Four short links: 22 Apr 2009

Government, Bayes, SMS, and distributed keystores:

  1. Government Projects the Agile Way — Can It Be Done? (NZ Government) — notes and audio from a workshop at the New Zealand State Services Commission looking to merge agile and government. The pullquotes are mostly generic about agile, but the important thing is that there are agile projects within government and their numbers are growing. Having witnessed the incredibly slow, cautious, and non-agile development processes of government, I know how good this shift can be for budgets and delivery.
  2. DivMod Reverend — general purpose open source Bayesian classifier in Python (the Ruby port is Bishop). Bayes theorem lies behind the 2000-era spam filters, and there have been plenty of open source libraries to do Bayesian classification, but this one caught my eye because it’s from the very good DivMod folks who are behind the very good Twisted framework. (via noahgift’s delicious stream)
  3. RapidSMS — a free and open source messaging framework for building SMS applications. Integrates with Django. (via straup’s delicious stream)
  4. Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores (Leonard Lin) — he had to install and test distributed keystores for a client’s project, and posted his notes. Distributed keystores are one of the recent spates of database-like tools intended to solve some of the problems of big data applications. The distributed stores out there is currently pretty half-baked at best right now. […] Don’t believe the hype. There’s a lot of talk, but I didn’t find any public project that came close to the (implied?) promise of tossing nodes in and having it figure things out. […] Based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is. (via straup’s delicious stream)
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