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 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: 14 October 2009

Multitouch Demo, Secrets Site Secrets, Hadoop Futures, Becoming Lucky

1. 10Gui Video -- demo of a new take on multitouch, a tablet and new GUI conventions. (via titine on Twitter)
2. Behind the Scenes at WhatDoTheyKnow -- numbers and stories from the MySociety project, which provides a public place for Official Information Act requests and responses. The fact information is subject to copyright and restrictions on re-use does not exempt it from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (though there is a closely related exemption relating to “commercial interest”). Occasionally public bodies will offer to reply to a request, but in order to deter wider dissemination of the material they will refuse to reply via WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Southampton University have released information in protected PDF documents and the House of Commons has refused to release information via WhatDoTheyKnow.com which it has said it would be prepared to send to an individual directly.
3. The View from HadoopWorld (RedMonk) -- fascinating glimpse into the Hadoop user and developer world. Hadoop can be used with a variety of languages, from Perl to Python to Ruby, but as Doug Cutting admitted today, they’re all second class citizens relative to Java. The plan, however, is for that to change. Which can’t happen soon enough, in my view. It’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Java, or its audience. The point, rather, is that there are lots and lots of dynamic language developers out there that would be far more productive working in their native tongue versus translating into Java.
4. Be Lucky, It's an Easy Skill to Learn (Telegraph) -- this one resonated with me, as it ties into some life hacking I've been doing lately. And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 7 October 2009

Ongoing Palm Fail, YouTube Numbers, Plugin Patent Pain, Bivalve-Oriented Architecture

1. Followup to jwz's Palm App Store Fiasco -- redux: still nothing concrete from Palm, but they're saying they'll create a second-rate app store into which open source apps will go (along with apps that Palm hasn't reviewed).
2. Schmidt on YouTube -- the interesting bit for me was Every minute, more than 10 hours of video is uploaded to the site.
3. Company that won $585M from Microsoft sues Apple, Google - The infamous '906 patent granted to Eolas and the University of California was one of the first patents to get the young online tech scene going in 1998. The patent addresses third-party browser plug-ins to run various forms of media as an "embedded program object"—essentially a program that runs within another program. Eolas promptly sued Microsoft for its implementation of ActiveX in Internet Explorer, which set in motion a years-long legal battle between the two companies. and won $585M, now they're suing many large Internet companies. (via Hacker News)
4. IBM Uses Mussels as Sensor Network -- Concerned with the environmental and revenue impacts of leaks during oil drilling, StatOil sought an innovative and automated way to detect leaks. They wanted to replace a manual process that included deep sea drivers. StatOil’s innovation, they attached RFID tags to the shells of blue mussels. When the blue mussels sense an oil leak, they close which prompts the RFID tags to emit closure events. In response to the events, the drilling line is automatically stopped. And, in case you are wondering, this is of no harm to the blue mussels. (via monkchips on Twitter)

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: 28 September 2009

Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

1. Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming.
2. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion of how to build a game around a serious real-life problem. And honestly, people: if she can make concussion into a game, surely you can make your crap websites suck less?
3. Justniffer -- packet sniffer that identifies HTTP requests and emits an Apache-style logfile showing what was requested. (via Simon Willison)
4. Vegemite Names New Spread -- the original name was crowdsourced in 1923. They decided to repeat the process for their new product, a spread made from Vegemite and Cream Cheese. The winning name came from an Australian web designer: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0". This does not appear to be a joke (no mention that the commercial will use music from Rick Astley). Unsure which will make Americans more ill: the name, the idea of eating Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, or the idea of eating Vegemite at all.

Four short links: 4 September 2009

Flood Maps, Govt Permalinks, Ops, and Security

1. Flood Maps -- what the world will look like when the oceans rise. Interactive, so you can dial up your preferred level of environmental horror. (via Hans Nowak)
2. Citability -- making government accessible, reliable, and transparent with advanced permalinks, as Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability.
3. Bootstrapping EC2 Images as Puppet Clients -- This is a post on how to get to the point of using Puppet in an EC2 environment, by automatically configuring EC2 instances as Puppet clients once they're launched. I've been learning that if you're using a cloud hosting service, you need an automated admin tool. (via Grig Gheorghiu). See also the APT repository for Chef.
4. USB Snoop Stick -- Trojan in a convenient form factor, malware on a stick, back doors in your pocket ... and best of all, it's sold to consumers.

