Four short links: 30 June 2009

Military Open Source, Social Govwork, Dietbot, and US IT Dashboard

1. Military Open Source Software Conference -- 12-13 August 2009 in Atlanta.
2. Govloop -- a "Social Network for Gov 2.0". Gov 2.0 could easily become the intersection of talk radio and social media consultant inanity. As with the Web 2.0 lunacy, when everyone who could spell wiki tried to sell one, you should cultivate the art of identifying and sidestepping the bozos, the time-wasters, and the charlatans who use buzzwords as a convenient alternative to thought. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
3. Introducing the Autom -- a personal robot to help you lose weight. Developed by Initiative Automata as an offshoot from MIT researcher Cory Kidd, Autom has conversations that encourage you to record your diet and exercise. The theory is that the added benefit of interaction will help you stick with the diet longer, increasing the chance that it will stick. Trials showed Autom users stick with their "weight loss regimen" twice as long as pencil-and-paper. (via So, Where's My Robot?)
4. USA Government IT Dashboard Launches -- Vivek Kundra's latest project, a dashboard giving insight into government spending. Contractors, CIOs, projects, schedules, and data via an API. Built in Drupal!

Four short links: 26 June 2009

Biz Numbers, Progress, Curse of the Mummy Tweets, and Crime Viz

1. Size vs Growth vs Acceleration (Rowan Simpson) -- you can tell how well a company is doing by the basis on which they report their progress.
2. Engineers Are The Best Deal, So Stock Up On Them (TechCrunch) -- Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999! (via Simon Willison)
3. Livetweeting a Mummy CT Scan -- this is why I love my Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans membership--I know that I'm supporting the museum with the coolest online outreach.
4. 20 Visualizations to Understand Crime (Flowing Data) -- thoughtful analyis of a set of visualizations of crime statistics.

Four short links: 19 June 2009

Cute Math, Fast Slo-Mo, Open Source HVAC, xkcd Hack

1. Inside-Out Multiplication Table -- very cool way to view the patterns of factors. Math is beauty with subscripts.
2. High-Speed Camera -- capture 100 frames at up to 1M frames/second. The sample videos, of a bullet liquefying on impact and a shotgun string boiling past, are stunning. The Makezine high-speed photography kit is the cheap amateur version.
3. Open Source Energy Management for Commercial Buildings -- open source project to enable interoperable applications for integrated Building Automation Systems (BAS). From NovusEdge. I wonder how they're planning to spread their open source and use it to disrupt. (via earth2tech and timoreilly on Twitter)
4. xkcd Knapsack Solution -- for those of you who like literal Python geeking with your comics. Have a great weekend!

Four short links: 12 June 2009

1. New Media Challenges: Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology (Center for American Progress) -- report on the issues around Web 2.0 use in Government, which include privacy, security, Public Records Act, advertising, etc. See also It's Not the Campaign Anymore: How the White House Is Using Web 2.0 Technology So Far from the same group.
2. Government Data and the Invisible Hand -- Ed Felten has written a fantastic piece on the relationship between data, presentations of the data, and the government departments that produce the data. It is full of powerful recommendations: The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Fast Modularity Community Structure Inference Algorithm -- This algorithm is being widely used in the community of complex network researchers, and was originally designed for the express purpose of analyzing the community structure of extremely large networks (i.e., hundreds of thousand or millions of vertices). The original version worked only with unweighted, undirected networks. I've recently posted a version that works on weighted, undirected networks. (via mattb on Delicious)
4. First Driver for USB 3.0 -- After a year-and-a-half's worth of work, Intel hacker Sarah Sharp announced that Linux will be the first operating system supporting USB 3.0. (via deusx on Delicious)

OSCON 2009 Highlights

OSCON 2009 is just around the corner, this year in San Jose, California. When I spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group last night, they asked me for a few highlights. It's tough to pick from over 200 sessions, all the best-of-the-best out of 800 submissions (and there were at least 100 more I wish I could have fit in). But, a few of the talks I'm particularly looking forward to are "Situation Normal, Everything Must Change" by Simon Wardley on the cloud computing apocalypse and its implications for open source, "Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem" by Brian Aker, "Introduction to Animation and OpenGL on the Android SDK" by Satya Komatineni, "Security-Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behavior" by Chris Shiflett, "What Web App Design Can Learn From the Harpsichord" by Elaine Wherry, and "The Freedom to Cure Cancer" by David Dooling on open source software in the Human Genome Project. On a less serious note, Friday will be capped off with "The Art of Klingon Programming" by Paul Fenwick and "The Conway Channel" by Damian Conway, two speakers from the southern hemisphere who never fail to make me laugh and think all at the same time.

