Four short links: 14 April 2011

HTML5 Demos, Resilience Engineering, Kinect SDK, and London Nerd Daytrips

  1. Chrome Experiment: ArcadeFire — choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering in HTML5. I have to say that “Built for Google Chrome” at the bottom does turn my stomach, a “this page looks best in Microsoft Internet Explorer” for the 2010s.
  2. Resilience Engineering, Part 1 (John Allspaw) — listing human error as a root cause isn’t where you should end, it’s where you should start your investigation […] The idea that failures in complex systems can literally have a singular ‘root’ cause, as if failures are the result of linear steps in time, is just incorrect. Not only is it almost always incorrect, but in practice that perspective can be harmful to an organization because it allows management and others to feel better about improving safety, when they’re not, because the solution(s) can be viewed as simple and singular fixes (in reality, they’re not). It’s all must-read stuff. (via Mike Loukides)
  3. What’s in Microsoft’s Kineck SDKit does seem to include the new super body tracking software able to track up to two users at the same time and it also promises a new feature – the ability to listen. It has four microphones and there’s promise that, with the position information, it’ll be able to isolate your voice from background noise. (via Tim O’Reilly)
  4. Nerdy London Day Trips (Ben Goldacre) — hundreds more reasons to visit London (and then leave it). Includes abandoned nuclear bunkers, an “eccentric” Victorian philanthropist’s labyrinth of tunnels, and the first house in the world to be powered by hydro-electricity. (via Kari Stewart)
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