Four short links: 18 November 2009

Web Time Travel, UK Map Data Liberation, Streetview Mashups, 3D Retail

1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
3. Mapsicle -- open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
4. Freedom of Creation Shop -- online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).

Four short links: 29 September 2009

Bletchley Park No Longer Blech, Contest Mania, Palm Process Fails For Free Software, Open Source Web Analytics

1. Bletchley Park May Have a Future -- the UK birthplace of modern computing, where Alan Turing worked during WW II breaking German codes, is dilapidated and in need of major repair. They appear to have a supporter in the UK National Lottery, who have given them a grant to begin work and prepare for further grants. It should be secured for the future as a place of significant historical merit in the development of computing. (See also The Geek Atlas)
2. Google Opens Voting on Ideas to Change the World -- there are a lot of contests at the moment: Project 10^100, Apps for Democracy, Apps for America, a plethora of X Prizes, the Netflix prize, and more. I wonder whether contests are like communities: you need a manager to cultivate and boost interest, or else your contest withers on the vine.
3. My ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process (jwz) -- This is my story about attempting to simply distribute this free software that I have written, and how Palm has so far completely prevented me from doing so. Epic Palm fail. (via Hacker News)
4. Piwik -- Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. GPL-licensed.

Four short links: 17 September 2009

Involuntarily Opened Geodata, Sense Organ, Doc Vis, 3D Open Source Bodies

1. Wikileaks Now Holds UK Postcode Database -- the UK does not have open geodata in the way that we know it. A state-owned enterprise, Ordnance Survey, is responsible for maintaining all sorts of baseline data and they charge (through the nose) for that data. This is the release of 1,841,177 post codes, geographic boundaries, and more. Postcodes in the UK are far more useful than US ZIP codes--they identify a handful of houses, rather than a few thousand houses.
2. My New Sense Organ -- a strap with buzzers and a compass, so you always have physical reminder of orientation. For people like me who can get lost putting on pants in the morning, this would be a godsend. (via Slashdot)
3. Saving is Obsolete -- EtherPad adds a Wave-like replay feature to help you see the history of a document.
4. Open Source 3D People -- incredible software to design realistic 3D faces and bodies. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

Baby's 60th Birthday

Radar's predictive sense is drawn from the 'wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst' as we seek to collectively surface the emerging trends of the technology sector. However, from time to time, it's appropriate to look back at the milestones that have shaped the digital industries which we all inhabit.

One of these milestones falls tommorow in the Northern city of Manchester, Great Britain, as the city honours the sixtieth anniversary of the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, the world's first stored-program computer, affectionately known as 'Baby'. Baby executed its first program on 21st June 1948, as part of an experiment utilising four cathode-ray tubes (the Williams-Kiilburn tube) as storage devices, incidentally also enabling random access to this stored memory. The program itself, was was designed to find the highest factor of 2¹⁸, taking almost an hour and 3.5m operations to establish a solution.

A replica of Baby was revealed in 1998, celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, and is located at Manchester's Museum of Science & Industry, coincidentally the venue for this week's b.TWEEN conference of the UK's creative and digital industries.

The implications of Baby's inception were profound, not only enabling the storage of data, but also program code and the means to process it electronically; all the characteristics of what we take for granted as a computational machine. The Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, where Baby was born, was subsequently party to many other firsts, including the floating point machine, transistor-based computers and virtual memory. Along with the University of Bradford (my home town!), forty miles east over the Pennine Mountains, these universities were amongst the first to teach computer science in the UK.

It's no coincidence that this region of the UK was at the forefront of technology - during the Victorian era, the cities of Northern England were the 'Silicon Valley' of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester has long been a global influencer culturally, economically and technologically.

Places such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield are undergoing a modern renaissance with an explosion of grassroots geekery, BarCamps, coworking communties, OpenCoffee meetups, tech conferences, even a Google office and the emergence of regional venture capitalists and startup culture. These may be the weak signals of an emerging technology hub - can this region produce another Baby?

You can find out more about Baby's background, specifications and its inventors at the 60th anniversary celebratory site - www.digital60.org and also watch the BBC's original news coverage.

(Coincidentally, George Dyson's TED 2003 talk on the Birth Of The Computer was just posted a few days ago).