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.
Complex Exploit, Better Coding Tools, Online Coding Tools, and DIY 3D-Printed Dolls
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| +Nat Torkington | 23 May 2012
- Tale of Two Pwnies (Chromium Blog) -- So, how does one get full remote code execution in Chrome? In the case of Pinkie Pie’s exploit, it took a chain of six different bugs in order to successfully break out of the Chrome sandbox. Lest you think all attacks come from mouth-breathing script kiddies, this is how the pros do it. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
- The Future is Specific (Chris Granger) -- In traditional web-MVC, the code necessary to serve a single route is spread across many files in many different folders. In a normal editor this means you need to do a lot of context switching to get a sense for everything going on. Instead, this mode replaces the file picker with a route picker, as routes seem like the best logical unit for a website. There's a revolution coming in web dev tools: we've had the programmer adapting to the frameworks with little but textual assistance from the IDE. I am loving this flood of creativity because it has the promise to reduce bugs and increase the speed by which we generate good code.
- Best Online Editors For Teaching HTML/CSS/JS (Pamela Fox) -- Over the past few months, I've been teaching in-person classes on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as part of GirlDevelopIt San Francisco. Along the way, I've experimented with various online consoles and editors, and I thought I'd share my experience with using them for teaching.
- Makie -- design a doll online, they'll 3d-print and ship it to you. Hello, future of manufacturing, fancy seeing you in a dollhouse!
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Budget App, Health Insurance Data, Perl Release, and HTML5 WYSIWYG Editor
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| +Nat Torkington | 22 May 2012
- New Zealand Government Budget App -- when the NZ budget is announced, it'll go live on iOS and Android apps. Tablet users get details, mobile users get talking points and speeches. Half-political, but an interesting approach to reaching out to voters with political actions.
- Health Care Data Dump (Washington Post) -- 5B health insurance claims (attempted anonymized) to be released. Researchers will be able to access that data, largely using it to probe a critical question: What makes health care so expensive?
- Perl 5.16.0 Out -- two epic things here: 590k lines of changes, and announcement quote from Auden. Auden is my favourite poet, Perl my favourite programming language.
- WYSIHTML5 (GitHub) -- wysihtml5 is an open source rich text editor based on HTML5 technology and the progressive-enhancement approach. It uses a sophisticated security concept and aims to generate fully valid HTML5 markup by preventing unmaintainable tag soups and inline styles.
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Objectivist C, Robotrading, Meme Culture, and Mobile-controlled Peripherals
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| +Nat Torkington | 21 May 2012
- Objectivist C -- very clever. In Objectivist-C, each program is free to acquire as many resources as it can, without interference from the operating system. (via Tim O'Reilly)
- Zynga and Facebook Stock Oddities (The Atlantic) -- signs of robotrading, a reminder that we're surrounded by algorithms and only notice them when they go awry.
- The Final ROFLcon and Mobile's Impact on Internet Culture (Andy Baio) -- These days, memes spread faster and wider than ever, with social networks acting as the fuel for mass distribution. But it's possible we may see less mutation and remixing in the near future. As Internet usage shifts from desktops and laptops to mobile devices and tablets, the ability to mutate memes in a meaningful way becomes harder.
- Oh Mi Bod -- I was impressed to learn that one can buy vibrators that can be controlled from an iPhone. Insert iBone joke here. (via Cary Gibson)
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Adoption Curves, Highschool Makerspaces, Google Glass, and OAuth Design Fiction
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| +Nat Torkington | 18 May 2012
- Overlapping S-Curves of Various Products (PNG) -- product adoption speed over time. (via Beta Knowledge)
- High School Makerspaces Q&A with Dale Dougherty (Radioshack) -- Experimentation is one of the things we’re trying to promote. If you do experiments, a number of them fail and you learn from that failure and say, “Gee, I could have done that differently.” It’s metacognitive skills that we’re trying to develop—a way of thinking, a way of doing that increases your confidence in your own abilities and in your capacity to learn. I’d like students to believe that anybody can do these things, not that only a few people are good at math or only a few people are good at programming. The goal is to reduce the barrier to those subjects and show that anybody can be good at them. (via Tim O'Reilly)
- Google Glass Patent: Infrared Rings and Fingernails (The Verge) -- The patent describes a wearable computing device whose interface can be controlled by infrared markers in the form of bracelets, rings, artificial fingernails, or effectively invisible temporary decals. A camera in the glasses would pick up radiation reflected from the marker, giving it a point of reference for user control. (via Chris Arkenberg)
- OAuth is Your Future (Flickr) -- design fictions to provoke thought. DHS accessing your Foursquare history? Aie. (via Dan Hon)
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Demythologizing Big Data, Online Scams, A Useful Computer Vision Library, and Opening Politics
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| +Nat Torkington | 17 May 2012
- The Mythology of Big Data (PDF) -- slides from a Strata keynote by Mark R. Madsen. A lovely explanation of the social impediments to the rational use of data. (via Hamish MacEwan)
- Scamworld -- amazing deconstruction of the online "get rich quick" scam business. (via Andy Baio)
- Ceres: Solving Complex Problems with Computing Muscle -- Johnny Lee Chung explains the (computer vision) uses of the open source Ceres Non-Linear Least Squares Solver library from Google.
- How to Start a Think Tank (Guardian) -- The answer to the looming crisis of legitimacy we're facing is greater openness - not just regarding who met who at what Christmas party, but on the substance of policy. The best way to re-engage people in politics is to change how politics works - in the case of our project, to develop a more direct way for the people who use and provide public and voluntary services to create better social policy. Hear, hear. People seize on the little stuff because you haven't given them a way to focus something big with you.
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Old Periodicals, Learning to Code, Substituting for Newspapers, and Charty Font
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| +Nat Torkington | 16 May 2012
- Many Old Periodicals -- I'm working my way through the back issues of "Thrilling Love". Sample story, Moonmist for Mary by Dorothy Daniels, from Feb 1950. Filing clerk Mary wins the heart of her secret coworker romance AND closes the sale AND is promised stock. It's torn from the pages of real life, I tell ya!
- Please Don't Learn to Code (Jeff Atwood) -- my take: everyone who is a "knowledge worker" should learn to program (who of us has not seen people wasting time with something we could automate in 10 lines of code?). It's hard to justify an adult like Bloomberg to take the time to learn to code, because he's already powerful and can hire other people to code. For this reason, I think kids should routinely be taught computational thinking (decomposition, pattern matching, etc.) and programming as a useful application of these skills. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Fungible News -- Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? [...] The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against. (via Phil Lindsay)
- FF-Chartwell, a Graph-Making Font -- brilliant! Font uses ligatures to show graphs. This is an elegant hack in so many ways, for example: copy and paste and you get the bare numbers! (via Chris Spurgeon)
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