- UK Internet Entrepreneurs (Guardian) — two things stood out for me. (1) A startup focused on 3d printing better dolls for boys and girls. (2) it seems easier to the government to start something new and impose its own vision than it is to understand and integrate with what already exists.
- TreeSaver.js — MIT/GPLv2-licensed JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts using standards-compliant HTML and CSS.
- Using git to Manage a Web Site — This page describes how I set things up so that I can make changes live by running just “git push web”.
- Strata Data Conference Recap — Clean data > More Data > Fancy Math — this is the order which makes data easier and better to work with. Clean data will be easier to work with and provide best results. If your data isn’t clean, it is better to have more data than having to resort to fancy math. Using higher order statistical processing, while workable as a last resort, will require longer to develop, difficult algorithms and harder to maintain. So best place to focus is to start with clean data.
"3D" entries
Four short links: 7 February 2011
Printed Toys, Magazines in JS, git push web, Clean Beats More
Four short links: 19 January 2011
Implementing REST, Teaching Exploration, reMAKEing the Enterprise, and Printing Titanium
- Implementing REST — This is a place for exploring aspects of implementing applications using the REST architectural style. This may include statements about existing frameworks and libraries, general discussions about the nature of the style and how it may be expressed and/or encouraged via a programming framework, etc.
- When Teaching Restrains Discovery — read about this research (short story: the more specific the skills taught, the less exploratory students were) and think about how we teach people to program, how we teach them the company culture, how we teach them to succeed.
- The Maker Generation in the Enterprise (JP Rangaswami) — We have to get away from the idea that knowledge work is smooth and stable and uniform and assembly-line in structure and characteristic. Knowledge work is lumpy. Period. There will be peaks. And there will be troughs. The current thinking appears to go something like this: “If we have troughs it will look like we don’t have enough work to do, so we need to pretend to work. Let’s fill our days up in advance with things that don’t depend on market or customer stimulus, things we can plan well in advance. And let’s call these things meetings. Then we can look busy all the time.” Such thinking has produced some unworthwhile consequences.
- i.materialise 3D Printing in Titanium — Titanium’s high heat resistance, high accuracy and unparalleled strength lets designers now make things that before now could only be made by the research and development departments of only the largest corporations in the world. By putting this technology in the public’s hands were democratizing manufacturing and giving you the opportunity to, design and order something this is exactly as you want it to be. (via Chris Anderson on Twitter)
Four short links: 1 December 2010
Kinect Hacking, Crowdsource, Lists, and Tablets
- 2 Kinects 1 Box (YouTube) — merging data from two Kinects in real time, to get astonishing 3D information. (via Chelfyn Baxter)
- Crowdsource is not Open Source (Simon Phipps) — there are some businesses that don’t understand this, and exploit community for their sole benefit in the name of open source. Ignorance of the four freedoms is dangerous.
- We Like Lists Before We Don’t Want to Die (Spiegel) — fascinating interview with Umberto Eco. If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot. (via Aaron Straup Cope on Delicious)
- $139.99 Android Tablet at Toys R Us — sales of Android tablets (as well as Apple tablets) could help bolster the after-market accessory opportunity for wireless players, including modem makers and wireless operators.
(via Sylvain Carle on Twitter)
Four short links: 15 November 2010
Prison Blogging, 3D Hacks, Budget Simulation, and Enterprise Sales
- Between the Bars — snail-mail-to-blogs transcription service for prisoners, to make visible stories that would otherwise be missed. there is a religous program here called Kairo’s in the program inmates are given letters and drawings made by small children not one in that program did not cry, after reading the words of incouragement from those kids. An unmissable reminder of the complexity of human stories, suffering, and situations, the posts range from the banal to the riveting. (via Benjamin Mako Hill)
- Kinect Opensource News — a roundup of open source Kinect hacks. I like memo’s gestural interface the best. Impressive stuff for just a few days’ access to the open source drivers. (via Andy Baio)
- You Fix The Budget (NY Times) — a simpler version of Budget Hero, which lets you choose policies and see their effect on the deficit. Unlike Budget Hero, the NYT app doesn’t discuss non-deficit consequences of the actions (social consequences, ripple-on economic effects). Like Budget Hero, you can’t add your own policies: you’re forced to choose from the ones presented. Real life is more complex than this simulation, but even something this simple is powerful: by interacting with this, you understand the magnitude of (say) education vs healthcare, and you realize how much of the current debate is froth.