We've extended the early registration discount until June 23rd, so you can still save $250. And OSCamp—the unconference within OSCON, organized by participants for participants—is completely free (as in beer and speech) open to anyone registered for an Exhibit Hall pass. Hope to see you there.

Four short links: 20 May 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Data Centers=Mainframes, Django Microframework, and a Visit To The Future

1. Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 15000th Title Posted To Project Gutenberg -- a great use of our collective intelligence and cognitive surplus. If I say one more Clay Shirkyism, someone's gonna call BINGO. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Datacenter is the New Mainframe (Greg Linden) -- wrapup of a Google paper that looks at datacenters in the terms of mainframes: time-sharing, scheduling, renting compute cycles, etc. I love the subtitle, "An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines".
3. djng, a Django powered microframework -- update from Simon Willison about the new take on Django he's building. Microframeworks let you build an entire web application in a single file, usually with only one import statement. They are becoming increasingly popular for building small, self-contained applications that perform only one task—Service Oriented Architecture reborn as a combination of the Unix development philosophy and RESTful API design. I first saw this idea expressed in code by Anders Pearson and Ian Bicking back in 2005.
4. Cute! (Dan Meyer) -- photo from Dan Meyer's classroom showing normal highschool students doing something that I assumed only geeks at conferences did. I love living in the future for all the little surprises like this.

Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

Four short links: 15 May 2009

LIfe After socket(), Imminent Death of Web 2.0, Breathalyzer Lameness, and Open Source Science Publishing

1. Whither Sockets? -- ACM Queue article on how sockets as a model for network programming have become an obstacle to where networking is going. All of these calls have one thing in common: the calling program must repeatedly ask for data to be delivered. In the world of client/server computing these constant requests make perfect sense, because the server cannot do anything without a request from the client. It makes little sense for a print server to call a client unless the client has something it wishes to print. What, however, if the service being provided is music or video distribution? In a media distribution service there may be one or more sources of data and many listeners. For as long as the user is listening to or viewing the media, the most likely case is that the application will want whatever data has arrived. Specifically requesting new data is a waste of time and resources for the application. The sockets API does not provide the programmer a way in which to say, "Whenever there is data for me, call me to process it directly." (via Slashdot)
2. Game Web 2.Over? (Meg Pickard) -- update of the classic "wall o' Web 2.0 logos" showing which have folded or been bought. I'm glad to see how many have folded; many were the inevitable "me too"ing of initial successes, and many were simply bad ideas. Death is a natural part of the Darwinian marketplace, painful as it is to those who are naturally selected out of the meme pool. I'm glad to see how many were acquired, showing they had something someone wanted. The diagram's incomplete now, of course: it doesn't show the companies launched after the wall o'logos was made. (via Waxy)
3. Breathalyzer Source Code Sucks -- 2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings. Nonetheless, the comments say that the values should be averaged, and they are not... I periodically worry that I've been so long out of hardcore coding that my skills are rusty and I'd never survive at the coal face again. Then I see something like this and I punch the air and wheeze "I still got it!" as I reach for my cane. (via BoingBoing)
4. Bloomsbury Science Free Online -- Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans. The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies. (via Glyn Moody)

Hackers wanted! Scholarships available to coders who'll come to journalism and help save democracy

Guest blogger Brian Boyer is a hacker journalist who writes about the intersection of technology and journalism. He's worked at public-interest journalism site ProPublica and is now at the Chicago Tribune, building their new News Applications team.

It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are scarce, and our democracy is at risk. I don't have a chart to guide our way through the darkness to Citizenry 2.0, but there are some who can navigate the singularity.

