers with misleading labels, or misinterpreting numbers that have a precise and defined meaning, does not further understanding. (Said 78.4% of statisticians, with a 20% confidence factor probability of false positives)

Four short links: 27 October 2009

Digital Art Programming, DIY Construction Set, Open Source Pedant, Design Principles

1. Field -- a development environment for "experimental code" and digital art. We think that, for many uses, Field is a better Processing than Processing. Includes Python and Java bridges, goal is to connect to as many different programming systems as possible. OS X only at the moment.
2. Contraptor -- a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication, desktop manufacturing, prototyping and bootstrapping. (via Hacker News)
3. After The Deadline -- open source contextual spelling and grammar checker. (via Hacker News)
4. Design Principles to Choose the Right Ideas -- Often people ask me how we know which ideas to choose from all the hundreds of ideas we’ve generated during brainstorm sessions. Apart from our gut feelings and experience there’s a method that could help us decide: define design principles. Interesting for the different sets of design principles used by Google and Microsoft teams. (via egoodman on Delicious)

Four short links: 26 October 2009

Data Exploration, Evidence-Based Coding, API to the English Language, Dual Licensing

1. Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that's appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it feels like is understandable.
2. Bits of Evidence -- Slides for a talk, "What we actually know about software development and why we believe it is true". (via Simon Willison)
3. Wordnik API -- definitions, frequencies, examples APIs. See the announcement from the Web 2.0 Summit.
4. The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing -- Brian Aker eloquently describes why he feels that dual licensing is anti-open source. Brian obviously has considerable experience informing this opinion--his years as Director of Technology for MySQL.

Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

I've reported before on the Worldwide Lexicon, the brainchild of my friend Brian McConnell. His most recent breakthrough, which I blogged about in August, was an impressive Firefox plugin that exploits both human and machine translations on the Web to provide pages you can read in your primary language.

As attractive as the Firefox plug-in can be, it's only the first stage in four that Brian plans toward a computing environment that encourages and leverages human translation. On the browser side, the next logical project is to reproduce the Firefox experience for IE users. Ultimately, he hopes the functionality becomes a standard part of every browser. Even better, he's working on a way to include the functionality on the server side so that it's browser-independent (although that technology would require support in the server software, of course).

And there's even more to come. He lays out his vision in an essay boldly titled The End Of The Language Barrier. The bottom of the article points to an equally important statement written for the World Economic Forum by Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Global Voices site that extends the reach of weblogs to people in many countries who previously lacked access to such forums.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 2 September 2009

Happy Programmers, Usability Tool, Geo API, Zombie Math

1. The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- you'll be surprised. Age before beauty!
2. Judge It Now -- fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster.
3. BlockChalk API -- These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services. Also see the explanatory blog post. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. The Mathematics of Zombie Attacks (PDF) -- Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. (via Doug McKenna)

Four short links: 31 August 2009

Digital Textbooks Rock, Diagrammed Sentences, Urban Games, Quirky Food

1. CK-12 Textbooks Accepted by State of California -- kudos to open textbook non-profit CK-12 for having many of their textbooks okayed for use in classrooms. Their books did better than those from commercial publishers! (via Slashdot)
2. Diagrammr -- web app to diagram simple sentences. (via brian on delicious)
3. Noticings -- Noticings is a game of noticing things in cities. Snap a photo of something interesting you happen upon, upload it to Flickr, tag it with 'noticings' and geotag it with where it was taken. (via migurski on delicious)
4. White Castle Microwavable Frozen Hamburgers -- Cal Henderson and Joshua Schachter can be bribed with these after midnight. (via direct observation)

Four short links: 20 August 2009

DIY SPY, Screencasting, Social Network Analysis, Term Extraction

1. DIY SPY - a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer -- As proof of concept (and a cool toy for anyone who has one of these lying around), I have implemented a working Wi-Fi spectrum analyzer on TI’s ez430-RF2500 development kit ($50), a 2-part USB dongle which consists essentially of a CC2500 radio strapped to an MSP430 low-power microcontroller (detachable bottom half) and a USB interface which enumerates as a virtual serial port (top half). The top half doubles as a standalone MSP430 programmer, so this kit is a great cheap way to get started playing with them. (via joshua on Delicious)
2. Screenr -- Instant screencasts for Twitter. Flash-based, uploads to their site and tweets the URL. The whole "for Twitter" thing is going a little too far: who records screencasts only for Twitter? It's like having a spellchecker only for three-letter words.
3. Social Network Analysis in R -- video and slides for talk on doing social network analysis with R.
4. We're Keeping the Term Extraction Service -- Yahoo!'s useful API gets a stay of execution. OK, we heard you. You’ve made it clear to us that shutting down the Term Extraction Service would be a mistake. So, we’ve changed our plans. We're leaving the service up and running indefinitely. (via Simon Willison)

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)