Three Quick Open Source in Defense Links (and then one other)

Next week I'll be participating in the inaugural Military Open Source Software Working Group Conference in Atlanta Georgia. Open source conferences that focus on the defense market are often salesy, have a dearth of actual developers, and tend toward sartorial blandness - a sea of dark blue suits worn by open source vendor sales people so they can convince hesitant buyers that their wares are just like the other guys. Look, we even license it by the seat!

This grass roots event, which will be held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center, is designed to answer the question raised by those other conferences; "where the geeks at?" It will even have a dress code to match, no suits allowed. There is still space available, so if you are having the kind of ridiculously cool summer that makes August in Atlanta sound appealing, pack your shorts and sandals and head down.

If you aren't familiar with the defense software space, it buys and builds an immense amount of software. Quite a lot of it is actually pretty cool too because it is designed to solve interesting problems. We're still waiting for the defense market to have its IBM/Apache moment, but when this market inevitably tips hard into open source the impact is going to be tremendous. Open source methods and licensing will be a conduit for technology transfer from the DoD into commercial use on a vast scale. However, what I think is really cool, is the opportunity it will offer for important participation in the other direction.

A couple of projects at the vanguard of this trend that just opened up are FalconView and Open CPI.

FalconView started life as a moving map for USAF mission planning and was already a great example of user innovation in the military. Recently the team at Georgia Tech took the next logical step and open sourced the bulk of the project.

My colleague John Scott (@johnmscott) and his team at Mercury Computer Systems just opened up the distinctly different Open CPI project. Sort of a middleware for FPGA's, it grew out of the signals processing field and, if it picks up community support, should make it simpler to develop and build hybridized hardware platforms for special purpose applications. I've written before at Radar about the trend in some areas away from pure commodity hardware in areas where performance and energy consumption are a priority. I think projects like Open CPI will contribute to this trend by making the development of specialized platforms more approachable.

This last link isn't related to open source software except for the fact that Gunnar Hellekson @ghelleks of Redhat pointed me to it. We were chatting over lunch about the epidemiology of virus and vulnerability propagation and the fact the removal term is too low to keep populations small. All too often, once a system on the network (whether in the enterprise or at the home) is infected, it stays infected until it is removed from the network and (hopefully responsibly recycled) sometime after it has been fully depreciated.

Furthermore, in a large enterprise with as many as millions of machines to deal with, it is simply impossible to manage the process of consistently hardening machines to prevent infection in the first place. If Population = (rate of infection - rate of removal)*t you can see that these two issues conspire to help the bot herders and other nefarious characters keep populations large.

To deal with the second problem (and perhaps someday enable a solution to the first) NIST has been developing the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP). Basically it is an extensible XML schema for defining the hundreds of security configuration parameters and their values that need to be managed. Once defined and rolled into profiles, agents running on various platforms can implement the profiles automagically. In DoD parlance, this means that Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) can be implemented broadly, efficiently, and, perhaps most importantly, in an ongoing manner.

Mapumental: Time & Scenicness in Maps

MySociety has given us a sneak peak at Mapumental, a map app that lets you pivot on travel-time, "scenicness", and house-price in the London area. Just enter a postal code and if you're looking for a home in the area Mapumental should be very helpful to you. It is an update to a previous foray into temporal maps (you can try it out on the embed in a Radar post of mine).

The map has a slider to control each of the dimensions. The time slider lets you choose how long you want to commute to get to the desired postal code by 9AM. This is a big change from the original map, which let you . The scenic slider lets you determine how nice of a place you want to live in. The housing price map The map above is quite depressing. It shows the areas you could live that will take you less than an hour and a half to get to work, has housing available for 750K GBP and is just barely scenic at level 3. Your options open up a lot if you ignore scenicness for this zipcode.

To make a useful and useable map with this many controls and data points is difficult. The base maps come from Open Street Map. The travel data (rail, bus, ferry) comes from Traveline (National Public Transport Data Repository); it's all based on a Tuesday in October, 2008. The map tiles, sliders and overall UI was inspired built by Stamen Design. MySociety's travel-time maps were pioneered by Chris Lightfoot.

The most unique dataset included in Mapumental is "scenicness". The data was gathered by user votes in the web app Scenic Or Not. As Tom told me, "We have 173,816 1*1 km squares voted on at least 3 times each, by different people. We're 80% of the way to a full dataset. Data comes from Geograph."

