Four short links: 15 December 2010

Google Database, Text UI, Sustainable Education, Font Basics

  1. Dremel (PDF) — paper on the Dremel distributed nested column-store database developed at Google. Interesting beyond the technology is the list of uses, which includes tracking install data for applications on Android Market; crash reporting from Google products; OCR results from Google Books; spam analysis; debugging map tiles. (via Greg Linden)
  2. Conversational UI: A Short Reading List — it can be difficult to build a text user interface to a bot because there’s not a great body of useful literature around textual UIs the way there is around GUIs. This great list of pointers goes a long way to solving that problem.
  3. Sustainable Education (YouTube) — Watch this clip from the New Zealand Open Source Awards. Mark Osborne, Deputy Principal from Albany Senior High School, talks about the software choices at their school not because it’s right for technology but because it’s right for the students. Very powerful.
  4. What Font Should I Use? — design life support for the terminally tasteless like myself. (via Hacker News)
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