Four short links: 14 August 2009

EPub FTW, SQL Horror, Computer Vision Explained, and A Massive Dump of Twitter Stats

Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
How SudokuGrab Works -- the computer vision techniques behind an iPhone app that solves Sudoku puzzles that you take a photo of. Well explained! These CV techniques are an essential part of the sensor web. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
Twitter by the Numbers -- massive dump of charts and stats on Twitter. I love that there's a section devoted to social media marketers, the Internet's head lice. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)

bowerbird [14 August 2009 02:19 PM]

nat said:
> Open standards rock.

isn't that a bit simplistic?

sure, open standards are tons better than proprietary ones.
that goes without saying...

but an unimpressive "standard" like .epub doesn't get
any less unimpressive simply because it is "open"...

further, an "open standard" which is in the hands of
dinosaur middlemen content-cartel corporations who
use it to stave off their upstart mammal competitors
is _still_ an obstacle to progress, even if it is "open"...

of course, since o'reilly is itself one of those dinosaurs,
i "consider the source". but at least you're big enough
to let my comment to the contrary remain uncensored...

-bowerbird