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: 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: 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.

Four short links: 21 October 2009

Battlefield Android, DIY Leukemia Hacking, Localisation, Bus Pirates

1. Raytheon Sends Android to Battlefield -- Google's OS sees deployment. Using Android software tools, Raytheon ( RTN - news - people ) engineers built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. [...] Every part of RATS is tailored for use on a battlefield. A soldier could make an unmanned plane a "buddy," for instance, and track its progress on a map using his phone. He could then access streaming video from the plane, giving him a bird's eye view of the area. Soldiers could also use the buddy list to trace the locations of other members of their squad. (via Jim Stogdill)
2. The Kanzius Machine (CBS News, video) -- inventor lost the race against leukemia, but his DIY RF therapy device is being developed "for real". (via Jim Stogdill)
3. Lost in Translation -- Will Shipley shows how to handle internationalisation and localisation. In this post I'm going to explain to you what internationalization and localization are, how Apple's tools handle them by default, and the huge flaws in Apple's approach. Then I'm going to provide you with the code and tools to do localization in a much, much easier way. Then you're going to think, 'That will never work, because of blah!' and I'm going to respond, as if I can read your mind or I've already had this argument with a dozen developers, 'It already did - I used these tools in Delicious Library and Delicious Library 2 and they've won three Apple Design Awards between them. (via migurski on Delicious)
4. The Bus Pirate -- interfaces to a heap of embedded hardware. The ‘Bus Pirate’ is a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal, eliminating a ton of early prototyping effort when working with new or unknown chips (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 20 October 2009

Politics in The Age of Social Software, Ethernet Patents, Free Book Fear, Programming Exercises

1. Poles, Politeness, and Politics in the Age of Twitter (Stephen Fry) -- begins with a discussion of a UK storm but rapidly turns into a discussion of fame in the age of Twitter, modern political discourse, the "deadwood press", and The Commons in Twitter Assembled. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new openness in our rule making, our justice system and our administration. Do not imagine for a minute that I am saying Twitter is it. Its very name is the clue to its foundation and meaning. It is not, as I have pointed out before, called Ponder or Debate. It is called Twitter. But there again some of the most influential publications of the eighteenth century had titles like Tatler, Rambler, Idler and Spectator. Hardly suggestive of earnest political intent either. History has a habit of choosing the least prepossessing vessels to be agents of change.
2. Apple and Others Hit With Lawsuit Over 90s Ethernet Patents -- unclear whether the plaintiff is 3Com (who filed the patents) or a troll who bought them. "We strongly believe that 3Com’s Ethernet technologies are being regularly infringed by foreign and some US companies," said David A. Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Ethernet Innovations. "We believe that the continued aggressive enforcement of the fundamental Ethernet technologies developed by 3Com against the waves of cheap, knock-off, foreign manufactured equipment is a necessary step in protecting the competitiveness of this American technology and American companies in general." (via Slashdot)
3. The Point -- someone's publishing Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python", which was published by APress under an open content license. Naturally this freaked out APress (it's easy to imagine many eyelids would tic nervously should such a thing happen with one of O'Reilly's open-licensed books). Mark's response is fantastic. Part of choosing a Free license for your own work is accepting that people may use it in ways you disapprove of. There are no “field of use” restrictions, and there are no “commercial use” restrictions either. In fact, those are two of the fundamental tenets of the “Free” in Free Software. If “others profiting from my work” is something you seek to avoid, then Free Software is not for you. Opt for a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” license, or a “personal use only” freeware license, or a traditional End User License Agreement. Free Software doesn’t have “end users.” That’s kind of the point.
4. Programming Praxis -- programming exercises to keep your skills razor-sharp, with solutions.

Random Hacks of Kindness: Disaster Relief Codejam

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the World Bank are getting together to support disaster relief projects. The first Codejam will be Nov 12-14 i the Bay Area. You can sign-up now. The list of proposed projects is online.

What is Random Hacks of Kindness?
It is an initiative that brings together disaster relief experts and software engineers to work on identifying key challenges to disaster relief, and developing solutions to these critical issues. This Codejam is the first of a series of Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) events that will bring the best and brightest together for a "give camp" to solve real world-problems related to Crisis/Disaster Relief.

Objectives:
This event is the first step in building a global community dedicated to solving disaster relief challenges through technology.
At the RHoK Codejam, programmers will partner with subject matter experts to tackle “real world "problems. These challenges have begun to be defined (see preparation), and will continue to be refined during the event.
The software created at this first event will continue to be developed at subsequent RHoK events, and openly shared with the international community. Our hope is that this software will address some of the serious challenges facing the disaster response community, and evolve in response to their needs.

Background:
In May 2009, the first ever Crisis Camp barcamp was held in Washington, DC. During one of the opening sessions an industry panel including representatives from Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! agreed that some matters supersede competitive concerns. We agreed to cooperate to mobilize our developer communities to create interoperable solutions/code that will have real impact in the field. We have partnered with NASA and The World Bank to make this happen.