Journalism needs great hackers. Not just nerds, but programmers who care -- about the values of journalism and the power of a free press to hold government accountable. Luckily, hackers are a freedom-minded bunch. The free software movement is rooted in many of the same principals that guide journalism. But news organizations aren't very sexy places to work -- especially now, as layoffs, bankruptcy and closures plague the industry. So how can we bring nerds to the news? One old-skool school is trying.

Free beer school!

Tell your programmer friends: The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is giving away full scholarships, plus expenses, to software developers.They can get a masters degree in journalism, gratis, from one of the most prestigious J-schools around.

I recently graduated from the year-long program, during which I studied with with one other hacker and ~45 brilliant 'normal' journalism students. I interviewed lawmakers, farmers and shopkeepers and wrote stories about agriculture, waterways, and the diabetes epidemic in Illinois. It was difficult to shake my introverted, google-first, face-to-face-as-a-last-resort programmer nature. But it was also thrilling.

Journalism is an info-geek's dream. You're constantly learning new topics, speaking with experts, and distilling real-world issues to their essence -- all in the mission of informing the folks who don't have time to soak up all that data. It's like being paid to write a new Wikipedia article every day.

We also wrote some software. My programmer colleague and I banged out enviroVOTE in a frenetic weekend of coding and coffee in the days preceding the election. The night of, we were tied to our keyboards, tallying results and tweeting updates while the rest of the world was watching TV. Such is the life of a journalist.

For our final project at Medill, the two coders and four non-coder new-media students built NewsMixer, an experiment in integrating social networks with news coverage. It was one of the first applications to roll out on Facebook Connect, and remains one of the only apps that explores its full potential. All the code is GPL'ed and has already spawned other open-source projects.

This is the time to remake journalism

Programmers have been making an impact in the news world for some time, but until recently most innovation in this space has been in creating new ways to present the old style. With a few shining exceptions like the datavisuals by the New York Times, most online news could have been written on a typewriter and mailed to Google for indexing.

Then, something amazing happened: Software won a Pulitzer Prize. Created by hacker journalist Matt Waite and other fantastically clever folks at the St. Petersburgh Times, PolitiFact is form of news that could only exist online. Aron Pilhofer, leader of the innovations team at the NYT, put it perfectly:

But is it journalism, some people asked? There's no lead per se, no narrative and no pyramids anywhere to be found, much less the inverted sort.

Journalism is about helping people make sense of important issues, and how those issues affect them personally. It's about uncovering that which someone wants to keep hidden. It's about holding people we place in high public office accountable. And by those definitions... PolitiFact more than meets the test. It takes a traditional form of newspaper reporting -- fact-checking what politicians say -- and scales it up in a way only possible on the web.

The NYT's Represent and its open-source cousin, Repsheet, are innovations much in the same vein, and their existence is a sign of the times. The tools now available to hackers are so great that we can think far beyond content management systems. The moment has come when a couple of great hackers can knock out a fully-fledged new form of media in a matter of weeks. Tell the Twitterati: there are lights in the distance.

Hackers wanted

The news is waiting to be saved. We have the technology, all we need is more nerds. So ditch your boring corporate gigs and come to journalism! Democracy is one hell of a fun problem to hack.

Four short links: 1 May 2009

Smart Grids, Open Source, Stuff That Matters, and Global Culture

1. A Little Give and Take On Electricity (NY Times) -- Dennis L. Arfmann, a lawyer at the Boulder office of Hogan & Hartson who specializes in environmental law, said he had no idea how much electricity he and his wife, Dr. Julie Brown, had used before he filled his roof with solar panels producing 4.5 kilowatts of power. During the day he sells power to Xcel and at night he buys it back; his goal is to cut his use so his net sales rise. All hardware networked, everywhere!
2. Open Source World Map (Red Hat) -- very nice map showing the intensity of open source use in countries around the world. (via Flowing Data)
3. Imagine Cup -- Microsoft's contest to get students working on stuff that matters. The winners of the New Zealand leg, Team Think, tackled literacy: they devised a program for tablets that provides both handwriting recognition and audio output, eliminating the need for basic literacy to understand lessons or instructions. They hope to take this prototype to developing countries that have underutilised computers due to literacy issues. (via Idealog newsletter and Scoop)
4. UGT -- It is always morning when person comes into a channel, and it is always late night when person leaves. [...] The idea behind establishing this convention was to eliminate noise generated almost every time someone comes in and greets using some form of day-time based greeting, and then channel members on the other side of the globe start pointing out that it's different time of the day for them. Now, instead of spending time figuring out what time of day is it for every member of the channel, we spend time explaining newcomers benefits of UGT. (via migurski on delicious).

