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: 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)

Ada Lovelace Day ABC

Ada Lovelace Day helps to "make sure that whenever the question Who are the leading women in tech? is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues". I was tempted to talk about Mitchell Baker (Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla) but the Ada Day specifically requested "unsung heroes", so I'm going to give you the ABC of great women you probably don't already know:

The first, actually, you probably do: Allison Randal. She sometimes blogs on O'Reilly Radar, but not as often as we like. Allison succeeded me in four projects, and made me look bad every time! She ran the Perl Foundation better than I did, she ran Perl 6 better than I did, she was a better editor than I was, and you don't need a math degree to figure out how smoothly OSCON ran without me last year .... I admire the way Allison is a humane manager who succeeds in getting forward progress, even out of the most difficult to manage people, yet she'd much rather be coding. She's a linguist, a compiler writer of mad skills, has been the driving force behind Parrot (congrats on 1.0!), and is a deeply sane person in an industry too-often burdened by ego, vanity, and fantasy.

The second is Brenda Wallace. She's also a rock-solid developer, but has taken on much of the social organising of geek events in Wellington, New Zealand. Software folks are great at spotting gaps in code coverage, but they often have a blind spot for gaps in social coverage. Brenda's run geek girl events, SuperHappyDevHouse, Open Days, Hack Days, and more. She's always finding ways to get developers meeting developers. She rallied many troops for New Zealand's fight against bad copyright law. And, as if that wasn't enough, she has more gadgets than anyone else I've met in NZ!

The third is Courtney Johnston. She works for the National Library of New Zealand. I especially appreciate liminal people, those who live at the intersection of worlds. Courtney bridges three: art, libraries, and the web. She can bring the world view, the values, the techniques, and knowledge from one community to the others, enriching them all. She's passionate about the potential for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to not just survive but thrive in the digital world. And, like Allison and Brenda, Courtney is an amplifier: she is working to share knowledge and build networks that make other people more effective and powerful in what they do.

Lady Ada would be proud.

Four short links: 29 Jan 2009

Luck, craft, coding, and strategy today on Four Short Links:

1. Because -- After a NZ big-money low-success e-tailer closed, there was widespread "ha! about time!" in the blogosphere. This post, by one of New Zealand's most successful web entrepreneurs, is a fantastically humble reality check. "Build it and they won’t necessarily come, no matter how good you think it is and how much you try and tell them about it. Looking at a high profile failure, and thinking that you just need to do to the opposite to be successful can be quite misleading."
2. Ira Glass's Manifesto -- the man behind This American Life talks about the art and craft of creating great radio stories. I learned a lot from reading it, and not just about radio. "I'm not against manipulating feelings. The whole job is about manipulating feelings. If you don't get in front of that and embrace it with a big bear hug, you're not doing your job as a radio producer. You just don't want to be all corny about it." It's the great lesson I'm still learning from Sara Winge at O'Reilly, that humans are built of emotions and stories and if we want to reach a human then we must speak with emotions and stories.
3. Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries -- Matt Biddulph notes some libraries that made his first Objective C programming easier.
4. Three Freemium Strategies -- I've been looking for an excuse to link to this blog, Startup Lessons Learned. It's well-written and informative. "Strategy is all about what you're not going to do; for a freemium business, it's about which users you're willing to turn away. Knowing which model you're in can make these decisions a little less excruciating."

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)

Segway CTO Leaves for Apple as Product Design VP

Phil Torrone noticed today on the Segway Chat forums that "Doug Field, the chief technology officer at Segway who heads their entire engineering team (and has since Day 1), is leaving Segway to become a VP of product design at Apple." The announcement continues:

Doug has been the driving force in making the Segway what it is today and will be sorely missed at the company. However, with every change comes good and bad. So while it's bad the rich history and experience of Doug is leaving, it's good in that perhaps the team will get a fresh perspective into possible engineering solutions for future versions of the Segway (or Segway-like applications). And hey, what can be better than a gig at Apple? These days, in the design and engineering world, not much!! We wish Doug all the luck in moving on!!

I have no idea what Doug will be working on at Apple, but both the Segway and Apple's recent ascendancy remind us how the computer industry is no longer just a software game. For so long, the standardization of computing hardware gave most of the business advantage to software. Now, the end game of that trend has re-emphasized the differentiating power of hardware design. Meanwhile, Moore's law, coupled with the rise of software above the level of a single device means that smaller and smaller devices can flex computing muscle. As a result, computing functionality is migrating from computers per se into the world of stuff.

We've been chronicling the alpha geek and enthusiast edge of this trend in Make: magazine, but it's a mainstream trend as well. Designing computer infused stuff is the wave of the future, and people who are good at it are going to be in high demand.