Four short links: 17 August 2009

1. How Twitter Works in Theory (Kevin Marks) -- very nice summary about the conceptual properties of Twitter that let it work. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don't care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.
2. Army To Test Wiki-Style Changes to The 7 Manuals -- In early July the Army will conduct a 90-day online test using seven existing manuals that every soldier, from private to general officer, will have the opportunity to read and modify in a “wiki”-style environment. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. MobWrite -- converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system. (via Simon Willison)
4. Open Data Standards Don't Apply To The Military -- It’s that last particular point that should be the most disturbing to the administration. Apparently all geospatial data being developed and utilized by the USAFA would be unusable without a sole software vendor. This causes concern over broader interoperability with other agencies and organizations, access to important national information, and archivability and retrievability. Expose of the single-source "standard" vendor lockin in US military geosoftware and geodata. (via johnmscott on Twitter)

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: 11 August 2009

1. The Slowing Growth of Wikipedia and More Details of Changing Editor Resistance -- researchers at PARC analysed Wikipedia and found the number of new articles and number of new editors have flattened off, and more edits from first-time contributors are being reverted. This is a writeup in their blog, with the numbers and charts. It's interesting that coverage in New Scientist talked about "quality", but none of the metrics PARC studied are actually quality. Wikipedia launched a strategic review which aims to tackle this and many other issues. (via ACM TechNews)
2. The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) -- teaser for upcoming O'Reilly book with some really good stuff. Balzac once wrote, “The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly,” and many successful social sites today founded themselves on an original sin, perhaps a spammy viral invitation model or unapproved abuse of new users' address books. Some companies never lived down the taint and other seems to have passed some unspoken statute of limitations. (via BoingBoing)
3. Skulpt -- entirely in-browser implementation of Python. (via Andy Baio)
4. Why Can't Local Government and Open Source Be Friends? -- the Birmingham example is one of many. Government procurement and tendering processes are often fishing expeditions, which biases responses in favour of commercial software companies making mad margins such that they can respond to RFPs that are really RFIs, etc. It's an issue everywhere in the world because it happens at local, not just central, level.

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)

Four short links: 1 July 2009

Web Awards, Speed Thrills, Magazines in the Cloud, Augmented Reality

1. The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they've lost the user's full attention and have to get it back. [...] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Printcasting -- very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
4. Pachube Augmented Reality Hack -- sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain't bad. (via bruces on Twitter)

Four short links: 8 June 2009

3D Geometry, The Printable Web, Government Internet Fail, and Real World Cloud Computing

1. How to Project on 3D Geometry -- the fine art (and math) of distorting an image so that it looks undistorted when projected onto a non-flat 3D surface. Confused? See the images below. (via straup on Delicious)
2. ZinePal -- Create your own printable magazine from any online content. (via warrenellis on Delicious)
3. What The Government Doesn't Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It -- Tom Steinberg from MySociety lays it out. As true for US, NZ, and every other country as it is for the UK (for which it was written). Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.” What I like about Tom vs the US's Gov 2.0 is that Tom puts down philosophy that's hard to argue with, whereas the US is dangerously close to simply focusing on techniques and that's subvertible.
4. Real World Cloud Computing -- summary from a panel of startups who are using EC2. The lock-in is latency. Transfering data within the Amazon services is free. Transfering data to an Amazon competitor: not free.