They've got more planned for it like making it public, allowing for alternate arrival and departure times, and allowing for multiple destinations to allow for couples. Those are all great additions, but what I would really like to see is either open-sourced code or an API so say that other geographic areas could have this functionality. How would this change the real estate market? If you could see this style of map for any industrialized area would it change the way you think about your quality of life and what it costs. Sounds like a great task for real estate sites Zillow or Trulia, alternately it's something that Walkscore could tackle.

Right now Mapumental is in Beta, but if you want early access Tom Steinberg sent a hint to BoingBoing: "Beta's private at the moment but we're handing out invites in exchange for declarations of love." Send your missives here. To learn even more about the project check out the short video after the jump.

(via Cory @ Boingboing)

Updated: Properly attributed Stamen's role on the project

(continue reading)

Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

Four short links: 12 May 2009

Storage Superfluity, Data-Driven Design, Twit-Mapping, and DIY Biohacking

1. Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting, hoarding, packratting, and the search technology necessary to find what you've stashed away. Analogies to be drawn between McMansions full of Chinese-made crap and terabyte drive full of downloaded crap. Do we need to keep it? Are there psychological consequences to clutter? (via gizmodo)
2. In Defense of Data-Driven Design -- a thoughtful response to the "Google hates design!" hashmob formed around designer Douglas Bowman's departure from Google. When you’ve got the enormous traffic necessary to work out if miniscule changes have some minor, statistically significant effect, then sure, if you can do it quickly, why wouldn’t you? But that’s optimization that should happen at the very end of the design cycle. The cart goes after the horse. Put it the other way ‘round and you have a broken setup. It doesn’t mean horses suck. It doesn’t mean carts suck. Carts are not the enemy of horses. Optimization is not the enemy of design. Get them in the right order and you have something really useful. Get them the wrong way around and you have something broken.
3. Just Landed: Processing + Twitter + Metacarta + Hidden Data -- Jer searched Twitter for "just landed in", used Metacarta to extract the locations mentioned, and then used Processing to build visualizations.
4. Do It Yourself Genetic Sleuthing -- MIT is starting a hotbed of DIY biologists. The 23-year-old MIT graduate uses tools that fit neatly next to her shoe rack. There is a vintage thermal cycler she uses to alternately heat and cool snippets of DNA, a high-voltage power supply scored on eBay, and chemicals stored in the freezer in a box that had once held vegan "bacon" strips. Aull is on a quirky journey of self-discovery for the genetics age, seeking the footprint of a disease that can be fatal but is easily treated if identified. But her quest also raises a broader question: If hobbyists working on computers in their garages can create companies such as Apple, could genetics follow suit? It's unclear what those DIY-started "genetics" companies would look like--the potential is there, but it's yet to met the right problem. (via Andy Oram)

Just Landed - 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo.

Four short links: 6 May 2009

Hamster Maps, Open Flu Data, Smart Grid Dollars, and Remixable Remix

1. Hamster Wheel Maps -- Jack Schulze has created an interesting way to see the world, in the form of "horizonless maps". The city unfolds in front of you like it was built on the inside of a hamster wheel and you're the hamster. Wired UK shipped an enormous foldout version.
2. Why Pig Flu is Better Than Bird Flu: Open Data (Glynn Moody) -- Glynn points to GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data), a system set up in 2006 because scientists were finding it hard to get timely H5N1 data. Following the correspondence letter in Nature, we have all pledged to share the data, to analyze the findings jointly, and to publish the results collaboratively, on the basis of open sharing of data respecting the rights and interests of all involved parties. This system has been used in the Mexican H1N1 outbreak.
3. IBM Plays Sugar Daddy to Smart Grid (CleanTech) -- IBM said it's making $2 billion available to jump-start IT projects, including the smart grid, because of the continued difficulty for partners to get project financing. The $2 billion would come from the company's lending and leasing arm, IBM Global Financing, in the form of low-rate loans, deferred payments, and other forms of project financing. The money is tied to projects authorized under the U.S. stimulus plan, which set aside $4.5 billion for smart grid projects. (via Freaklabs)
4. Lessig's "Remix" Book Now ccFree -- the latest book by Larry Lessig is now available under a CC-BY-NC license. (via Lessig blog)