- Meet the New Enterprise Customer, a Lot like the Old Enterprise Customer — Ben Horowitz nails the difficulty of selling to the enterprise, and drives a stake through the “they’ll buy our service with their credit cards, like consumers do” myth. xcellent enterprise sales reps will guide a company through their own purchasing processes. Without an enterprise sales rep, many companies literally do not know how to buy new technology products. (via Mike Olson on Twitter)
Four short links: 10 November 2010
Facebook Behaviour, Multitouch Modelling, Early Ads, and Gaming Public Transportation
- Risk Reduction Strategies on Facebook (danah boyd) — Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. Two very interesting practices designed to maintain not just some abstract idea of “privacy” but, more important, control.
- Beautiful Modeler — a software tool for gestural sculpting using a multi-touch controller such as an iPad. (via Andy Baio)
- How Telephone Directories Transformed America — this caught my eye: Less than a year after the New Haven District Telephone Company issued its first directory, it issued a second, and that one augmented listings with advertising. (via Pete Warden)
- Chromarama — a game that shows you your movements and location as you swipe your Oyster Card in and out of the Tube. Points are awarded for avoiding rush hour, visiting new stations, etc. They say they want to change behaviour, but I don’t believe people ride public transportation to collect points, so they travel when they have to and so won’t change their commute times. Would love to be proven wrong, though. (via Roger Dennis)
Four short links: 27 October 2010
Cleaning HTML, 3D Android Home, Autoupdating, Data Refining
- Bleach — HTML sanitizer, which some might say is an impossible task.
- TAT Home — a gesture-powered 3d home screen for Android.
- Omaha — the autoupdater used in Chrome and other Google projects, open sourced.
- Google Refine — Freebase GridWorks has new home and new name, with new checkins happening all the time. An excellent ETL tool for figuring out what data you have and getting it into the right format.
Four short links: 3 Sep 2010
Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound
- Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) — […] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric […] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry)
- 2010 Mario AI Championship — three tracks: Gameplay, Learning, and Level Generation. Found via Ben Weber’s account of his Level Generation entry. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of being added to the level. The result is a computationally efficient approach to generating a large space of randomized levels.
- Wave in a Box — Google to flesh out existing open source Wave client and server into full “Wave in a Box” app status.
- 3D Sound in Google Earth (YouTube) — wow. (via Planet In Action)
What we can learn from data, 3-D and a globe
IBM's Julia Grace on social media shifts and why 3-D and data are made for each other.
IBM researcher and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Julia Grace spends her days digging into data. Her tools are a little unusual, though. Instead of spreadsheets and bar graphs, she uses visualizations and a seven-foot-tall, three-dimensional globe. Grace discusses life with a giant globe and explores her recent findings in this Q&A.
Four short links: 28 April 2010
Fair Use Economy, Deconstituted Appliances, 3D Vision, Redis for Fun and Profit
- Fair Use in the US Economy (PDF) — prepared by IT lobby in the US, it’s the counterpart to Big ©’s fictitious billions of dollars of losses due to file sharing. Take each with a grain of salt, but this is interesting because it talks about the industries and businesses that the fair use laws make possible.
- Disassembled Household Appliances — neat photos of the pieces in common equipment like waffle irons, sandwich makers, can openers, etc. (via evilmadscientist)
- GelSight — gel block on a sheet of glass, lit from below with lights and then scanned with cameras, lets you easily capture 3D qualities of the objects pressed into it. Very cool demo–you can see finger prints, pulse, and even make out designs on a $100 bill.
- Redis Tutorial (Simon Willison) — Redis is a very fast collection of useful behaviours wrapped around a distributed key-value store. You get locks, IDs, counters, sets, lists, queues, replication, and more.
Four short links: 13 April 2010
Find the Pretty, Win the Prize, Manage the Data, and Model the Temple
- 0to255 — simple cute colour-generator. (via Hacker News)
- ProPublica Wins Pulitzer Prize (NYTimes) — important landmark in the rise of online journalism. The award is a landmark for ProPublica, founded in 2007, and the other digital news outlets that have sprouted around the country. Over the last few years, the Pulitzer Prize board has relaxed the eligibility rules, allowing news sites to submit work published only online; this year there were many such submissions.
- Big Data Workshop — unconference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. (via jchris on Twitter
- 3D Machu Picchu, Created With LIDAR — viewable in Google Earth, took over 1,200 hours of work. (via skry on Twitter)