Ignite Seattle on 12/1 (tomorrow): iPhone Apps, Ben Franklin and Rubik's Cube

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

The 8th Ignite Seattle is this Tuesday, 12/1. We've got an amazing set of speakers and fun opening activity. We are once again at the King Cat Theatre in Downtown Seattle.

Doors open at 7PM. The contest will start at 7:30 and the talks will begin at 8:30. You can track Ignite Seattle updates at http://igniteseattle.com.

Here is our list of awesome speakers:

Benjamin Franklin – Intellect: without an outlet in the world
Do we remain in awe of Ben Franklin’s capacity and accomplishments or do we take on his mantle of “Doing the best with what we have” and look at our issues and do something about them? Better yet, WWBFD? [Brady's note: This is going to be a presentation by someone done as Benjamin Franklin. You can learn more on his site.

Wendy Chisholm (wendyabc) Challenge your assumptions. Innovate. Change the world.
Most designers are taught to design for the average user and as a society we hold many assumptions about the characteristics of those users. However, products are used in unexpected ways and by unexpected audiences.

Sarah Schacht (sarahschacht) Overcoming Cacophony: Making Gov 2.0 Work for You
What can you do, as an individual to make your voice heard in the lawmaking process and what tools do you use? Learn how to make your email float to the top of a pile of thousands, how to stand out from the crowd, and how to do so without losing your sanity.

Eugene Lin – iPhoning my way to retirement, $.70 at a time
I want to be rich. Steve Jobs promised it. App after app, the Apple gods got angry with me. Until finally, with nothing but an accelerometer, two dozen naked women, and the nation of Japan, I had a story to tell.

Scott Berkun (berkun) Everything you need to know about philosophy in 5 minutes
I’m the sad owner of a philosophy degree. I’m convinced i can give people a better education in philosophy (and make them realize how much they already know and love philosophy) in 5 minutes than I got in 4 years.

Jason Carmel (defenestrate99) Defamation and Twitter - A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
I will provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the people of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

Jeremy Bingham (captain_tenille) An Astronomical Viewing Shelter on the Cheap
Using your telescope in the city can be frustrating with all the stray light all over the place. You can’t do much about the skyglow, but you can shield yourself from stray light sources nearby.

Richard Bailey – More blink in less time? Manufacturing electronics for art projects.
The Groovik Cube required a custom surface mount circuit board for each of the 56 facets. Early estimates showed that this would require well over 150 hours of time to accomplish. The Groovik electronics team created an assembly line and produced 90 boards in one day.

Mike Tyka – Cubes in the Sky
We went through about 10 designs each trying to achieve the same goal of somehow raising the 15×15x15ft Groovik’s Cube, weighing near 4000 lbs 10 feet in the air within a fairly tight budget.

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What Would Jane Austen Have Twittered?

by Sarah Milstein | comments: 4

After the recent Web 2.0 Expo NY--a sprawling, week-long conference and exhibition--I ducked into the Morgan Library to catch "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy." A one-room show about an 18th century novelist seemed like the perfect antidote to a week of tech talk in the Death Star Javits Center.

As I'd hoped, the Morgan focuses on a handful of objects from Austen's life, and the commentary is thoughtful. I was surprised, though, to find myself thinking that had Twitter been around in Austen's time (1775-1817), she would likely have been a fan.

Austen wrote more than 3,000 letters, many to her sister Cassandra. They corresponded constantly, starting new letters to each other the minute they finished the last one and sharing the minutia of their lives. From reading Austen's novels, I'd always assumed that people in her era spent a long time waiting for the mail. But the show mentions that during Austen's life, mail in London and environs was delivered six times a day. Sometimes, a letter sent in the morning was delivered the same evening. Which makes snail mail sound a lot more like email or twitttering.

The speed of mail at the time and the content of the Austen sisters' letters suggest that the desires to communicate instantly and to let other people know what you ate for breakfast aren't modern phenomenon. Of course, Twitter lets you share your soy milk-to-cereal ratio with strangers and thus adds a layer of publishing to our updates. But people today often assume that email, Twitter and other relatively instant communication media have created a slew of brand new communication behaviors. The Jane Austen show at the Morgan suggests just the opposite: our human patterns are surprisingly consistent, and technology evolves to meet us.