Four short links: 5 May 2009

Spies, Community, International Success, and DNA Origami

1. Supermap -- The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is paying an undisclosed sum to California-based Geosemble Technologies to develop an intelligence version of the "geospatial data integration and layering technology" that the company developed for use by urban planners, real estate investors and market analysts. The technology combines overhead imagery, maps and heavy-duty data mining to create a map-based intelligence capability reminiscent of the Pentagon's former Total Information Awareness program. When the project is done - and In-Q-Tel won't say how soon that might be - CIA agents will be able to merge aerial images and electronic maps on a computer screen. Then they will be able to click on the building or other item of interest and all manner of information will pop up: who the tenants are, phone numbers, company records, links to company and organization Web sites, news reports related to the tenants or incidents at the address, property records, tax data and more. I love that Cheap Suit Susan, your local real estate agent, had the technology before the CIA. It's like learning that Lionel Hutz has a missile defense system to stop his house being TPed.
2. 7 Harsh Truths About Running Communities -- As the leader of your community, your personality sets the tone. As a result if the community behaves in ways you do not want, then you only have yourself to blame. I have seen many bloggers write about the negative comments they get on their posts. In most cases this is due to the tone they themselves strike in their writing. Although there are exceptions I believe that users will respond in the same voice you yourself set. If you are irreverent, then so will your users be. If you are rude, expect rude responses. "Social software" is an anachronism-software that doesn't let users interact has become antisocial software. Every web creator needs to know what successful communities have in common. (via Julie Starr)
3. Lingopal is Big in Japan (Lance Wiggs) -- Turns out we are biggest in Japan. We have done no marketing there - it is all organic growth as our google ad writing and PR ability is not so good in Japanese. More anecdata for my belief that, while chance favours the prepared mind (as Louis Pasteur said), we routinely use post-hoc rationalisation to explain why it was inevitable that this or that lucky SOB hit it big.
4. DNA Origami Seeds: Bottom-Up Methods for Molecular Self-Assembly (US News) -- Winfree's coworker at Caltech, Paul W. K. Rothemund, pioneered the seed-DNA technology that allows tiny "DNA origami" structures to self-assemble into nearly arbitrary shapes (such as a smiley face and a map of the Western Hemisphere). The researchers designed several different versions of a DNA origami rectangle, 95 by 75 nanometers, which served as the seeds for the growth of different types of ribbon-like DNA crystals. The seeds were combined in a test tube with other bits of DNA, called "tiles," heated, and then cooled slowly. At the lower temperature, the tiles start to stick to each other and to the origami. In this way, the DNA ribbons self-assemble, but only into forms such as ribbons with particular widths and ribbons with stripe patterns prescribed by the original seed.

Four short links: 4 May 2009

Maps, Africa, Protein, and Rockets

1. Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets -- Google criticised for putting up map layers showing the towns where a discriminated-against class came from, because that class is still discriminated against and Google didn't put any "cultural context" around it. Google and their maps didn't make the underclass, Japanese society did. Because they're sensitive about having the problem, they redirect their embarrassment into anger at Google. You could make a long and profitable career in IT consulting simply by charging to say "it's not a technical problem" and you'd be right more times than wrong.
2. See Africa Differently -- using the Internet to reframe a continent. Videos, essays, and more, all designed to get you seeing the majority of Africa, which isn't defined by conflict and famine. (via NY Times book review)
3. Fold.it - Solve Puzzles for Science -- science harnesses our "cognitive surplus" by inviting us to help solve the problem of protein folding, one of the hardest in biology. (via auckland_museum on Twitter)
4. Arduino Telemetry Payload in Class C Rocket (Jon Oxer) -- Because class-C rockets are so small and light they can't lift much of a payload and I had to keep the mass of the electronics as small as possible. You can get a sense of scale from this photo which shows a small white bundle in the bottom of the nosecone. Inside that bundle is an Arduino Pro Mini 5V/16Mhz, a 433Mhz transmitter module, and a Lilypad 3-axis accelerometer. PCBs ... in ... Spaaaaace!

