- Ubiquity — Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centers, disaster recovery space and wireless towers.
- Google Abandons Open Standards for Instant Messaging (EFF) — it has to be a sign of the value to users of open standards that small companies embrace them and large companies reject them.
- How Does Copyright Work in Space? (The Economist) — amazingly complex rights trail for the International Space Station-recorded cover of “Space Oddity”. Sample: Commander Hadfield and his son Evan spent several months hammering out details with Mr Bowie’s representatives, and with NASA, Russia’s space agency ROSCOSMOS and the CSA. That’s the SIMPLE HAPPY ENDING.
- Great Lessons: Evan Weinberg’s “Do You Know Blue?” (Dan Meyer) — It’s a bridge from math to computer science. Students get a chance to write algorithms in a language understood by both mathematicians and the computer scientists. It’s analogous to the Netflix Prize for grown-up computer scientists.
Four short links: 24 May 2013
Repurposing Dead Retail Space, Open Standards, Space Copyright, and Bridging Lessons
Burning the silos
The boundaries created by traditional management are just getting in the way of reducing product cycle times.
If I’ve seen any theme come up repeatedly over the past year, it’s getting product cycle times down. It’s not the sexiest or most interesting theme, but it’s everywhere: if it’s not on the front burner, it’s always simmering in the background.
Cutting product cycles to the bare minimum is one of the main themes of the Velocity Conference and the DevOps movement, where integration between developers and operations, along with practices like continuous deployment, allows web-native companies like Yahoo! to release upgrades to their web products many times a day. It’s no secret that many traditional enterprises are looking at this model, trying to determine what they can use or implement. Indeed, this is central to their long-term survival; companies as different from Facebook as GE and Ford are learning that they will need to become as agile and nimble as their web-native counterparts.
Integrating development and operations isn’t the only way to shorten product cycles. In his talk at Google IO, Braden Kowitz talked about shortening the design cycle: rather than build big, complete products that take a lot of time and money, start with something very simple and test it, then iterate quickly. This approach lets you generate and test lots of ideas, but be quick to throw away the ones that aren’t working. Rather than designing an Edsel, just to fail when the product is released, the shorter cycles that come from integrating product design with product development let you build iteratively, getting immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t. To work like this, you need to break down the silos that separate engineers and designers; you need to integrate designers into the product team as early as possible, rather than at the last minute. Read more…
Four short links: 23 May 2013
Amazon Slash Slashed, Indies Out, Printing for Peace, Massively Online Orthographic Build System
- Kindle Worlds Fine Print — Amazon’s fanfic publishing system has a few flaws: no pr0n, no crossovers, no slash, and Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright. I can’t see this attracting pinboard’s most passionate users.
- XBox One Won’t Allow Indies to Self-Publish Games — When it comes to self-publishing, Microsoft is the odd man out. Both Sony and Nintendo allow developers to publish their own games onto PlayStation Network and Nintendo Network, respectively. Microsoft’s position stands in stark contrast to Sony, which has been aggressively pursuing indie content for PS4. (via Andy Baio)
- 3D Printers for Peace Competition (Michigan Tech) — We are challenging the 3D printing community to design things that advance the cause of peace. This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Ghandi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing. (via BoingBoing)
- covim — Collaborative editing for vim. My dream of massively multiplayer troff can finally be realised.
Talking about in-memory
Analysts use in memory databases for near real-time interaction.
I flew to the West Coast this week to attend Maker Faire with my computer-programming, ham-radio-building, hardware-curious teenage cousin. I’ve attended twice in New York but this was my first trip to the mothership. Wow. So much cool stuff to look at, interact with, talk about … and buy. Both of us bought one of these, among other things. He’ll actually use his, and I’ll pretend to, but mostly I was just overwhelmed with gadget envy and succumbed to the impulse buy. The end result of the weekend was a full brain, sunburn, lingering claustrophobia and a bunch of interesting stuff in my bag for TSA to radiate, plus lots of ideas for projects if I can find a bit of downtime.
While I was out West, Edd Dumbill, Roger Magoulas and I took advantage of our coastal proximity to get together in Sebastopol and have a conversation about in-memory databases. Roger, along with his colleague Ben Lorica, has been looking into this area for some time, and it seemed like a good opportunity for him to catch us up and share the conversation with all of you. I hope you enjoy it.
Update: I meant to add, if you would like to subscribe to these podcasts you can find them here.
Four short links: 22 May 2013
New Kinect, Surveillance of Things, How to Criticise, and Compensating for Population
- XBox One Kinect Controller (Guardian) — the new Kinect controller can detect gaze, heartbeat, and the buttons on your shirt.
- Surveillance and the Internet of Things (Bruce Schneier) — Lots has been written about the “Internet of Things” and how it will change society for the better. It’s true that it will make a lot of wonderful things possible, but the “Internet of Things” will also allow for an even greater amount of surveillance than there is today. The Internet of Things gives the governments and corporations that follow our every move something they don’t yet have: eyes and ears.
- Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps (extract) — How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” 2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). 3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
- New Data Science Toolkit Out (Pete Warden) — with population data to let you compensate for population in your heatmaps. No more “gosh, EVERYTHING is more prevalent where there are lots of people!” meaningless charts.
Four short links: 21 May 2013
Videogame Hyperinflation, Thumbdrive Computing, Distributed Consensus, and Organism Simulation
- Hyperinflation in Diablo 3 — interesting discussion about how video games regulate currency availability, and how Diablo 3 appears to have messed up. several weeks after the game’s debut a source claimed that there were at least 1,000 bots active 24/7 in the Diablo 3 game world, allegedly “harvesting” (producing) 4 million virtual gold per hour. Most of the gold generated by the ruthlessly productive, rapidly adapting bots found its way to third party vendors in a black market which undercut the prices in the sanctioned, in-game auction houses.
- Dell Project Ophelia (PC World) — $100 USB-stick-sized Android computer.
- Call Me Maybe (Kyle Kingsbury) — a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
- OpenWorm (The Atlantic) — simulating the c. elegans nematode worm in software. OpenWorm isn’t like these other initiatives; it’s a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that’s coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.
Radar 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 