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.
Monki Gras Roundup, Flow Programming, Curvy Javascript Text, and Political Purchases
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 10 February 2012
- Monki Gras 2012 (Stephen Walli) -- nice roundup of highlights of the Redmonk conference in London. Sample talk: Why Most UX is Shite.
- Frozen -- flow-based programming, intent is to build the toolbox of small pieces loosely joined by ZeroMQ for big data programming.
- Arctext.js -- jQuery plugin for curving text on web pages. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Hi, My Name is Diane Feinstein (BuyTheVote) -- presents the SOPA position and the entertainment industry's campaign contributions together with a little narrative. Clever and powerful. (via BoingBoing)
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Web-based Visualization, Javascript Charting, Automating Education, Sniffing HTTP(S)
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 9 February 2012
- Weave -- web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. GPL and MPL-licensed. (via Flowing Data)
- Flotr2 -- MIT-licensed Javascript library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs. It is a branch of flotr which removes the Prototype dependency and includes many improvements. (via Javascript Weekly)
- What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Math Education Again And Again (Dan Meyer) -- nicely said: it's hard to test true understanding, easy to automate only part of the testing and assessment support for learners.
- mitmproxy -- GPLv3-licensed SSL-aware HTTP proxy which lets you snoop on the traffic being sent back to the mothership from apps.
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Text Mining, Unstoppable Sociality, Unicode Fun, and Scholarly Publishing
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 8 February 2012
- Mavuno -- an open source, modular, scalable text mining toolkit built upon Hadoop. (Apache-licensed)
- Cow Clicker -- Wired profile of Cowclicker creator Ian Bogost. I was impressed by Cow Clickers [...] have turned what was intended to be a vapid experience into a source of camaraderie and creativity. People create communities around social activities, even when they are antisocial. (via BoingBoing)
- Unicode Has a Pile of Poo Character (BoingBoing) -- this is perfect.
- The Research Works Act and the Breakdown of Mutual Incomprehension (Cameron Neylon) -- an excellent summary of how researchers and publishers view each other and their place in the world.
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Version Control, Data Tables, Developer Communities, and Reality Mining
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat
| 7 February 2012
- Integrated Content Editor (GitHub) -- a track changes implementation, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web, written by the NY Times team and open sourced.
- Data Tables -- featureful jQuery plugin for tables of data. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Creating a Developer Community (Slideshare) -- treat the problem like a channel conversion funnel: turn visitors into downloaders, downloaders into users, users into contributors. His screenshots of shitty conversions are great! (via Kohsuke Kawaguchi)
- Sex Differences in Intimate Relationships (PDF) -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others use social graph analysis to analyze communications patterns in relationships. Notice that not only does the preference for an opposite-sex “best friend” kick in significantly earlier for females than for males (~18 years vs mid-20s, respectively), but females maintain a higher plateau value for much longer. More reality mining to understand ourselves. (via Sean Gourley)
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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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