Four short links: 5 June 2009

Kid Robots, US CTO, SCOTUS CSS, Javascript Infoviz

1. Visual Programming Environments for Kids -- detailed writeup of the research and coding done by Shone Sadler to build a visual programming environment for robots, so simple that kids can use it. (via steveweiss on Twitter)
2. The Nation's CTO Lays Out His Priorities -- it's still not entirely clear how the CTO and CIO's roles differ, as both are focusing on open data and "innovation platforms". CTO explicitly calls out economic growth through technology and innovation, though, which could be promising.
3. Redesigning the Government: The US Supreme Court -- the Sunlight Foundation offer a redesigned home page to the US Supreme Court, showing how it could be more useful. How long until the government's CSS is in a git repository where most people with commit access are outside the beltway?
4. Javascript Infoviz Toolkit -- Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more.in this Javascript suite for building data pretties. Higher-level than processing.js. (via chrisblizzard on Twitter)

Four short links: 3 June 2009

Video Chat, NGO Incorp, Smart Grid, and Enterprise Sales Funny

1. Tinychat -- very simple web-based take on videochat. Pro members get higher resolution, more rooms, and privacy. (I like the "free = public, charge for private" business model)
3. One Click Orgs -- One Click Orgs is building a website where groups can quickly create a legal structure and get a simple system for group decisions. We think social enterprises, collectives and activist groups have better things to think about than obscure legal clauses. Still getting built, but a good idea. We're one step closer to Charlie Stross's vision from Accelerando of a twisty maze of cross-shareholding organisations whose bylaws are Python scripts.
4. Trilliant Acquisition Signals Next Phase of Smart Grid -- smart grids rely on networked power meters and consuming devices. Therefore there are possible alliances between powerline broadband and smart meter companies, as this union shows. Finally, a use for broadband power? (via monkchips on Twitter)
5. The Vendor-Client Relationship -- should mandatory watching for everyone in enterprise sales. (via johnclegg on Twitter)

Four short links: 29 May 2009

Meatware Hacks, iPhone Web Stats, Distributed Hash Tables, Richard Feynman Fun

1. Freedom for OS X -- Mac app that disables networking for up to eight hours so you can get work done without Internet distractions. Technology workarounds for meatware bugs. (via Joshua-Michèle Ross).
2. iPhone Casts a Giant Shadow on the Web -- 43% of mobile web traffic is from iPhone users, as measured by "the world's largest purveyor of ads on mobile apps and websites". As I was told today, "more people are spending more time looking at the web through one of these. For how much longer can you afford to ignore it?" (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Why you won't be building your killer app on a distributed hash table (Jonathan Ellis) -- locking and sophisticated queries. I'm still trying to figure out where we'll end up with these "let's do something simple in a way that lets us scale horizontally, and then build on top of that" approaches to solving the big data/graph theory problems behind many modern apps.
4. Richard Feynman Interviews at Microsoft -- a bit of fun to start the weekend on. (new URL 20090601)

Four short links: 27 May 2009

Hacker Browser, Design and Engineering, Twitter Data, Fire Eagle Updater for OS X

1. uzbl -- lightweight WebKit-based web browser controlled with vim-like keystrokes, controllable through a FIFO for scripting, and all the "features" (bookmarking, history, changing URL) happen through external scripts. For the hardcore. (via joshua on delicious)
2. A Conversation With Eric Rodenbeck About Usefully Cool Design and Engineering (Jon Udell) -- if we could only distil Stamen down to their barest essence, we could make a fortune selling it on the black market ...
3. Twitter Data -- using Twitter as a conduit for messages that have semantic markup. My gut reaction is that I'd prefer pure JSON in the data tweets, because a hybrid gives you poor use of the limited bandwidth and there seems no strong reason to care about human readability. (via Ted Leung)
4. Clarke -- elegant OS X updater for Fire Eagle that uses Skyhook to determine your location.

