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: 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: 20 July 2009

1. Apple's iPhone Wrecking the Cell Industry -- bleat bleat. Andy Oram's comment hits the mark: The music companies and AT&T were like travelers who refused to believe they were taking a long trip. They didn't pack warm clothing, and therefore had to buy it at disadvantageous terms when they came to need it. Apple was more sophisticated about where all companies are going technologically, so they had what others needed.
2. Fruux -- a lightweight and convenient system preference pane, that syncs your Address Book, Calendars, Tasks and Bookmarks between different Macs. (via Daniel Raffel)
3. Redflax -- notable not just for art, but for the Maori quote: He toi whakaaro, he mana tangata - roughly translates: where there is creativity/artistic expression, there is human dignity/prowess.
4. Google's Chiller-less Data Center -- Belgium has only 7 days (on average) when the ambient air temperature isn't enough to cool the data center. Finally, a business model for unpleasantly-cold climates.

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".