Organizers:
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and The World Bank are founding sponsors
NASA-Ames is a co-sponsor

Preparation:
We want our hacks to make an impact. To that end we need the problem definitions as tight as possible before we begin coding on the 12th. The following is a link (see here) to the preliminary project definitions. Please contribute by adding new ideas and/or refining ones that are already there.

Four short links: 12 October 2009

DSL for NLP Task, Insider Tradespotting, Outsource Fail, Cloud Fail

1. Snowball -- a small string processing language designed for creating stemming algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. (via straup on delicious)
2. Insider Trades -- a Yahoo! Hack Day app that turned out to be worth continuing. Scans SEC systems every 30 seconds and alerts you if the stock you track has been traded by an insider. (via straup on delicious)
3. Air New Zealand Slams IBM -- central point of failure in the outsourced IT. "In my 30-year working career, I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client's customers is not the glowing endorsement you want.
4. Danger/Microsoft Loses Sidekick Customers' Data -- Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger's latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. This cloud had a brown lining.

Four short links: 9 October 2009

Negative Karma, Wal-Mart TQI, Idiot Airlines, and Native iPhone Apps in Lua

1. Don't Display Negative Karma -- A fascinating insight for those building social software, whether for collective intelligence or otherwise: There can be no negative public karma-at least for establishing the trustworthiness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user's abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bankruptcy. This setup defeats the primary goal of karma-to publicly identify bad actors. Assuming that a karma starts at zero for a brand-new user that an application has no information about, it can never go below zero, since karma bankruptcy resets it. Just look at the record of eBay sellers with more than three red stars-you'll see that most haven't sold anything in months or years, either because the sellers quit or they're now doing business under different account names. (I love finding articles like this, thinking "they should write a book for us!" and then realizing "oh, they already are!") (via Hacker News)
2. Information Wants to be Free, Even At Wal-Mart (Pete Warden) -- an interesting piece on the value of opening up data, sharing information in negotiations so the best outcome can be reached. I'd argue that this trust argument is usually a cop-out, hiding worries about turf and control. In most cases it's clear that it's not in the other party's best interest to screw you over, and if it is, why are you dealing with them at all? The worst cases I saw were between departments within the same company, often we shared more information with competitors than the guys down the hall. The other reason I see people not sharing is shame: many companies (and individuals) work hard to present a facade of competence and quality that facts belie.
3. The Forest, The Trees, and the Bag Fees -- The bean counters can't track the revenue dilution of all these new fees. They don't want to. We miss the forest for the goddamed trees all the time. And the CEO acts as if fees are found cash. Meanwhile, no one asks why our overall revenue is plunging and we're losing money quarter after quarter. Everyone acts as if one thing has nothing to do with the other. A reminder to watch the important numbers, e.g. cash in bank, profit, customer satisfaction. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
4. Native iPhone Apps Written in Lua -- open source port of Lua with Cocoa bindings for the iPhone. This is a tutorial showing you how to install and get past Hello, World. Apple have already approved one app written using it.

Four short links: 8 October 2009

DIY Baby Rocker, Unix Systems Glory, Encrypting Ephemera, and Explaining Creative Joy

1. Linux Baby Rocker -- inventive use of a CD drive and the eject command ... (via Hacker News)
2. I Like Unicorn Because It's Unix -- forceful rant about the need to rediscover Unix systems programming. Reminds me of the Varnish notes where the author explains that it works better because it uses the operating system instead of recreating it poorly.
3. Encrypting Ephemeral Storage and EBS Volumes on Amazon -- step-by-step instructions. (via Matt Biddulph on Delicious)
4. You Have No Life -- if a video smacks even slightly of concentrated effort or advance planning, someone will inevitably scoff that the subject has a) "too much time on his hands" or b) "no life." Ten times out of ten. [...] After six years I lack a succinct, meaningful response to my students' defensive, clannish embrace of mediocrity, though I'm grateful for this tweet, which comes pretty close: dwineman: You say "looks like somebody has too much time on their hands" but all I hear is "I'm sad because I don't know what creativity feels like."