Incidentally, the show doesn't say when multi-daily snail mail faded, and I wonder if it passed out of fashion with the rise of the telegraph in the mid-1800s. Anyone know?

Steve Souders: Making Web Sites Faster in the Web 2.0 Age

How huge JavaScript libraries, rich content, and lame ad servers are slowing the web down

by James Turner | comments: 6

As much as anything else, a user's impression of a web site has to do with how fast the site loads. But modern Web 2.0 websites aren't your father's Oldsmobile. Chocked full of rich Flash content and massive JavaScript libraries, they present a new set of challenges to engineers trying to maximized the performance of their sites. You need to design your sites to be Fast by Default. That's the theme of the upcoming Velocity Online Conference, co-chaired by Google performance guru Steve Souders. Souders is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, and spent some time discussing the new world of web site performance with me.

James Turner: There's been an evolution of the whole area of web performance, from the old days when it was all about having a bunch of servers and then doing round robin or just spreading the load out. How is web performance today different than it was, say, ten years ago?

Steve Souders: Well, what's happened in the last five years or so is that Web 2.0 and DHTML and AJAX has really taken off. And that's really been in the last two years. Five years ago, we started seeing a lot of flash and bigger images. So basically what's happened is our web pages have gotten much richer, and that also means heavier. There's more content being downloaded, more bytes. And then in the last two years, with the explosion of Web 2.0, we're seeing not only a lot more bytes being downloaded into web pages, but we're seeing that that involves a lot of complex interaction with JavaScript and CSS. And so whereas maybe five or ten years ago, the main focus was to build back-end architectures that would support these websites, we're seeing today that we need a lot more focus on the front-end architecture of our websites and web applications.

So that's where Velocity comes in, and my work comes in. Whereas ten or twenty years ago, you had people looking at collecting and evangelizing best practices for back-end architectures like databases and web servers, Velocity and my work is about identifying and evangelizing best practices for building really fast high-performance front-end architectures.

James Turner: I know, as someone who's been doing AJAX development, AJAX is a very different kind of paradigm for how you're interacting with the server. It's a lot more chatty. Are the current generations of web servers really designed for that kind of interaction?

Steve Souders: I think that the chattiness of AJAX applications isn't really the issue with regard to performance. I mean, anything can become an issue, but looking across the top 1,000 websites in the world, that's not the issue. The issue is that these web applications that do AJAX require a lot of JavaScript to set up that framework on the client, inside the browser. And to set that up, to download all of that JavaScript and parse it and execute it just takes a lot of time. A user is downloading complex photos or mail or calendaring application, and before they've even done any chatty AJAX request, they're just waiting for the application to actually load and start up. That's the frustrating period, you just want to get in and start working on your slides or reading your mail, and you're waiting for this start up to happen. Typically, once these AJAX frameworks have loaded, the AJAX work that we're doing in the background is not that big of a problem either from a back-end perspective or from the client side perspective.

James Turner: One of the things we see a lot these days is people using libraries like YUI or Google's libraries or JQuery . They have compressed versions, but they're still pretty large. To what extent do you think there's a need to really go in and pick and choose out of those libraries?

Steve Souders: Well, myself personally, I do that frequently because I only need usually one small feature, like I need a carousel or I need a drop-down menu or something like that. And I'll go to the work of pulling out just the code that I need. But I'm working small website projects. If you're building a whole web application, you're probably using many parts of these JavaScript frameworks. There still might be some benefit in pulling out just the pieces that you need. But that's extra work. And when you need to upgrade, that's the likelihood of introducing bugs or other problems. So certainly, I wouldn't avoid doing that. It should be evaluated, pulling out just the JavaScript that you need from the frameworks so long as the licensing even supports that.

