Nat has chaired the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and other O'Reilly conferences for over a decade. He ran the first web server in New Zealand, co-wrote the best-selling Perl Cookbook, and was one of the founding Radar bloggers. He lives in New Zealand and consults in the Asia-Pacific region.
E-Commerce Analytics, Text Mining on Hadoop, Bozonics, and It's Safe To Write With a Mac Again
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 6 February 2012
- Jirafe -- open source e-commerce analytics for Magento platform.
- iModela -- a $1000 3D milling machine. (via BoingBoing)
- It's Too Late to Save The Common Web (Robert Scoble) -- paraphrased: "Four years ago, I told you all that Google and Facebook were evil. You did nothing, which is why I must now use Google and Facebook." His list of reasons that Facebook beats the Open Web gives new shallows to the phrase "vanity metrics". Yes, the open web does not go out of its way to give you an inflated sense of popularity and importance. On the other hand, the things you do put there are in your control and will stay as long as you want them to. But that's obviously not a killer feature compared to a bottle of Astroglide and an autorefreshing page showing your Klout score and the number of Google+ circles you're in.
- iBooks Author EULA Clarified (MacObserver) -- important to note that it doesn't say you can't use the content you've written, only that you can't sell .ibook files through anyone but Apple. Less obnoxious than the "we own all your stuff, dude" interpretation, but still a bit crap. I wonder how anticompetitive this will be seen as. Apple's vertical integration is ripe for Justice Department investigation.
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Investigating Page Speed, The Web Commons, Community and Popularity, and GPL Enforcement
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 3 February 2012
- Page Speed (Google Code) -- an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.
- What Commons Do We Wish For? (John Battelle) -- trying to understand what the Internet would look like if we don’t pay attention to our core shared values. Excellent piece from jbat, who is thinking and writing in preparation for another book.
- The Trouble with Popularity -- this blog post on StackOverflow does a great job of explaining why moderators are necessary, and why it's not in everyone's interest to give them what they want. Sad to see this come out just as Yahoo! continues to gut and fillet Flickr, which used to be the benchmark for all things community.
- The Ongoing Fight Against GPL Enforcement -- interesting! Software Freedom Conservancy, who have pursued several cases against manufacturers who ship GPLed code but do not release their source and modifications to it, have used busybox as a fulcrum for their GPL code release lever. Manufacturers may be attempting to replace busybox with non-GPLed code to take away the fulcrum. In other news, engineering metaphors are like a massless body at light speed before the bigbang: unknowable.
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Build a Button, CMU iPad Course, Materials Conference, and Facebook IPO
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 2 February 2012
- Beautiful Buttons for Bootstrap -- cute little button creator, with sliders for hue, saturation, and "puffiness".
- CMU iPad Course -- iTunes U has the video lectures for a CMU intro to iPad programming.
- Inspiring Matter -- the conference aims to bring together designers, scientists, artists and humanities people working with materials research and innovation to talk about how they work cross- or trans-disciplinarily, the challenges and tools they've found for working collaboratively, and the ways they find inspiration in their work with materials. London, April 2-3.
- Facebook's S-1 Filing (SEC) -- the Internets are now full of insights into Facebook's business, for example Lance Wiggs's observation that Facebook's daily user growth is slowing. While 6-10% growth per quarter feels like a lot when annualized, it is getting close to being a normal company. Facebook is running out of target market, and especially target market with pockets deep enough to be monetised. But I think that's the last piece of Facebook IPO analysis that I'll link to. Tech Giant IPOs are like Royal Weddings: the people act nice but you know it's a seething roiling pit of hate, greed, money, and desperation that goes on a bit too long so by the end you just want to put an angry chili-covered porcupine in everyone's anus and set them all on fire. But perhaps I'm jaded.
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The Invention-Commoditisation Cycle, Software Estimations, Fullscreen Browser API, and File Formats in Javascript
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 1 February 2012
- Cycles of Invention and Commoditisation (Simon Wardley) -- Explosions of industrial creativity rarely follow the invention or discovery of a technology but instead its commoditisation i.e. it wasn't the discovery of electricity but Edison's introduction of utility services for electricity that produced the creative boom that led to recorded music, modern movies, consumer electronics and even Silicon Valley. However, utility provision of electricity did more than just create a new world, it disrupted existing industries (both directly and through reduced barriers of entry), it also allowed for new practices and methods of working to emerge and even resulted in new economic forms - such as Henry Ford's Fordism. This isn't a one off pattern. The cycle of invention/commoditisation repeats throughout our industrial history, following a surprisingly consistent pathway. Understanding this pattern is critical to anticipating the changes emerging in our industry today - whether that's the web, cloud computing or the future changes that 3D printing will bring. Simon explains the Business of the Internet in one blog post. Simon is king.
- Why Are Software Development Task Estimations Regularly Off By A Factor of 2 or 3? -- never a truer word spoken in parable.
- Using the Full-Screen API in Browsers (Mozilla) -- useful! The older I get, the more I like full-screen mode. I found myself wishing my email client had it, then someone pointed out that was called "mutt in a shell window". Fair 'nuff.
- File Formats in Javascript (GitHub) -- pointers to libraries for different file formats in Javascript.
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Entertainment Industry Booming, Exposing Data, Login Data, and QR Codes
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 31 January 2012
- The Sky is Rising -- TechDirt's Mike Masnick has written (and made available for free download) an excellent report on the entertainment industry's numbers and business models. Must read if you have an opinion on SOPA et al.
- Tennis Australia Exposes Match Analytics -- Served from IBM's US-based private cloud, the updated SlamTracker web application pulls together 39 million points of data collated from all four Grand Slam tournaments over the past seven years to provide insights into a player's style of play and progress. The analytics application also provides a player's likelihood of beating their opponent through each round of the two-week tournament and the 'key to the match' required for them to win. "We gave our data to IBM, said, 'Here we go, that's 10 years of scores and stats, matches and players'," said Samir Mahir, CIO at Tennis Australia. Data as way to engage fans. (via Steve O'Grady)
- Data Monday: Logins and Passwords (Luke Wroblewski) -- Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities.
- QR Codes: Bad Idea or Terrible Idea? (Kevin Marks) -- People have a problem finding your URL. You post a QR Code. Now they have 2 problems. I prefer to think of QR codes as a prototype of what Matt Jones calls "the robot-readable world"--not so much the technology we really imagine we will be deploying when we build our science fictiony future.
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Human Labour, Kinect in Laptops, Web Fonts, and Brain Boosting
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 30 January 2012
- Improvisation and Forgiveness (JP Rangaswami) -- what makes us human is not repetitive action. Human occupations should require human intellect, and there's no more human activity than making a judgement call when processes have failed a customer.
- Kinect Tech in Laptop Prototypes -- "waving your hands around at your laptop" will be the new "bellowing into your walkie-talkie phone". (via Greg Linden)
- Beautiful Web Type -- demo page for the best from Google's web fonts directory. Source on GitHub.
- Ethics of Brain Boosting, Discussion (Hacker News) -- this comment in particular: in my initial reckless period of self-experimentation, I managed to induce phosphenes by accident -- blue white flashes in the entire visual field, blanking out everything else. Both contacts were in the supraorbital region. I ceased my experiments for a while and returned to the literature. And you thought that typo where you accidentally took the database offline was bad ....
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