Four short links: 22 Apr 2009

Government, Bayes, SMS, and distributed keystores:

1. Government Projects the Agile Way -- Can It Be Done? (NZ Government) -- notes and audio from a workshop at the New Zealand State Services Commission looking to merge agile and government. The pullquotes are mostly generic about agile, but the important thing is that there are agile projects within government and their numbers are growing. Having witnessed the incredibly slow, cautious, and non-agile development processes of government, I know how good this shift can be for budgets and delivery.
2. DivMod Reverend -- general purpose open source Bayesian classifier in Python (the Ruby port is Bishop). Bayes theorem lies behind the 2000-era spam filters, and there have been plenty of open source libraries to do Bayesian classification, but this one caught my eye because it's from the very good DivMod folks who are behind the very good Twisted framework. (via noahgift's delicious stream)
3. RapidSMS -- a free and open source messaging framework for building SMS applications. Integrates with Django. (via straup's delicious stream)
4. Some Notes on Distributed Key Stores (Leonard Lin) -- he had to install and test distributed keystores for a client's project, and posted his notes. Distributed keystores are one of the recent spates of database-like tools intended to solve some of the problems of big data applications. The distributed stores out there is currently pretty half-baked at best right now. [...] Don’t believe the hype. There’s a lot of talk, but I didn’t find any public project that came close to the (implied?) promise of tossing nodes in and having it figure things out. [...] Based on the maturity of projects out there, you could write your own in less than a day. It’ll perform as well and at least when it breaks, you’ll be more fond of it. Alternatively, you could go on the conference circuit and talk about how awesome your half-baked distributed keystore is. (via straup's delicious stream)

Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains:

1. Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) -- Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities threaten to close in. Drug dealers and organized criminal factions use them to coordinate operations. [...] "Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil." As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things." One man's space junk is another man's Make project. (via BoingBoing)
2. My Students, My Cellphone, My Ordeal -- there's probably a market selling lightweight forensic tools to schools, specifically to avoid scenarios like this poor man's.
3. DIY High Speed Book Scanner From Trash and Cheap Cameras (Instructables) -- $300 of parts gets you a reasonably high-quality scanner. It doesn't have an automatic page turner, but it's still a step up on "open the scanner lid, change the page, close the lid, hit scan, wait, [repeat until braindead]". We have a huge legacy of analog, and we're going to need consumer-grade consumer-priced systems if we are to rip-mix-burn our cultural legacy. What would the Google Books settlement look like if we all had high-speed scanners to do to our bookshelves what iTunes did to our CD shelves? (via BoingBoing)
4. OpenCog Brainwave Projects in Google's Summer of Code -- in case you think GSoC is all about GNOME apps getting alternate shortcuts for DVORAK keyboards, there's some esoteric stuff being approved. I wish that when I was a college student someone had paid me to work on a Application of Pleasure Algorithm Project.

Recent Posts

• Importance of Innovation in Finance & BarCampBank | by Jesse Robbins on April 20, 2009
• Four short links: 16 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 16, 2009
• PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer | by Brady Forrest on April 8, 2009
• Four short links: 2 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 2, 2009
• Four short links: 13 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 13, 2009
• Four short links: 9 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 9, 2009
• Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words | by Timothy M. O'Brien on March 5, 2009
• Four short links: 3 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 3, 2009
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• O'Reilly Labs: RDF For All of Our Books, Plus Bookworm Ebook Reader | by Andrew Savikas on February 10, 2009
• Open Source NG Databases (mailing list summary) | by Nat Torkington on February 2, 2009
• Four short links: 30 Jan 2009 | by Nat Torkington on January 30, 2009