But something else that helps address that problem is the Google AJAX Libraries API. This is where Google is actually hosting versions of JQuery and Dojo and YUI and Google's Closure JavaScript framework and Scriptactulous and EXT and others. What happens is you can have multiple websites that don't have any interaction with each other, Sears.com and WholeFoods.com, but they both might be using JQuery 1.3.2. And if they're both downloading that library from the Google AJAX Libraries API, then the URL is exactly the same. So a user that visits multiple of these websites only has to download that JavaScript once during their entire cache session. That further mitigates the need or motivation or benefit of pulling out just the parts that you need.

At first, I didn't think there would be that much of a critical mass around these people that would adopt the Google AJAX Library CDN and the actual version numbers of these JavaScript frameworks, but it's actually taken off really well, a lot of websites are using them. Users are actually getting this critical mass benefit where when they go to some website, Sears.com, that's using JQuery, they already have that in their cache from a visit they made a previous day to a different website. So I think in general, I would recommend to developers that they not change the JavaScript frameworks they're using. And if they're using a framework that's hosted on Google, download it from there. It's hosted on Google's infrastructure, so it's going to be fast, reliable, and users will actually get the benefit of having a greater probability of the framework being in their cache, because multiple websites are taking advantage of loading it from there.

James Turner: I have to put my security hat on for a second and ask, when you get into a situation like that, the flag that comes up for me is if someone managed, by some kind of an injection fake, delivery a version of a library that had vulnerabilities so that it appeared to be coming from Google, you could get into a situation where someone would be using a poison library. Do you think that's at all a realistic concern?

Steve Souders: Well, I think it depends on who's doing that. I work at Google so I don't want to come off as sounding like a fan boy who's only going to say great things about what Google is doing. I'm as cautious as the next person with what passwords I use and what information I give to any web company. But when it comes to something like this, I've built stuff that's running on Google App Engine or Amazon AWS. It's always possible that these big companies, these big web hosting providers are going to go down. But there's probably a greater chance that my website is going to go down than Google or Amazon. And the same thing with security. There's probably a greater chance that my website is going to be hacked than Google or Amazon. So I think it is a possibility. But I think the odds are pretty small of that happening. And that would not be a concern that would stop me from taking advantage of these services because of the performance benefits I get from them.

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Four short links: 30 November 2009

Paywall Performance, News Decisions, Sony Subsidising US Supercomputer, Invisible Open Source Business Model

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

1. Paywall Performance for News -- the National Business Review (NBR) in New Zealand went to a paywall in mid-July, and Foo Camper Lance Wiggs says their visitor numbers reveal a grim picture. As a commenter says, of course, visitor numbers go down but NBR makes money directly from the visitors that stay. I'm curious to see the effect on advertisers now the site's incentives are not to spray their load far and wide to land on as many eyeballs as possible. An interesting canary in the mine for Rupert's paywall plans at Fox.
2. Real Time, Real Discussion, Real Reporting: Choose Two (CrunchGear) -- a long post about the Internet's effects on journalism, but the headline will stick with me the longest.
3. Sony Still Subsidizing US Supercomputer Efforts -- US military buying PS3s as a cheap source of cell CPUs. The PS3's retail price is subsidized by Sony, driving game sales in a razor-blades model. It's like you could melt down razors and get more in scrap metal than they cost to buy at the supermarket ... (via BoingBoing)
4. Open Source Proves Elusive as Business Model (NYTimes) -- To Ms. Kroes’s point, there is an open-source alternative, and usually a pretty good one, to just about every major commercial software product. In the last decade, these open-source wares have put tremendous pricing pressure on their proprietary rivals. Governments and corporations have welcomed this competition. Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question. On the contra side, Mozilla makes millions from referred searches and must be counted as a win for open source even though it's not a company.

Washington Newseum stresses individual heroism, downplays economics and social context

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 0

My Parka pinched tightly, I plunged into the sleet that battered the pavements of Washington DC in a flash storm and tread down 6th Street. I wasn't about to turn back now. There was no other time for me to take the assortment of extended family members to the Newseum, the exhibit hall about journalism that has garnered so much buzz since its recent move from humble beginnings over the horizon in Virginia to a swank neomodern block with a balcony over looking the Capitol building that generates so much of its subject matter.