Four short links: 25 May 2009

1. China is Logging On -- blogging 5x more popular in China than in USA, email 1/3 again as popular in USA as China. These figures are per-capita of Internet users, and make eye-opening reading. (via Glyn Moody)
2. The Economics of Google (Wired) -- the money graf is Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."
3. Why Washington Doesn't Get New Media -- Things eventually improved, but despite the stunning advances in communications technology, most of federal Washington has still failed to grasp the meaning of Government 2.0. Indeed, much is mired in Government 1.5. Government 1.5? That’s a term of art for the vast virtual ecosystem taking root in Washington that has set up the trappings of 2.0 — the blogs, the Facebook pages, the Twitter accounts — but lacks any intellectual heartbeat. Too many aides in official Washington are setting up blogs and social media pages because they understand that is what they are supposed to do. All the while, many are sweating the possibility that they might actually have to say something substantive or engage the public directly. It is the nature of midlevel know-nothings to grinfuck any idea that would force them to substantially change their behaviour. We incentivize this when we talk about "you must have a blog" (ok, I'll get comms to write it), or "put up a wiki for this" (ok, but there'll be no moderation so it'll be ignorable chaos). Describe the behaviour you want and not a tool that might produce it. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. On the Information Armageddon (Mind Hacks) -- Vaughn points out that the much-linked-to New York Magazine article on attention is a crock. I didn't like it because it was wordy and self-indulgent, Vaughn because it didn't actually cite any studies other than one which was described incorrectly. History has taught us that we worry about widespread new technology and this is usually expressed in society in terms of its negative impact on our minds and social relationships. If you're really concerned about cognitive abilities, look after your cardiovascular health (eat well and exercise), cherish your relationships, stay mentally active and experience diverse and interesting things. All of which have been shown to maintain mental function, especially as we age.

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Villainous Javascript, Funding the Arts, Peak Web, and Crowdsourced Quality Control at a Museum

1. Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy)
2. Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X] by Y and it takes $Z" and people can donate to your goal. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
3. Peak Web (Chris Heathcote) -- My biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong. I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web.
4. Crowdsourcing the Cleanup with Freeze Tag -- The Awe-Worthy Brooklyn Museum, like all cultural institutions, have more objects than they can add metadata to. They let users provide metadata through tagging, but all crowdsourcing projects permit vandals. Their solution: crowdsource the cleanup. My only question is whether this will become a game between vandals and janitors. Brooklyn Museum is noteworthy for their insanely great use of the web, check them out and please support them if you like what you see.

Warning sign of peak web

Four short links: 15 May 2009

LIfe After socket(), Imminent Death of Web 2.0, Breathalyzer Lameness, and Open Source Science Publishing

1. Whither Sockets? -- ACM Queue article on how sockets as a model for network programming have become an obstacle to where networking is going. All of these calls have one thing in common: the calling program must repeatedly ask for data to be delivered. In the world of client/server computing these constant requests make perfect sense, because the server cannot do anything without a request from the client. It makes little sense for a print server to call a client unless the client has something it wishes to print. What, however, if the service being provided is music or video distribution? In a media distribution service there may be one or more sources of data and many listeners. For as long as the user is listening to or viewing the media, the most likely case is that the application will want whatever data has arrived. Specifically requesting new data is a waste of time and resources for the application. The sockets API does not provide the programmer a way in which to say, "Whenever there is data for me, call me to process it directly." (via Slashdot)
2. Game Web 2.Over? (Meg Pickard) -- update of the classic "wall o' Web 2.0 logos" showing which have folded or been bought. I'm glad to see how many have folded; many were the inevitable "me too"ing of initial successes, and many were simply bad ideas. Death is a natural part of the Darwinian marketplace, painful as it is to those who are naturally selected out of the meme pool. I'm glad to see how many were acquired, showing they had something someone wanted. The diagram's incomplete now, of course: it doesn't show the companies launched after the wall o'logos was made. (via Waxy)
3. Breathalyzer Source Code Sucks -- 2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings. Nonetheless, the comments say that the values should be averaged, and they are not... I periodically worry that I've been so long out of hardcore coding that my skills are rusty and I'd never survive at the coal face again. Then I see something like this and I punch the air and wheeze "I still got it!" as I reach for my cane. (via BoingBoing)
4. Bloomsbury Science Free Online -- Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans. The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies. (via Glyn Moody)