Four short links: 6 October 2009

Birdwatching Technology, Transportation Data, Multitouch in Python, and Face Detection on the iPhone

1. Bird-watching Turns To Technology (BBC) -- CCTV-esque automated bird watching. Sensor networks + computer vision for an ecological purpose. In a bid to track the guillemots behaviour, Dr Dickinson is refining established work that involves modelling the visual structure of an area around a nest. The computer system will be able to use this model to identify changing elements in the scene, and determine if they correspond to movement by a guillemot. "That is the typical way of doing surveillance," said Dr Dickinson, "work out what's moving, that gives you an idea about what is interesting in a scene."
2. The Case for Open MTA Data -- If you live in Portland, there are dozens of mobile applications that help fill gaps in transit information. You can check your phone to see when the next bus is supposed to come. You can plan a trip from one unfamiliar part of town to another. You can even have your mobile device buzz if you fall asleep before reaching your destination. For the basic stuff, there's no iPhone necessary (although that certainly helps for information luxuries). Anyone who has a plain old cell phone with text messaging can ride the train or the bus with greater ease thanks to these apps. (via Making Light)
3. PyMT -- a python module for developing multi-touch enabled media rich applications. Currently the aim is to allow for quick and easy interaction design and rapid prototype development. There is also a focus on logging tasks or sessions of user interaction to quantitative data and the analysis/visualization of such data.
4. Near Realtime Face Detection on the iPhone with OpenCV Port -- we're probably only one or two revisions of iPhone hardware away from being able to do some serious computer vision tasks on the handset. Proof of concept adds a tie to the face you're pointing the camera at.

Four short links: 25 September 2009

On Wheel Reinvention, Research Visualization, New Comments, and Defective Congressional Data

1. Diesel: A Case Study In That Thing I Just Said -- a new asynchronous I/O library in Python, which earned this fabulous review from Glyph Lefkowitz who wrote the granddaddy of all asynch libraries in Python, Twisted. Again, I don't want to dump on Diesel here; for what it is, i.e. an experiment in how to idiomatically structure asynchronous applications, it's all right. For that matter Twisted has its fair share of bugs too, which would be pretty easy to lay out in a similar post; you wouldn't even need to do the research yourself, just go look at our bug tracker. But both Diesel and Tornado make the mistake of attempting to replace the years of trial-and-error, years of testing discipline, and years of portability and feature work that Twisted has accumulated with a few oversimplified, untested hacks.
2. Eigenfactor -- ranking and mapping scientific knowledge. Visualizations and analyses from when geeks attack scientific publishing.
3. Washington Post Develops Visual, Web-like Commenting System -- WebCom displays comments in a dynamic web instead of a traditional list. As new comments come in, the web gets bigger. The web, however, is not organized by chronology. King and his team believe that the most valuable comments are those that are rated highly by peers and those that spur responses. WebCom uses those criteria to organize the web. (via The Evolving Newsroom)
4. Congressional Data is Defective By Design -- You should have better access to this info! You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress. This is punishingly ridiculous. Congress could immediately take steps to make all publicly-relevant legislative data comply with the community-derived Eight Principles of Open Government Data.[...] That is to say, bill info from Congress could and should be available today in real time, free of charge, open-source, and licensed openly, via such open-standards technologies as XML, API’s, and regular bulk data downloads. We're entering a time where the tools and methods that make good software can help make good laws. (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Four short links: 24 September 2009

Historic Cartography, MySQL Futures, Timewarping GDB, Open Source Werewolves

1. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography -- This resource provides a comprehensive view of the history of cartography, with examples of maps created throughout the ages and background information about the contexts within which those maps, visualizations and map making technologies were created. Explore each time period, click on the images and stories found throughout each time line, and read more about the history of creating thematic maps as a means of visualizing data. (via Titine on Delicious)
2. Interview with Larry Ellison (Infoworld) -- Asked about MySQL, "No, we're not going to spin it off," even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. Lots of detail and interesting tidbits in this interview. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. GDB and Reverse Debugging -- GDB version 7.0 (due September 2009) will be the first public release of gdb to support reverse debugging (the ability to make the program being debugged step and continue in reverse). (via Hacker News)
4. A New Self-Definition for FOSS -- There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It’s just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn’t help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development. I don't agree entirely with this quoted piece, but there's a lot to what he says. Open source is not a silver bullet--hell, most people don't even know what the werewolf is. Open sourcing doesn't magically make developers appear, open sourcing doesn't magically make a market appear. Your closed source problems still exist after you open source because it's. not. about. you. It's about the users and their comfort, abilities, and freedoms. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 22 September 2009