The Newseum is an experience worth the entrance fee, and a capacious view into the profession that it honors. The history exhibit boasts history-making front pages throughout the life of our country, and the First Amendment exhibit brought tears to my eyes. But a lot was missing from the Newseum too, and I didn't think the omissions were just something they'll get to later.

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Four short links: 27 November 2009

3D Models from Webcams, a Javascript Scheme, EMACS in Your Browser, and CS History

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. ProFORMA -- software which builds a 3D model as you rotate an object in front of your webcam. Check out the video below. (via Wired)
2. BiwaScheme -- a Scheme interpreter written in Javascript. (via Hacker News)
3. YMacs -- in-browser EMACS written in Javascript. Emacs, for those of you who were left in any doubt, is the only editor ever created by software engineers worth a damn (where "worth a damn" == "has possibly already achieved sentience") with the possible exception of teco.
4. Historic Documents in Computer Science -- my eye was caught by John Backus's first FORTRAN manual, Niklaus Wirth's original Pascal paper, the BCPL reference manual (the C programming language got its name from the C in BCPL), and Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC patent. (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 26 November 2009

Ed Data, Robot Talk, Gorgeous Web Layout, and Copyright Laws

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. 1 in 3 Schools -- visual exploration of education data is the latest BERG project, and they've found a new application for a cute visualization and they're calling the result Chernoff Schools. Recommended reading for those interested in visualization or education.
2. The Robots Podcast -- self-explanatory. (via So Where's My Robot?)
3. Dive Into HTML 5 (Mark Pilgrim) -- absolutely gorgeous layout. The first thing I've seen that makes me want HTML 5. (Apparently O'Reilly will be publishing it when it's finished. Yay, us!)
4. Copyright Watch -- a repository of national copyright laws.

Four short links: 25 November 2009

Sexy HTTP Parser, 9/11 Pager Leaks, Open Source Science, GLAM and Newspapers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 4

1. http-parser -- This is a parser for HTTP messages written in C. It parses both requests and responses. The parser is designed to be used in performance HTTP applications. It does not make any allocations, it does not buffer data, and it can be interrupted at anytime. It only requires about 128 bytes of data per message stream (in a web server that is per connection). Extremely sexy piece of coding. (via sungo on Twitter)
2. Wikileaks to Release 9/11 Pager Intercepts -- they're trickling the half-million messages out in simulated real time. The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its revelation will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the event and its tragic consequences. (via cshirky on Twitter)
3. Promoting Open Source Science -- interesting interview with an open science practitioner, but also notable for what it is: he was interviewed and released the text of the interview himself because his responses had been abridged in the printed version. (via suze on Twitter)
4. Copyright, Findability, and Other Ideas from NDF (Julie Starr) -- a newspaper industry guru attended the National Digital Forum where Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums talk about their digital issues, where she discovered that newspapers and GLAMs have a lot in common. We can build beautiful, rich websites till the cows come home but they’re no good to anyone if people can’t easily find all that lovely content lurking beneath the homepage. That’s as true for news websites as it is for cultural archives and exhibitions, and it’s a topic that arose often in conversation at the NDF conference. I’ve been cooling on destination websites for a while. You need to have a destination website, of course, but you need even more to have your content out where your audience is so they can trip over it often and usefully.

Velocity 2010: Fast By Default

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 3

We're entering our third year of Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference. Velocity 2010 will be June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA. It's going to be another incredible year.

Steve Souders & I have set a new theme this year, "Fast by Default".  We want the broader Velocity community & to adopt it as a shared mission & mantra. The reason for this is simple...

Fast isn't a Feature. Fast is a Requirement.

At Velocity earlier this year Marissa Meyer explained why performance mattered so much to Google. Then Eric Schurman (Bing & Velocity Program Committee member) and Jake Brutlag (Google Search) made history with a co-presentation on just how crucial performance is to revenue .

Phil Dixon of Shopzilla explained that a 5 second performance improvement increased their revenue by 7-12 percent while reducing hardware spend by 50%!!!