Four short links: 7 Apr 2009

Maps, meaning, makers, and orphaned works:

1. Lens Tools and Fisheye Map Browsing -- a summary of magnification in maps through history, culminating in use of the fisheye/lens as a way to explore layers and data in thematic maps. (via Titine's delicious stream)
2. Socially Relevant Computing -- frustrated by the meaningless examples and work in computer science classes, Mike Buckley started sending students into the real world and building projects for handicapped people, firefighters, children, etc. Read their SIGCSE paper (PDF) for more. (via Andy Oram)
3. Maker Faire Africa -- I wish I could go!
4. Google Book Search Lawsuit Settlement Analysis -- finally a simple statement of why many folks aren't happy with the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: Thanks to the magic of the class action mechanism, the settlement will confer on Google a kind of legal immunity that cannot be obtained at any price through a purely private negotiation. It confers on Google immunity not only against suits brought by the actual members of the organizations that sued Google, but also against suits brought by anyone who doesn’t explicitly opt out. That means that Google will be free to mine the vast body of orphan works without fear of liability. Any competitor that wants to get the same legal immunity Google is getting will have to take the same steps Google did: start scanning books without the publishers’ and authors’ permission, get sued by authors and publishers as a class, and then negotiate a settlement. The problem is that they’ll have no guarantee that the authors and publishers will play along. (via Glynn Moody)

Four short links: 12 Feb 2009

Two links on visualization and two on life:

1. Myth of the Concentration Oasis -- Vaughan of Mind Hacks takes on the trendy notion that the Internet is turning us into brainless dullards who are unable to focus on any subject for longer than a 15s TV commercial. "The trouble is, it's plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case."
2. UUorld -- gorgeous map-based visual analytics environment for Mac OS X. Lovely to see something step beyond the "throw it onto a Google Map", which has become commonplace.
3. Why I Can't Afford Cheap -- great story about an octogenarian talking about her prized possessions. (via Titine's delicious stream)
4. Visualization Trends for the Noosphere (Jon Udell) -- thoughtful commentary on what's needed to make data visualization as simple as email. Viz is an incredibly powerful tool for translating data into understanding, but it's currently too damn hard to "mix the paint" (Udell's great term for the data hacking to convert, fix, etc. the data before they can be used). (via Titine's delicious stream)

Four short links: 14 Jan 2009

Something beautiful, something informative, something mindblowing, something revealing: something for everyone in today's link set.

1. Trees and Forests on Old Russian Maps - old maps, like old books, are works of art. I loved this collection of symbols; it reminded me how much creativity and beauty we've lost (temporarily, I hope) in modern maps.
2. Distinguishing Decorative from Meaningful Elements in UI Design - as a thoughtless cloth-eyed coder who designs CSS with the same care and attention that a boar on Viagra devotes to lovemaking, I appreciate this detailed explanation of why a simple design choice (a border around something) turns out to have been the wrong thing to do.
3. Interview with Clay Shirky and Part 2 - from Columbia Journalism Review. This is as good as the Bruce Sterling improv on the future from last week. Every paragraph has a philosophically sound quotable nugget. This is about the future of newspapers, the fiction of "information overload", the bogosity of Luddism, and a fine fine rebuttal to Nick Carr's Google stupidity.
4. Sampling Twitter - serious geekery by Dewitt Clinton, who tried to sample the Twitter ID space for an indication of representative user behaviour--follows, friends, active, etc. "Again extrapolating for accounts too new to test and private accounts, this suggests that 23% of all assigned ids, and thus 6.8% of all potential user ids, are assigned to someone who is posting regularly, is following other users, and is being followed by at least one other user. This implies that there there are up to 1,200,000-1,300,000 active, connected users on Twitter."

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".

Web 2.0 Expo Europe Videos Up

Many of the keynote videos from last week's second Web 2.0 Expo Europe are available. The highlight for me was definitely Tim's conversation with Martin Varsavsky, the CEO of Fon. He discussed his path from Argentina to Spain, his handling of the credit crisis a year before Sequoia's warning and his philosphy as an entrepreneur.

Other mainstage highlights included:

A Conversation Between Yossi Vardi (International Technologies) and Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media)
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Tinker.it!), In Case of Turbulence: Open Source Hardware
Saul Klein (Index Ventures), The European VC Market
Leisa Reichelt (www.disambiguity.com): Redesigning Drupal.org: An Exercise in Open Source Design

Unfortunately, only the mainstage sessions were recorded by us. You can find many speaker's slides online. More videos will be coming this week, including my conversation with John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) on their product's future and the Tele Atlas's CTO's talk on their crowdsourced mapping process.

Updated: Dopplr provides a visualization of where our attendees came from. It's great to see most of Europe so well represented.