Cities, How Things Work, Stylish Google, EC2 Numbers

1. The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future (IO9) -- a great essay by Matt Jones, based on his talk at Webstock this year. Urban design is how we created alternate realities before we had iPhones, and the new technology lets us choose which science fiction future we want to inhabit. We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said. Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. [...]
2. How and Why Machines Work (MIT Open Course Ware) -- Subject studies how and why machines work, how they are conceived, how they are developed (drawn), and how they are utilized. Students learn from the hands-on experiences of taking things apart mentally and physically, drawing (sketching, 3D CAD) what they envision and observe, taking occasional field trips, and completing an individual term project (concept, creation, and presentation). Emphasis on understanding the physics and history of machines. (via Hacker News)
3. Google Style Guide -- how Google codes. Useful if you're working on their code, starting a job there, or want to mock them for not specifying K&R braces/four space tabs/<insert One True Way here>. (via Hacker News)
4. EC2 Usage Guessed From Sequential IDs -- The Superseries ID changes so rarely that originally I had assumed it was some kind of checksum. This would have been odd as it limits the total available IDs to 2²⁴ = 16.8 million. Up to very recently, the Superseries ID for all resource types - instances, images, volumes, snapshots, etc. - was 69 (in the us-east-1 region (for eu-west-1 the Superseries ID is 74). These days, new instances use the Superseries ID 68. This subtle change, unnoticed by the industry, may hint at an astonishing achievement: 8.4 million instances launched since EC2’s debut! (Instance IDs are even so 8.4M = 16.8M / 2.) (via mattb on delicious)

Four short links: 15 September 2009

Delegation, Journalism, Dating Numbers, Learn Git

1. Why You Shouldn't Do It All Yourself -- this resonated with where I am in a few projects. One of the hardest things to learn in management is how not to do it all yourself. People often call this a problem with "delegation". But the problem isn't with telling others what to do. The problem is learning how not to do it all yourself. (via br3nda)
2. The Story Behind The Story (The Atlantic) -- I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.
3. OkTrends -- analytics from a dating site show what works in email. We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. (read their note on how they protected privacy before freaking out)
4. Learn GitHub -- Here we have tried to compile the best online learning Git resource available. There are a number of articles and screencasts, written and arranged to try to make learning Git as quick and easy as possible.

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: 28 August 2009

The Future, Python Metrics, Distributed Version Control, and Stylish R

1. What The Future's All About (Webstock Words) -- Bruce Sterling on the future. We’re not going to get a future Cloud World as somehow opposed to a future Augmented Reality World. It can’t happen. The ideas can be clearly distinguished, but ideas about technology, labels for technology, predictions and suppositions about technology, they don’t map onto actual real-world technology. Human culture doesn’t work like a logical argument.
2. PyMetrics -- code analysis software that produces metrics for your code. (via the excellent 10 Ways To Let People Know You're a Bad Python Programmer by Noah Gift)
3. Prophet and SD 0.7 Are Now Available -- Prophet is a lightweight schemaless database designed for peer to peer replication and disconnected operation. Prophet keeps a full copy of your data and (history) on your laptop, desktop or server. Prophet syncs when you want it to, so you can use Prophet-backed applications whether or not you have network. SD (Simple Defects) is a peer-to-peer issue tracking system built on top of Prophet. In addition to being a full-fledged distributed bug tracker, SD can also bidirectionally sync with your RT, Hiveminder, Trac, GitHub or Google Code issue tracker.
4. Google's R Style Guide -- R is a high-level programming language used primarily for statistical computing and graphics. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google. (via Bo Cowgill's blog)

Four Short Links: 24 August 2009

Distributed Version Control Systems, Ideas Tracking, OO Survey Results, New Barcodes

1. Making Sense of Revision Control Systems (ACM Queue) -- good introduction to the subject from Bryan O'Sullivan, author of Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (aka Distributed Revision Control with Mercurial) that covers Subversion, Mercurial, and git. Under the distributed view of revision control, every commit is potentially a branch of its own. If Bob and Alice start from the exact same view of history, and each one makes a commit, they have already created a tiny anonymous fork in the history of the project. Neither will know about this until one pulls the other's changes in, at which point they will have to merge with them. These tiny branches and merges are so frequent with Mercurial and Git that users of these tools look at branching and merging in a very different way from Subversion users. The parallel and branchy nature of a project's development is clearly visible in its history, making it obvious who made which changes when, and exactly which other changes theirs were based upon.
2. Ideas Are Awesome -- Ideas Are Awesome is a web culture aggregator tracking emerging marketing, design, and technology memes. We are currently tracking: simplify, empower, give, inspire, connect, adapt. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
3. OO Concepts Survey Result -- There were 3785 people who completed the survey. These charts show the proportion who gave the different possible responses for each question. If you're an OO programmer, use this to determine how aberrant your practices are (hint: most people are neither zealous nor consistent).
4. Bokode -- a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. (via waxy)

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: 6 July 2009

iPhone Maps, Tooth Milling, Scratch Updated, Newspapers for All

1. Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth)
2. My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future!
3. New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how to program (I've had success with lots of 7 and 8 year olds). The new version includes keyboard entry, webcams, and support for Lego WeDo. The user interface has also been changed to work on a Netbook's 800x600 screen. Kudos to the Scratch team! (via scratchteam on Twitter)
4. Newspaper Club - a Work in Progress -- blog for the Newspaper Club project. "We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we're alarmingly honest about where it's all going wrong." I can't figure out whether this is a brilliant decentralisation move that will disrupt the newspaper industry, or a paper form of steampunk. (via Simon Willison)