Fast means Client, Server, Infrastructure, Operations, & Organizations

Getting to Fast isn't just about any one part of the system. Browser & Client performance is crucial, and requires an equally fast server & infrastructure to support it. When load increases, infrastructure must scale quickly or performance suffers. The operational tools and processes for managing software & infrastructure must support rapid changes in a dynamic environment, and be backed by an organization & culture that embraces it.

We're Looking for Speakers - Submit your Proposals Now!

Do you have ideas and experience for improving Web Performance & Operations and making things "Fast by Default"? We want you as a speaker at Velocity 2010.

Submit your Proposals Now! Entires are due no later than January 11th, 2010 at 11:59 PM Pacific.

One more thing...

Quite a few people have asked us to have Velocity conferences more frequently & beyond the SF Bay Area, and so we're going to try something new. On December 8 we'll be running our first ever Velocity Online Conference.

Past Velocity Conference participants get a 50% discount & get a 25% discount off Velocity 2010.

See the full schedule after the jump...

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Four short links: 24 November 2009

Pwned by English, Scammy Christmas, TechCrunch Design, Facebook Numbers

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. English Shellcode (PDF) -- paper presented at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, showing how to encode arbitrary x86 shell code (the payload in a malware or other attack that elevates privileges and pwns your machine) as something that looks, at first glance, to be English text. Impressive piece of work. (via Slashdot)
2. The Twelve Scams of Christmas (McAfee) -- a press release, but one to send to all your civilian (non-computer-professional) friends. Scam IV: The Dangers of Holiday E-Cards. Cyber thieves cash in on consumers who send holiday e-cards in an effort to be environmentally conscious. Last holiday season, McAfee Labs discovered a worm masked as Hallmark e-cards and McDonald’s and Coca-Cola holiday promotions. Holiday-themed PowerPoint e-mail attachments are also popular among cybercriminals. Be careful what you click on.
3. TechCrunch Deconstructed -- analysis of TechCrunch's design, talking about what works and what might be problematic. Boxing in the ad around a piece of content helps increase click-through. The logo however doesn't offer much in terms of actions and is likely to reduce the click-through. (via Brady)
4. Bebo to Shut Down in Australia -- I don't care about Bebo, but this astonished me. "It's just phenomenal," said Nielsen Online's director of analytics, Mark Higginson. "Every time I run those numbers I have to double check. Australians are spending nearly a third of all their time browsing the internet on Facebook alone."

More that sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 5

After posting some thoughts a month ago about Erving Goffman's classic sociological text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I heard from a reader who urged me to try out a deeper work of Goffman's, Frame Analysis (Harper Colophon, 1974). This blog presents the thoughts that came to mind as I made my way through that long and rambling work.

Let me start by shining a light on an odd phenomenon we've all experienced online. Lots of people on mailing lists, forums, and social networks react with great alarm when they witness heated arguments. This reaction, in my opinion, stems from an ingrained defense mechanism whose intensity verges on the physiological. We've all learned, from our first forays to the playground as children, that rough words easily escalate to blows. So we react to these words in ways to protect ourselves and others.

Rationally, this defense mechanism wouldn't justify intervening in an online argument. The people arguing could well be on separate continents, and have close to zero chance of approaching each other for battle before they cool down.

When asked why forum participants insert themselves between the fighters--just as they would in a real-life brawl--they usually say, "It's because I'm afraid of allowing a precedent to be set on this forum; I might be attacked the same way." But this still begs the question of what's wrong with an online argument. No forum member is likely to be a victim of violence.

We can apply Goffman's frame analysis to explain the forum members' distress. It's what he calls a keying: we automatically apply the lessons of real-life experiences to artificial ones. Keying allows us to invest artificial circumstances--plays, ceremonies, court appearances, you name it--with added meaning.

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Tonight: Radar/Ignite/Laughing Squid Meetup in Philadelphia

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 0

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and I are going to be in the Philadelphia area today. We want to meet up with people while in town, so we're having a Drinkup at Triumph Brewing Company in the Old City area of Center City starting at 7PM. Facebook has the details. If you are involved in Ignite Philly, read Radar or Laughing Squid, or are doing cool things with technology then Scott and I would love to meet you.

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